Is it really shocking anymore when the hand-wringing medical powers-that-be expound on the dangers of trampolines? “Kids playing on trampolines can hit their heads!” “They can break their bones!” “They can get tangled up in that stupid netting like butterflies and flail wildly in the noonday sun until you, responsible parent who insisted on the netting instead of just buying an XBox and being done with it, rescue them!” We get it, creepy doctors whose parents never let them do anything fun except play with an ant farm and vivisect small woodland creatures — trampolines are death platforms that snare children with the mellifluous lure of jumping higher and higher and higher.
Fact: Citing more than 100,000 trampoline-related injuries in 2009, the American Academy of Pediatrics said that trampolines are still dangerous and nets don’t make them any safer.
Fact: No physician in the history of the universe has ever jumped on a trampoline.
Fact: Double-bouncing is soooo stupid — it’s responsible for about 75 percent of trampoline-related maimings.
Fact: Young children (younger than six) are stupid and uncoordinated, so they’re at the highest risk for fucking themselves up.
Fact: If there was a collective regulating body of six-year-olds, it would issue a recommendation that not reaching for the stars via trampoline puts adults in danger of becoming boring stupidfaces.
Fact: Falls from trampolines are potentially catastrophic, accounting for between 37 and 39 percent of all injuries.
Fact: If trampolines could talk, they’d all say, “We’re hungry! Feed us your children!”
Doctors hope that parents realize how unreasonably dangerous and unnecessary trampolines are. If more kids just sat inside and played video games, incidents of traumatic childhood events such as breaking a bone, skinning a knee, or going on a long, coming-of-age journey to find the body of a missing boy, all the while wading through bogs of leeches and being chased by a marauding Kiefer Sutherland would decrease drastically.
Trampolines are no place for kids, docs warn [NBC]
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