Stephanie Worsop: Trampoline injuries raise questions about cotton wool kids

Trampolines are safer nowadays but people are still getting injured. Photo / Getty Images

OPINION

In the span of a generation, trampolines have gone from being open, bare-steel death traps to heavily padded, net-enclosed, well, still death traps.

This week, we ran a story showing the number of trampoline-related injuries made to ACC last year was the highest in a decade, with 848 injuries being lodged in the Bay of Plenty for a cost of more than $536,000.

Over the same 10-year period, there have been 8305 trampoline-related injuries in the Bay of Plenty region, coming to a cost of $5.5m to help people recover.

Now, I don't want to be one of those old codgers who starts every sentence with "back in my day" but I'm going to make an exception for this.

Back in my day, we had little protection on trampolines. We used to jump off the garage on to it, we'd double bounce each other on purpose and in summer, we'd squirt it with dishwashing liquid and put the sprinkler underneath, turning it into a giant slip and slide.

There were, of course, some brutal injuries; my sister put her tooth through her lip, my cousin landed on his back on to the steel bar and I was double bounced off the trampoline entirely.

On countless occasions, we smashed our heads together, landed on our ankles funny and fell through the springs.

Knowing the damage we did to ourselves on those old-school trampolines, of course I think the added safety precautions of today's models make sense.

The extra padding and netting could be all the difference between a bruise and a broken bone.

But the fact that 848 trampoline-related injuries were lodged last year alone, shows there's only so much you can do to stop people from hurting themselves.

Beyond banning trampolines entirely, I'm at a loss for what more could be done to make them injury-proof.

As a society, it's natural to want to look for ways to better protect people, especially our children, but we cannot wrap them in cotton wool either.

And if anything, these ACC figures prove we can implement every safety measure available and people will still find a way to hurt themselves.

When I think back, we were lucky not to have done any lasting damage from our misadventures, not just on the trampoline but climbing trees, roller skating and just in general, being kids.

But the flip side to that was it taught us crucial skills such as risk management and considering the consequences of our actions.

In my opinion, we will do more harm than good robbing the next generations of learning those skills by shielding them from every risk in their lives, trampolines included.