Mum’s Fortnite warning after son, 4, broke his arm trying to ‘float’ off garden slide while copying online computer game
A MUM has issued a warning to parents to keep their young children away from Fortnite after her four-year-old son broke his arm while attempting to imitate the wildly popular video game.
Harrison Day missed his first day of primary school after injuring himself while trying to "float" off a garden slide after seeing videos of the online sensation.
Mum Charley Dale, 31, had tucked Harrison safely into bed, but the youngster sneaked to his older brother Joshua’s bedroom where the nine-year-old was watching videos of the game on YouTube.
Joshua was wearing headphones to view the videos, so didn't know that his little brother was secretly watching from the doorway.
Days later Harrison decided to re-enact what he’d seen by jumping off a slide in the family’s back garden while holding an umbrella - in a similar fashion to how competitors in Fortnite enter the battlefield after being dropped from the sky.
Charley, also mum to one-year-old Oliver, told The Sun Online: “I could see him from the kitchen window – he was just messing about in the back garden.
“Then he tried to jump off the side of the slide, which is almost impossible, and he let go of the brolly but his left arm was still attached to the top of the slide and he sort of fell and it literally snapped.
“He came running in to me and I just put my arm round him because I was dialing 999 and he screamed for an entire hour because it hurt that much.
“The bones didn’t come out but his arm was disfigured and almost from the wrist down it was floppy.
“It was horrible; I’d never seen anything like it and I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
Charley, who lives with Harrison and Oliver’s dad Lee Day, 27, in Bicester, Oxon, added: “Once he was out of pain Harrison was quite proud of telling us that he had seen the video in his brother’s room, he’d seen an umbrella and he thought he would try it, and he was quite proud of the fact that it went okay the first two times.
“He’s got off really lightly.
"The trauma team at the hospital thought they would have to wire it but thankfully they managed to manipulate it and put it in a cast.
"It could have been a lot more than his arm.
“I’d say if an older sibling has access to the internet just really try to keep the little children away, which I thought I had done – I had put them to bed,” she added.
“I do think children need to be taught that a game is a game because Harrison said ‘well if I died I would come back okay’ and I said ‘no, life doesn’t happen like that’.
“I don’t know where he’s got that from.”
The NSPCC has previously warned parents to ensure children playing Fortnite stay safe online.
The children’s charity launched the advice for parents, alongside O2, following concerns over a function within the game which automatically allows users to speak to other players through voice and text chat.
It means children playing the game can be contacted by strangers. The voice chat can be disabled, but the text function cannot be turned off.
Creator Epic Games says it does not direct the game to children under the age of 13 in the UK, according to the NSPCC.
The PEGI rating for the game is 12 years old, however PEGI does not take chat features into consideration when rating games.
Other parents have warned of children becoming addicted to the game or racking up huge bills while using it.
One 10-year-old fan in Bridgend, Wales, spent almost £1,200 by making in-app purchases without his mother’s knowledge.
Meanwhile a 14-year-old boy in Sydney, Australia, is so addicted to Fortnite and other computer games that he has not attended school for two years and headbutted his mum when she tried to stop him playing.
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Police officers in Belfast also issued a warning after a stranger tricked a 12-year-old boy into sending a Snapchat picture over the social media app, having struck up a conversation with him via the online computer game.
The schoolboy was later asked to send pictures of himself in exchange for £500 in Fortnite vouchers.
Epic Games, creator of Fortnite, was contacted for comment.