By Gazette Staff
February 3rd, 2026
BURLINGTON, ON
With all that nice white fluffy snow – how do you keep the kids off the slopes?
McMaster Children’s Hospital (MCH) reports some very serious accidents. Doesn’t have to be that way.
Fun – but not recommended.
“In January, we had multiple incidents of children sledding into trees resulting in significant trauma,” says Dr. April Kam, division head of pediatric emergency medicine at MCH. “The hospital’s trauma team treats these incidents in the same manner as children involved in motor vehicle collisions.”
Dr. Kam led a study that found head injuries are the most common sledding injury seen in the MCH emergency department. Head injuries are especially concerning because in rare cases, they can cause lasting brain damage or cognitive difficulties.
“Children and teens routinely wear helmets when skiing and snowboarding, where they can control their speed, yet not when sledding where they often have no control over how fast they go,” says Kam, who is calling for a cultural shift, where helmets are also the norm on toboggan hills.
This way, you get to go home with your parents and not in an ambulance.
As well as confirming that head injuries were the most commonly-treated injury, Kam’s study found that younger kids were more likely to hurt their heads while older children more often had abdominal injuries. Most injuries happened when children fell or crashed into objects, typically involving the head, broken bones, or scrapes and bruises.
Kam’s study also found that most injured children were between six and 10 years old, with an average age of about nine, and just over half were boys.
Kam launched the study during the COVID-19 pandemic, after noticing more children arriving at the MCH ED with sledding injuries during lockdowns, when other winter activities like skating, hockey, ringette and skiing were cancelled to prevent the illness from spreading. She wanted to investigate whether her observations were supported by data.
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