Three-Year-Old Amish Boy Airlifted After Being Run Over By Planter
A three-year-old Amish boy was seriously injured yesterday afternoon after being run over by a horse-drawn planter on a farm in Centre County, Pennsylvania, as reported by WTAJ.
Pennsylvania State Police say the accident happened Monday on Brush Valley Road in Rebersburg. The Daily Voice notes that emergency crews treated the child at the scene before he was airlifted to Geisinger Hospital in Danville, where he remains under medical care as of this posting. The investigation continues.
Accidents Like This Are Not Unheard Of
Farm accidents involving young children are a painful reality of Amish life. We’ve covered several over roughly the past year – including a 12-year-old boy killed while discing a field, a toddler who died in a Lancaster County farm accident, and a 15-year-old girl run over by a corn wagon in Wisconsin.
The Amish have large families and the type of small family farming the Amish do means that children live in proximity to hazards, including farm equipment and animals.
Additionally, Amish culture involves children in work from an early age – even if that means just being around parents and older siblings while they are working. Frankly, it’s a hazard level that most non-Amish American families would not tolerate.
Wishing this child a full recovery. Will update this post as new information becomes available.
Biased reporting
I hope this little boy recovers fully, and my heart goes out to his family. But I’m disappointed in how stories like this are often framed when the family is Amish.
English children are exposed to dangers constantly: tractors, ATVs, dirtbikes, farm equipment, horses, dogs, guns in the home, vehicles, pools, machinery, sports injuries, and everyday accidents. Yet when something happens in an Amish community, the tone often seems to suggest their lifestyle is the issue.
The Amish people I know are kind, hardworking, family-centered people who love and care for their children. A farm accident is tragic no matter what community it happens in. Horse-drawn equipment does not make this family negligent any more than a tractor accident would automatically make an English family negligent.
Please consider reporting these incidents with the same compassion and neutrality you would give any other family. This was a terrible accident involving a hurt child, not an opportunity to cast an entire community in a negative light.
Hi Stacey – thanks for raising this question, and I think you make some good points here. I’ve pointed out dangers in English society as well in past posts like this (also, and not to complicate it, but the Amish might also count spiritual dangers of some non-Amish lifestyles into the equation as well).
But I don’t believe anything in this post suggested this family was negligent, and I actually try to be quite aware of that sort of framing towards an individual family, who is going to be in a sensitive situation to say the least, when these sorts of stories come up.
So I am going to respectfully push back and say that I don’t think it lacks compassion or neutrality to simply note that an Amish family farming lifestyle can expose children to higher levels of certain risks that other families do not experience, due to being in different circumstances.
I do not think most non-Amish families, especially in current times with modern emphasis on safety, would be comfortable with their children, younger ones especially, being around farm equipment and animals in the ways I’ve often enough observed in Amish contexts. At the same time Amish parents do of course teach their children common sense safety.
And that’s not to say that other context-dependent risks don’t exist in other situations, as you pointed out well here with the examples you gave. I probably should have taken a minute to note those hazards as well, so thanks for doing that here.
Prayers for the family and community.
I do not like how this article was written. You wrote it as though Amish families are reckless. That is so far from the truth. I know many Amish families ( very close friends). Amish communities are very careful with their children and are fantastic mothers and fathers. The children have chores daily, they learn responsibility very early in life. The do not sit in front of a TV and eat a bag of chips and they do not stare at a IPhone all day long. So the parents don’t need be parents. The Amish children work alongside the parents. Knock off the unkindness.
Farm Accidents
I pray for a speedy recovery for that child and prayers for the family. Farming is a very dangerous job regardless of the farmer’s being Amish or English.
Amish Boy Air-Lifted
Oh, dear Lord!! Please let this child survive. I’m heartbroken!!
Prayers for this precious little one
Do Better!
“Additionally, Amish culture involves children in work from an early age – even if that means just being around parents and older siblings while they are working. Frankly, it’s a hazard level that most non-Amish American families would not tolerate.”
You call this neutral? Children living on any farm can be involved in accidents as well as adults. These people aren’t careless. What do you know about hazard levels at other farms, what people “tolerate”. You imply Amish care less about family injuries. EVERY farm has many hazards as do many other jobs.
Lori, thanks for the comment. Here’s the quoted section of what I wrote, along with the prior paragraph, just to give a bit fuller context:
“The Amish have large families and the type of small family farming the Amish do means that children live in proximity to hazards, including farm equipment and animals.
Additionally, Amish culture involves children in work from an early age – even if that means just being around parents and older siblings while they are working. Frankly, it’s a hazard level that most non-Amish American families would not tolerate.”
When I write something like that, I’m thinking of farm-specific hazards – things like young Amish children riding on horse-drawn equipment, say perched with one or two other siblings on a forecart over a bumpy pasture, a metal-wheeled wagon weighing thousands of pounds rolling along just behind them – or performing farm tasks around cattle and horses that outweigh them by 10x or more – and around various other farm hazards.
That doesn’t mean that I’m saying individual Amish families are “careless”, or other things people seem to think that I said, which I didn’t.
I’m saying culturally or societally, I believe the Amish tolerate a higher risk level for their young children, especially on the farm.
They are disproportionately running small family farms, which is something most Americans don’t do – plus they have large families with lots of small children which they involve in work from an early age, as a part of their culture. This combination in itself leads to potentially hazardous situations that the average young non-Amish child in the suburbs will never be exposed to.
You can also throw in things like allowing children to ride scooters, and drive pony carts at quite young ages (under 10), on public 45 MPH roads. I do not think the average non-Amish family would be as tolerant of that sort of thing, as the average Amish one would be.
I’m not saying that as a critique, but an observation. Like with anything, trade-offs are involved. At the same time, as mentioned on this thread, Amish culture largely lacks other hazards seen in non-Amish society. But I’m talking about the farm context here.
But the fact that I bring all this up, doesn’t mean that I’m saying Amish don’t care about their children’s safety. I would simply say on balance I believe they are not as hyper-safety-focused regarding their children as a lot of us non-Amish are.