THESE TIMES

The benefits of bounce, bounce, bounce

Kirk Ericson | Sep 28, 20230

We had a trampoline in the backyard for our kids when those two kids were kids, and for 10 years I had to put up with safety Nellies telling me how dangerous trampolines are, especially ones not surrounded by netting.

I heard stories about broken backs and quadriplegia and fractures and dislocated shoulders and broken teeth. I heard people cite statistics about trampolines being a leading cause of emergency rooom visits.

Sometimes, those people shared their own involvement in trampoline-related mayhem.

Most of the stories were pointed at me as though I was ignorant of a trampoline’s risk, and that if I truly cared about my kids’ bones and brains, I’d get rid of the damned thing.

I didn’t doubt their stats and stories, but stats and stories often provide incomplete pictures of life on earth.

For instance, here are some people who don’t show up in the gloomy trampoline statistics: The people who never go to the hospital because they never hurt themselves on a trampoline, and the people who didn’t injure themselves because of the increased coordination they developed by jumping on a trampoline.

When my oldest son was 12, I was on a beach with him along the waters of Dana Passage, which laps against the southern shores of Harstine Island. He was bouncing, bouncing, bouncing on the trunk of a tree that had fallen from a hillside and which ended up suspended 10 feet above the beach. The tree had a little give in it.

My son lost his footing and fell backward toward the beach. He did a twist and half-turn in midair and landed on his feet — mostly.

Ta-da!

No injury. No statistic. Perhaps he avoided injury because the trampoline made him comfortable with his body’s presence in space. It’s also possible he wouldn’t have been bouncing on the tree in the first place if we hadn’t had a trampoline, but I try not to dwell on such questions when I’m making a point.

My son’s beach acrobatics that day won’t show up in any government chart about how beneficial trampolines are, which leaves us with no substantial counter to people who cite statistics about how perilous trampolines are. Our nation is obsessed with counting and accounting, but the facts that can’t be objectively tracked are just as relevant as those emergency room numbers are.

We had mishaps on that trampoline, some related to the 8-inch round hole in the trampoline bed, but the majority of tears were spilled in anguish over having to separate themselves from the trampoline for a while.

That’s another fact about trampolines that can’t be quantified: Children are happy on trampolines.

My boys spent long stretches of sunny afternoons on the trampoline with their friends, bouncing, talking, circling, making up games, trying new moves. In summer, I’d put a sprinkler under the trampoline and the neighborhood kids’ radars would ping and over they would stream. We slept on it several times when it was too hot in the house.

Kids need to know how to fall and not hurt themselves because they’ll be falling long after us parents have moved onto whatever comes next.

Increased coordination for your children is a vaccine that every parent should embrace.

And to seal my point, while raising our two fine boys into fine adults, they had exactly one emergency room visit between them, and no trampoline was an accomplice to that injury.