We are fortunate in the West, or most of it anyway, because the European Community, north America and Canada have strict laws on how safe kids’ toys should be.
Despite this, there are plenty of unscrupulous people about who will import cheap junk toys that could be hazardous to children, which means that anyone buying children’s toys has to have their wits about them.
Having said that, the larger stores do do their best to weed out the rogue suppliers and in fact most of the unsafe children’s toys are discovered before they go on sale. Be careful in discount stores and open-air markets though.
Once you get your safe kids’ toys home, the time to be careful starts. This is because most injuries in the home involving toys do not happen to the person that the toys were bought for. This is because adults trip over them. The staircase is the worst
The first thing that anyone buying toys must look for is the label. In the United States this is known as the CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission) and in Europe it is known as the Certificat European (CE). However, be cautious, because these labels can be faked very easily.
If you are not accustomed to buying toys for children, the next indicator to look for is the age bracket for which the toy is meant. In general the indicator will give 5+ or 7-12, so you still have to use some judgment.
Educational toys are important to children and one of the best of these that you can add to as the child gets older is Lego. Duplo is the kind of Lego that is most suited to very young children.
This is because Duplo building blocks are larger than the normal Lego building blocks so that tiny hands can manage them easily.
One of the biggest risks for very young children is choking. Young children put everything into their mouths but Lego has made these Duplo building blocks too large to swallow.
As your child grows older, you can add to the Lego set right up to adulthood. There are Lego electric motors for teenagers and there are many adults that have carried on using Lego well past their Twenties.
If however your child does have an accident with a toy, you should strive to find out how it happened immediately after seeing to your child.
If the accident was plainly the child’s fault or someone else’s, you can report it if you like, but if the problem came about because of a problem or failure inherent in the toy, you ought to report it.
The first location to report the toy is to the local authorities and then you should inform the manager of the shop where you bought it. Keep the toy until the wheels of bureaucracy turn enough to get around to you
They will come back to you and you may save other children and their parents from going through the same problems that you did.
Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on a range of topics, but is now concerned with the Fisher Price Big Foot Monster. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Smart Toys for Kids.