Kids love jumping. It's an immutable fact of nature. But is a trampoline simply an accident waiting to happen?
Seems so, according to an article in the Huffington Post, which revealed the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) "strongly discourages" trampolines in both residential and commercial use. The AAP echoed a similar statement issued by the Canadian Paediatric Society earlier this year.
"The key thing is that three-quarters of injuries occur when there are multiple users on the mat," Dr. Michele LaBotz, co-author of the AAP statement, told the Huffington Post. "And especially when you get those disparate sizes — you get a real big person and a real small person — the small person is much more likely to get injured, 14 times more likely to get injured."
Those injuries range from the moderate fractures, dislocations and sprained ankles to the more severe, head and neck trauma, with an estimated one in 200 incidents leading to permanent neurological damage.
With their soft mats, trampolines lull us into a false sense of security. But even protective netting will not prevent around two-thirds of injuries, which occur on the central mat, warns LaBotz.
In Canada, more than 4,000 cases of trampoline injuries were treated in emergency rooms in the Canadian Hospitals Injury Reporting and Prevention Program (CHIRPP), though clearly that figure doesn't account for all injuries sustained. The article further states that more than 40 per cent of those injuries involved five- to nine-year-old children, with more than eight per cent requiring hospitalization.
And the push for physical activity in the battle against childhood obesity could see those figures jump. But the message is clear. As far as pediatricians are concerned, there is no safe way to use a recreational trampoline.
Seeing those catalogue images of whole families bouncing around together makes LaBotz and her colleagues cringe. "And parents are struggling now to pull their kids away from the computer and the video games. And it's easy to see how it might seem like a good, fun, relatively inexpensive thing to do."
A lot of hot air and pediatric paranoia, or is it high time we heed the warnings and banish the bouncing?
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