Sliding with your kids can put them at risk of a fractured leg, say orthopedic surgeons

Sometimes keeping your children close at hand can actually do more harm than good. This seems to be the case when it comes to joining your little ones on the playground slide.

According to Dr. Edward Holt, an orthopedic surgeon at Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis, Maryland, many kids are showing up to his emergency room with spiral tibia fractures from a sliding-board-ride-gone-wrong.

What happens is the child's rubber-soled shoe will touch the slide and cause enough friction to twist his or her leg. Then, the weight of the parent will cause the bone to fracture.

"This fracture is entirely preventable," Dr. Holt says in a YouTube video he created to raise awareness of this common playground accident.

"The adult is just devastated for having caused a fracture when they were trying to keep the child safe," he says.

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Although it's hard to say exactly how prevalent this is, a 2009 study at the Winthrop University Hospital in Mineola, New York, discovered that almost 14 percent of leg fractures among children presenting to that hospital in an 11-month period occurred while riding a slide with a parent.

"As soon as the weather gets warm, this starts to happen," Dr. John Gaffney , a pediatric orthopedic surgeon and author of the study, tells the New York Times. "It's so common."

As common as it may be, not many people are aware of it.

"I've never heard of it," admits Kristen Gane, program manager at Safe Kids Canada, an organization created by a surgeon at SickKids in an effort to prevent predictable accidents. "That is something you would not anticipate."

But she's seen other examples of parents putting their kids in harms way in the name of safety.

"As parents, in our enthusiasm to keep our children safe," she says, "we sometimes do things we shouldn't."

She gives the example of kids who wear helmets at the playground. They might pull up on their bikes, leaving their helmets on, and their parents figure it can't hurt that they get a little extra protection while on the jungle gym.

But it can hurt.

"Helmets and playgrounds are a really bad mix," says Gane. "Children have actually been strangled in Canada from their helmet strap while using a playground."

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If a child falls off climbing equipment in a playground, or off a tree, their helmet can pose a strangulation risk.

"The helmet is a really good example of a well-meaning parent," says Gane, "who's trying to make their child safer, but who may actually be putting them at higher risk."

She warns that parents shouldn't use safety products for purposes they weren't designed for, and also cautions them not to get creative when it comes to safety equipment. They shouldn't be using a scarf, say, as a restraining device for a dinning chair booster, or adding extra belts or padding to car seats.

"We don't have the engineering expertise to imagine how adding one component might actually compromise the way the product works," Gane explains. "So we have to trust the professionals."

And now, adding to the long list of dangers parents are warned to look out for, hitting the slide with our young ones is the new parenting faux-pas. Brought to you straight from those professionals tired of setting all those fractured legs.

Check out the video below of a man who sent his disabled son to school with a recording device.