Kids Break Legs While Riding Slides on Adult’s Lap, New Study Finds

A study by a New York physician on the causes of broken bones in children he treated found that many of the injuries occurred while the child was riding down a playground slide on the lap of an adult.

Many adults who worry that a child will be injured if allowed to slide on their own instead hold the child in their lap and slide along with them. But Dr. John Gaffney, a pediatric orthopedist at Winthrop University Hospital in Mineola, N.Y., found that doing so can be very dangerous to children.

Study of Childhood Broken Bones Finds Common Cause

Gaffney wondered exactly how the children he treated had been injured, so he went through the medical files of all the children he’d treated for broken shinbones in the previous 11 months looking for the cause of the injury.

He found that of 58 fractures in children under age 18, 13 of the injuries had happened on a slide. In each of those 13 slide-related injuries, the child was riding on the lap of an adult or older sibling, Gaffney said in a study published this month in the Journal of Pediatric Orthopedics, according to an MSNBC.com report.

Gaffney’s findings prompted him to conclude that adults should not ride slides with toddlers or young children in their laps and that more people should be aware of the under-reported risks of the activity.

Increased Weight Leads to More Broken Bones

The doctor concluded that the reason for the injuries was because the added weight of the adult is enough to snap the shinbone of small children who get a leg jammed into the side of the slide as they go down. The child alone generally does not have enough weight or forward momentum to break the leg bone if they are sliding on their own, Gaffney concluded.

Slide With Caution

Gaffney said if a child is too young or otherwise unable to ride a slide by themselves, they should find a more age-appropriate playground activity and avoid riding the slide on the lap of an adult. Other doctors who read Gaffney’s study said the risks of broken bones from riding a slide in the lap of an adult should be considered, but should not result in an outright ban on the activity.

“Parents do need to be aware that there are risks,” Dr. Barbara Gaines, director of trauma and injury prevention at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, told MSNBC.com. “And I think it’s reasonable to say that they shouldn’t take the steepest slide on the playground and that they might consider other activities that would be fun for the parent and child to share.”

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