Playground season has been in full swing for a couple of months now, and my kids and I have enjoyed our fair share of park-hopping already. Now that they’re older, it’s a relief to me to not have to climb up any large play structures to rescue them when they’ve lost their nerve to go down a really tall slide. They’re also all old enough to be able to do the swings without me pushing them, so basically, a park visit is just a little R & R in the sunshine for me. I’ll admit it, I’m in the stage of parenting where I haven’t thought about playground safety in a REALLY long time. (Which, maybe I shouldn’t admit, I mean, I DO watch them at the park but I’m not a helicopter mom!)
But THEN. This morning I saw a viral Facebook post about playground safety that made my heart stop for a minute.
Because I’ve made this specific playground safety mistake SEVERAL times, and apparently, my kids and I just got lucky.
In a post that had been shared over a whopping 98,000 times at the time of publication, mom Heather Clare shares what happened to her and her daughter at the playground a few years ago so that other parents can be informed. Because, she says, she had NO idea what she was doing with her daughter was dangerous AT ALL.
She says:
So every year I do a PSA on going down a slide with your child on your lap. When Meadow was 12 months old (I went down with Matthew first, but he was lucky) , I went down the slide with her on my lap and her foot got caught between me and the slide. This picture is the moment her leg was breaking.
Warning: I’ll pause here to say some of you may find this picture disturbing, now that you know what it is of. (When I saw it before I had read what it was, I wasn’t disturbed. It’s not graphic.)
Photo: Heather Clare
She continues:
She’s still smiling… because it was happening at this exact moment. When we went to the ER, the super empathetic [sarcasm] doctor lectured me on how common this injury is. I had no idea. I thought everyone took their kids down the slide. I strongly feel every playground should have a warning sign, but since I’ve never seen one (and we go to ALOT of playgrounds), I share this picture every year in hopes that the pain Meadow felt and the guilt that I still feel will save other babies and parents from the same. Don’t ever go down a slide with a baby on your lap. There is no SAFE way to go down a slide with your little.
