Many parents seem to think their kids take more safety precautions than is really the case, new study findings show.

While most parents believe that their children always wear bicycle helmets when riding their bikes, and use seat belts and sit in the back seats when riding in motor vehicles, these beliefs do not always reflect their children’s actual behavior.

“We cannot rely on parents alone to confirm safety practices in their children,” according to lead study author Dr. Peter F. Ehrlich of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and his colleagues. “Therefore, we must treat injury prevention as a family issue,” they write in the current issue of the journal Injury Control and Safety Promotion.

Many studies about injury prevention rely on parental responses to assess children’s safety practices. To address this limitation, Ehrlich and his team compared parents’ and children’s attitudes and practices regarding seatbelt and helmet use. He conducted the research while at Children’s Hospital of West Virginia.

Nearly all (95 percent) of the 731 fourth and fifth grade children studied owned bicycles and 88 percent had helmets.

The results showed that parents “really don’t know exactly what their kids are doing,” Ehrlich told Reuters Health.

While 70 percent of the 329 parents who responded to the survey reported that their child always used their helmet, only 51 percent of children said they always adhered to that safety rule, the researchers report.

Similarly, parents reported that less than five percent of their children never wear helmets, but 20 percent of their children admitted to riding with their heads uncovered. Thirteen percent of children even said they did not need to wear a helmet, most commonly because they believed they were experienced riders, because the helmet was uncomfortable or because they did not think it was cool to wear one.

Parents were even more confident, albeit wrongly so, about their children’s car safety practices.

Almost all (92 percent) of moms and dads reported that their child always wears a seat belt when riding in cars, whereas only 70 percent of their children said they always do so. What’s more, while 80 percent of parents said their child always sits in the back seat, at least 90 percent of children said they sometimes sit in the front seat.

“We always think our kids are better than they are,” Ehrlich said.

Parents who buckled up or donned helmets while cycling - or did not do so - seemed to serve as role models for their children.

“The time-tested mantra that ‘parental actions speak louder than words’ was clearly elucidated in our study,” Ehrlich and his team write.

Eight-eight percent of children who said they “never” wore a helmet had parents who also reported “never” wearing a helmet. On the other hand, parents who said they always use seat belts were more likely to have children who said they use seat belts and ride in the back seat.

Studies have shown that children under 12 who use child safety seats and sit in the back seat have an up to 70 percent lower risk of dying in a motor vehicle crash than those who do not adhere to such safety measures.

SOURCE: Injury Control and Safety Promotion 2004.