Florida Guide to Laws for Personal Injury & Children

Common types of injuries to children

Children are particularly susceptible to certain types of injuries, many of which are preventable. These include:

1. Falls from heights or tip-over accidents

Falls are the leading cause of childhood injuries that require medical treatment. Children can fall from a variety of heights and surfaces, but typically these injuries involve playground equipment like jungle gyms or falls as a result of climbing on furniture.

If you have a child in your home, you should consider the following:

• Is any furniture taller than 30 inches high? 
• Is the furniture stable (i.e. does it wobble or move when touched)?
• Does the furniture have drawers or protrusions that a child might use as climbing steps? 
• Is the furniture in an area that’s accessible to the child?

Even furniture that doesn’t meet these criteria could be dangerous, so it’s important to carefully evaluate risks in your home.

2. Burns

This includes everything from burns from touching hot objects like the stove or a hot liquid to sunburn. Parents should be especially cautious of children using firecrackers, amateur fireworks, and sparklers.

3. Cuts and lacerations

Everyone gets a cut sometimes—it’s not just in childhood, it happens to everyone. But children don’t always understand how to be careful when using knives or tools or that they need to avoid touching broken glass.

4. Poisoning

Children get into things. Whether it’s cleaning products, medicines, or something they found outside in nature like a plant that’s not meant to be ingested, these things happen.

You can call the national Poison Control hotline for 24/7 advice if you or your child has ingested something
and you’re not sure if it’s poisonous: 800-222-1222.

5. Choking

Young children have smaller airways than adults and they aren’t always as adept at chewing food properly. Some choking accidents are related to food that’s too big or not chewed well, but other incidents are from children swallowing items that aren’t food. 

Specifically, experts recommend that parents and caregivers are especially vigilant and avoid these foods for very young children:

Children should be watched carefully if they have toys with small pieces, coins, or anything else that is small enough to go into their mouth but too large to be swallowed. One rule of thumb is that if an item is small enough to fit through the opening of a toilet paper roll, it’s too small for a child to handle unsupervised.

6. Suffocation

The American Academy of Pediatrics provides guidelines for safe sleep to protect babies from suffocation. Even older children need supervision around items like cords to blinds or shades and other things that could cause them to become entwined.

7. Bites and stings

The CDC reports that bites and stings are the third most common reason why children ages 0-9 visit emergency departments. This could be because of tick bites, bee stings, or other types of animal interactions including snakes, bats, dogs, or others.

8. Drowning or swimming accidents

A child can drown in as little as a few inches of water, even in your own bathtub. If the child’s nose and mouth can become submerged under the water, they need to be supervised at all times. 

Swimming pool accidents can happen because a child wanders through an unlocked gate or ungated pool area and falls in the water without an adult noticing, or even when an adult is present but doesn’t recognize the signs of drowning.

9. Car accidents

Car accidents are the second leading cause of death for children from ages 2 to 14 years old. Aside from understanding how to properly use child safety seats and seat belts, driving safely and defensive driving can help to keep your family safe.

10. Gun violence and accidental gun-related deaths

For the first time in 2020, guns replaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for children ages 1-18. In 2021, firearms accounted for nearly 19% of childhood deaths, according to the CDC. During that year, nearly 3,600 children died in gun-related incidents, or five children for every 100,000 in the nation.

Florida pure comparative negligence rule and
lawsuits on behalf of children

Florida state law follows a pure comparative negligence standard, so if the plaintiff has contributed to their own injury in any way, their damages would be reduced according to their percentage of fault. 

Sometimes this is a big issue in cases involving children because children are held to different standards of reasonableness than adults.

Children and the “reasonable person standard”

In general, the courts follow a reasonable person standard. The “reasonable person” standard is an objective test in personal injury cases that jurors use to determine if a defendant acted like other people would have in the same situation.

A child’s standard is compared to an average child of the same age and experience. For instance, a six-year-old’s behavior would be evaluated based on the typical and reasonable behavior of an average six-year-old. 

Here’s an example:

Three-year-old Emma is holding her mom’s hand as they walked through a busy parking lot outside the supermarket. Emma’s mom drops a bag of groceries and a few items begin to roll away. She remains holding Emma’s hand but is also gathering the groceries that had fallen on the ground. At that moment, Emma spies the pet store that’s next to the supermarket and there’s a cute puppy barking in the window. Emma breaks free from her mom’s grasp and begins to run across the lot to see the puppy. As she does, she is hit by an oncoming car in the parking lot. 

The court determines that the driver had a responsibility to drive as carefully in a parking lot as they would on the road, and that it’s reasonable to expect children to be moving around in a supermarket parking area—they should have seen Emma and stopped before hitting the child. 

It was also determined that Emma did not share responsibility for her own injuries because the average three-year-old would not be expected to understand the dangers of oncoming cars or running in a parking lot. 

By contrast, let’s say it was 13-year-old Mac in the supermarket parking lot. He’d ridden his bike to the store to pick up some snacks for the afternoon. He had his bag of snacks dangling from the handlebar of his bike and was preparing to ride home. Mac is riding his bike in the lot and not paying a lot of attention to cars around him. He spots his friend Joey, who is riding his own bike on the other side of the parking lot. He waves, but Joey doesn’t see him, so Mac decides he’s going to catch up with him so they can hang out. Mac makes an abrupt turn on his bike, and he is hit by a car and injured.

The court decides that although the car driver had the same responsibility as the driver who hit Emma with respect to driving carefully and expecting people to be moving around the lot, Mac also bears responsibility for the collision. Mac was old enough to understand how to safely navigate a parking lot and that he should be looking where he’s going while riding a bike. 

The court awards Mac $10,000 in damages for his injuries. However, Mac is 60% liable for his own accident. Therefore, his damage award is reduced by 60% and Mac receives $4,000 in damages.

The attractive nuisance doctrine

An attractive nuisance is a condition that might appeal to a child who doesn’t really grasp why it might be dangerous. 

Some classic examples of an attractive nuisance include:

This is related to shared fault rules because a defendant will naturally try to minimize their liability for a claim. They might say, for instance, that when the child was injured falling off a ladder on the defendant’s property, the child should not have been climbing on it in the first place.

And that might be true. 

But a ladder could be considered an attractive nuisance. So, while the child was trespassing and technically caused their own injury by climbing a ladder that they were too small to climb, the court could find that it was an attractive nuisance. In other words, the property owner should have realized that an unattended ladder might be tempting to a young child if left in an area that’s easily accessible. 

This would reduce the child’s contributory negligence and put the liability on the defendant, increasing the amount of the settlement or judgment the child can recover.

What if you are injured by a minor in Florida?

Flipping the tables a bit, what if you are injured because of a child’s actions? 

Nearly every state has some version of a parental responsibility law. While opponents question the fairness of punishing a parent for their children’s behavior, victims’ rights advocates believe that the injured person should not be financially burdened for someone else’s negligence, even if that someone is a child.

Florida parental responsibility laws

There are two causes of action that hold a parent responsible for a child’s behavior under Florida law:

1. Driving (Florida Statutes § 322.09)

A parent must sign and verify a minor’s driver’s license application.

If the driver is under 18 years old, the parent or guardian must submit their own U.S. birth certificate, green card, employment authorization card issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, or proof of non-immigrant classification. 

The parent or legal guardian is responsible for injuries or property damage caused by the child if the child is negligent or exercises willful misconduct while driving a motor vehicle. The parent or guardian is financially responsible and shares liability with the minor for any injuries that arise from the child’s driving. 

2. Vandalism and theft (Florida Statutes § 751.24)

If a minor who lives with their parents in Florida “maliciously or willfully destroys or steals property, real, personal, or mixed,” the parent is financially responsible for the damages. This responsibility is limited to actual damages and court costs, but there is no provision for pain and suffering or other non-economic harm. 

However, in addition to the specific liability related to driving and vandalism, there are other rules that would hold parents responsible for a child’s actions. 

If the parent is aware that their child is likely to act recklessly or carelessly, they must take reasonable steps to prevent the child from causing foreseeable harm to another person.