The Bad News about Bounce Houses

Here’s over 100,000 reasons you shouldn’t feel pressure to buy a bounce house for your kid’s party.

At the risk of deflating anyone’s party plans – and by “anyone” I refer to our tiny friends under age 7 — it’s worth wondering whether our bounce house rental money wouldn’t be better spent on, well, absolutely anything other than a bounce house rental. Because in addition to offering a springy jumping space, bounce houses also appear to offer ample opportunities for taking our kids to the emergency room.

Since 2003, there have been 113,272 emergency room visits after people were injured on what are called inflatable amusements – bounce houses, slides, and rock climbing walls — says the government’s CPSC. You know, structures with flexible fabric that maintain their shape with a continuous air flow. The number of ER visits has grown by 227 percent over the past ten years. Most injuries were from bounce houses (also called “moon bounces’) and most of them were leg and arm fiascos.

But it’s not all broken bones – as there were 12 deaths during this time that the government knows of, anyway. In 2010, a 2-year-old boy suffocated in a bounce house after a 3-year-old girl unplugged the motor. Also that year, a 2-year-old boy was found floating face down in a swimming pool after falling from an inflatable slide. And a 5-year-old boy died after he fell from one of these amusements and hit his head on concrete. In 2012, an 11-year-old boy fell into a lake and died while playing in an inflatable bounce house that was offshore. And in 2003, a 15-year-old boy fell from an inflatable slide at a high school wellness event. He suffered a traumatic brain injury and died 4 days later.

If you are going to rent one, don’t forget to keep an eye on your adult friends. In what’s called a “King of the Hill” amusement, two adults fell out through a cap in the inflated fence, struck a 3-year-old boy who was standing nearby and later died from the head injury he got from being knocked down. In 2009, a 50-year-old man was doing flips in a bounce house before falling backward and suffering fatal head and neck injuries. And a 33-year-old woman died in a bounce house after landing on her head and neck while bouncing.