Oaklee’s guest post by Nancy Cowles, Executive Director for Kids In Danger, a Chicago-based nonprofit dedicated to improving children’s product safety.
It was just like any other day. Lisa put her son, Shane, into bed for his afternoon nap and closed the door. Lisa could have never imagined that she would later find the dresser in Shane’s room toppled on top of her baby boy. Shane was only two years old when he died.
Shane was not the first furniture tip-over death and sadly not the last. Despite the number of tip-over incidents in the past decade, there has hardly been any reform to safety standards. To stop the numbers from increasing, Congress, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and the furniture industry must understand the need for safer furniture designs and stricter standards.
Along with Shane’s Foundation, Kids In Danger (KID) published a new report, Furniture Stability: A review of data and testing, which looks at data from dresser and chest tip-overs and tests dressers for stability. Findings include:
- Two-year-olds are the age group most affected by tip-overs and are most likely to be killed.
- Head injuries (37%) were the most common category of injury.
- Almost all (98.7%) of head injuries are related to a television on the tipping dresser falling on a child.
The testing of 19 dressers and chests included stability tests based on both the voluntary industry standards as well as new testing protocols KID developed.
- Only nine of the 19 units passed the stability performance tests based on the current voluntary standard. Only two units passed all the tests.
- Furniture placed on carpeting is less stable than furniture placed on hard floors but testing is currently done on hard floor surface.
KID would like to see stronger standards enforced. Manufacturers can design furniture with wider bases, interlocking drawers or other changes to increase stability. What can you do now? Anchor furniture with tip restraints to the wall. Learn more at #AnchorIt from CPSC. Report any stability issues with furniture to www.saferproducts.gov and look for furniture that meets the current standard and has design features to make it more stable. We can prevent another tragedy.