How To Keep Your Children Safe In A Bounce House

Kids love bounce houses, if they see an inflatable you can be pretty sure they will be running towards it for a chance to bounce around. Bounce houses are great fun but they also come with the danger of injury from weather related incidents, improper set-up, or accidents that happen while the children are playing in the bouncer.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) released a report saying they are aware of 3,991 injuries, including 12 deaths, involving inflatable amusements from 2003 to 2013.

CPSC staff recently evaluated incident data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (“NEISS”) and estimated that approximately 113,272 emergency department-treated injuries associated with inflatable amusements occurred from 2003 through 2013.

The estimated annual average is 16,903 ER visits due to bounce house injuries every year, this is 46 injuries per day. Those are quite a lot of injuries & it is rising each year. But don’t let that scare you off from letting your children have fun inside of an inflatable!

There are some very simple things that you as a parent can do to significantly reduce the chance of your child being injured while they are playing:

• If you are renting an inflatable for a backyard birthday party make sure that you rent it from a company that has proper insurance coverage. A rental company that has insurance is required to have higher safety standards than a company that is not insured. For example Cossio Insurance Agency requires that Party Rental Companies provide proof of safety rules & safety checklists as well as a rental agreement that goes over the safety rules with the customer. Insurance companies will also only provide coverage for Commercial Inflatables; they will not insure a bounce house that is made more as a toy.
• Make sure that any inflatable your child will be jumping in is staked to the ground. If it is not staked down, do not let your child enter the bouncer. Also, keep an eye on the weather. Even a staked down inflatable can get blown away if the winds speeds are over 15-25 mph.
• Every bounce house needs to have proper supervision with an attendant regulating the number of children entering the bounce house & supervising the activity that is going on inside.
• Never slide down an inflatable slide (or any slide for that matter) with a small child in your lap. While this may sound harmless, this can lead to the child’s legs or arms getting caught on the slide and getting broken arms/legs. If they are not big enough to climb up/go down by themselves they should not be on the ride for their own safety.
• There are also certain activities that children should know can get them seriously injured. We Insure Inflatables has created a fun cartoon video to show children that certain things such as lying down inside of the inflatable or climbing up the slide can end up getting them hurt. This video was created to help to reduce the number of ER visits each year by making the children aware of what they need to do to stay safe. (After all, they are the ones that are jumping inside of the inflatable). Show this video to your child, it could prevent them from getting hurt!

Via YouTube