Stroller safety

We see ALOT of cases of head injury in the pediatric emergency department. Thankfully, most cases are minor. I often send parents home with an ice pack and tell them that they don’t need to wake their child up every 10 minutes to make sure that they are still alive.

Many of the minor head injury patients I see are babies and toddlers. Toddlers just toddle into walls, furniture – anything. But how about infants? How does that happen? Many head injuries in the 3 year and under set are stroller-related injuries. The baby I treated the other night slipped out of her stroller while the stroller was being carried down the subway stairs. This is obviously more of an urban phenomenon since there are no subways stairs in the burbs, but stroller injuries can happen anywhere.

According to a study published in the journal Pediatrics, there were 64,373 stroller injuries reported between 1994 and 1998. And these numbers have remained fairly constant.

What I see personally in the ER, is that babies are frequently not strapped into their stroller and then slide right out. So, just a friendly reminder to strap your baby into their stroller before you’re on the go. This holds true with strollers and car seats as well. There is nothing worse than that expression of guilt on mom or dad’s face after their 3 month old baby tumbled down the stairs because they weren’t strapped into their stroller.

Other stroller-related injuries were “stroller tip injuries”. This happens when your stroller tips backwards when you decide to load one weeks worth of groceries on the back of the stroller.

So remember to strap your baby into their stroller and not to use the stroller as a grocery cart.