Safety is something we value at J&D Ultracare, especially when it comes to kids. A safe kid is a healthy kid, as it’s easy to prevent injuries from occurring if you know what to do. However, there are ways that kids injure themselves that parents may not be aware of.
Take slides for example. A lot of parents like to take their kids down the slide with them for a number of reasons. Maybe the kid doesn’t feel comfortable going down a slide alone, or maybe the parent is trying to protect the kid from falling and hurting themselves. However, a report from HealthDay News shows that this practice might be doing more harm than good.
Here’s a great quote from the article:
“Many parents and caregivers go down a slide with a young child on their lap without giving it a second thought,” said lead researcher Dr. Charles Jennissen. He is a pediatric emergency staff physician at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine.
“And in most cases I have seen, the parents had no idea that doing so could possibly give their child such a significant injury. They often say they would never have done it had they known,” he added in a news release from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The study analyzed over 350,000 playground slide injuries treated in emergency departments from 2002 to 2015 and the results were very surprising. Over one third of these injuries were attributed to kids that were sitting on the laps of their parents. To make matters worse, these kids had broken bones that were typically by their lower legs.
If you’re wondering why these injuries occur, it’s because the foot gets caught on the edge or the bottom of the slide. Once they’re stuck and their body keeps moving forward, it causes the foot to twist or bend backwards. The researchers found that this was common between those that were aged between 12 and 23 months.
This becomes a lot more common when parents hold their kids down slides. When kids go down slides alone, they accelerate at a pace that is proportionate to their weight. However, when an adult is holding a child down a slide, the added weight makes them go a lot faster. As a result, it makes injuries a lot more common.
If you want to read more, check out the full article by clicking here. We at J&D Ultracare think this is an incredibly important story because it’s something that not a lot of people know about. Please spread the word to help keep our children safe!