Each year, more than 150,000 children ages 14 and younger are treated in hospital emergency rooms for playground-related injuries.
Protect your child by following these safety and injury-prevention tips:
Playground safety tips
- Supervise your child at all times.
- Make sure your child wears a helmet or protective gear when using scooters, skates, skateboards or bicycles.
- Teach your child not to jump for distance from the swings or other equipment.
- Only use playgrounds that are age-appropriate and have safe surfacing like wood chips, mulch, sand, pea gravel or rubber under and around equipment.
- Report dangerous playgrounds to the organization responsible for them.
Injury-prevention tips
To help prevent injuries, remind your child to:
- Use playground equipment properly:
- Always swing sitting down
- Allow only one person on a swing at a time
- Wait his turn on the slide
- Sit on the slide, and slide on his bottom only
- Use monkey bars for climbing only — not acrobatics
- Play gently — pushing and roughhousing can lead to falls
- Never wear jewelry, jackets with drawstrings or scarves when playing. They can get caught on playground equipment
- Wear proper footwear, such as sneakers
- Tell an adult if playground equipment does not look safe
Download our Playground Safety brochure
Our Playground Safety brochure is available for download in multiple languages: