Scooters take kids everywhere fast – including the emergency room.
More than 3.2 million kids visited emergency rooms between 1990 and 2011 because of injuries linked to toys of all types, according to a new study from Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus.
The trend isn’t good: The injury rate jumped 40 percent over the study period.
“Almost all of that (increase) is attributable to the foot-powered scooter,” says Gary Smith, director of the hospital’s Center for Injury Research and Policy and one of the study’s authors.
The study, published in Clinical Pediatrics, looked only at products classified as toys. That means bikes, which are classified as vehicles, were left out.
That omission allowed researchers to spot the injury trend in ride-on toys, particularly scooters. Smith said the data showed that scooter-related injuries soared when lightweight, foldable scooters such as the Razor came on the market in the late 1990s. When the fad waned in the early 2000s, injuries dropped but they have, since 2005, begun climbing again.
“We have to change the culture when it comes to child safety,” Smith said. “We would not sell a motor vehicle without seat belts. A scooter should not be sold without a helmet.”
Although ride-on toy injuries affected kids 5 and older, it’s toddlers who get whisked to emergency rooms most often as a group. The under-3 crowd tends to mouth toys, and their most common toy-related injuries are choking on or swallowing small toys.
Two-year-olds are the most “at risk” age group when it comes to toy-related injuries, the study found.
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