Pediatricians Urging Parents to Stop Using Baby Walkers

Health Wellness

My two daughters are in their early 40s and I remember them in their baby walkers when they were infants. Our oldest daughter would bounce up and down a lot until she fell asleep, but our youngest thought her walker was a world-class race car. She would take off across the room in her walker as fast as she could and just crash into anything and everything. We were glad we lived in a ranch-style home without any basement or stairs. We did have to keep the doors to the outside locked once she discovered how to open the doors.

Our granddaughter is now 16, but when she was little, we bought her a walker. She and her mom, our youngest daughter, lived in a third-floor apartment, but I never recall the granddaughter getting the walker outside the door and near the stairs.

Fortunately, neither of our daughters, nor our granddaughter ever sustained any injuries from the walkers, but that’s not been the case with hundreds of thousands of kids, as reported:

“A new study published Monday in Pediatrics journal says that though walker-related injuries are declining, thousands of children are harmed by them and treated in American emergency rooms each year.”

“Those concerns have led pediatricians for years now to call for walkers to be banned outright and the study’s researchers concurred: Parents, stop using them.”

“‘Using data on emergency department visits for children under 15 months from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, they found 230,676 infant walker injuries from 1990-2014,’ says an excerpt of the study from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which publishes Pediatrics journal.”

Most of the children – 90.6 percent – suffered head or neck injuries, according to the study. Nearly 75 percent of them were ‘injured by falling down the stairs in an infant walker,’ the study says.”

My first inclination is to blame poor parenting and the failure to keep a watch on their kids, but then senior study author Gary Smith, Director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy as Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, stated:

“I have commonly heard the words from parents who brought their child to the emergency department after an injury in a baby walker, ‘Doctor, I was standing right there, but she moved so fast that I did not have time to stop her’.”

Reading that is what reminded me of how our youngest used to speed across the room and throughout the house in her walker, like a combination of race car driver and demolition derby driver. That made me realize that even with good parenting and careful supervision, it’s still easy for a little one in a walker to suddenly dart away too fast for any parent to grab in time. If there are stairs nearby, they can easily reach the stairs before the most agile of parents can leap like a superhero and save their precious little one from certain disaster.

Smith also said:

“These are good parents, who were carefully supervising their children and using the baby walker as intended. Their only error was that they believed the myth that baby walkers are safe to use.”

Seeing the statistics and knowing from personal experience just how unpredictable little ones in walkers can be, I tend to agree with the recommendation of pediatricians not to use baby walkers and if you are, stop.

Baby Walkers Injuries

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