Our intuitions about what is safe and what is not, are often determined by perceptions rather than by facts. We are, for example, generally more fearful about flying in airplanes than about driving in our cars. But the data shows that likelihood of a car accident is actually much greater than the likelihood of a plane crash. Some of our intuitions about child safety are also not supported by the facts. When bathing our young children, for example, we take particular care to insure that the water is neither too cold nor too hot. In fact, however, the greatest cause of bathtub injuries are due to slips and falls, not burning or submersion.

Parents are not unique in this regard and researchers have also focused mainly on burns and submersions in their surveys of bathtub injuries. A recently published article in Pediatrics, summarized in Contemporary Pediatrics (Ryan 2009), reports the first nationwide study that looks at data regarding bathtub slips and falls. The data for the study came from The National Electronic Survey of the US consumer products division from 1990 to 2007. The investigators reviewed abut 790,000 reports of bath tub and shower injuries, to children and adolescents, who were treated in US emergency rooms over the 18 year period.

These figures suggest that there were around 43,000 injuries of this kind for each of the years of the study. To put this figure in perspective, it suggests that the bathtub injury rate is 5.5 percent per ten thousand young people each year. More than half of the injuries were to children four years and younger. Most of the injuries, more than 80 percent, were due to slips and falls. The face was the most frequently injured part of the body (48 percent) and injuries to the face and neck were the next most frequent (15 percent).

These results suggest that parents need to be as thoughtful about slips and falls as about temperature. Because parents may not always be able to catch a child who is slipping or falling, rubber mats should be placed on the tub floor to prevent such accidents. Although it is probably unnecessary to say, it is also important not to leave young children alone in the tub. Putting a mat on the bottom of the tub each time the child takes a bath and removing it to dry thereafter may seem like a pain. But it is the best insurance against all too common bathtub injuries.

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Ryan, J. (2009). "Tub Thumping: 43,000 Kids Slip in the Bath." Contemporary Pediatrics.