Kids have an amazing ability to get their fingers into just about anything; hinges, jars, plugs, even other kids’ eyes. I’m sure we can all remember being yelled at for pulling apart the doll grandma gave us as a birthday present, or using dad’s hammer to “fix” the fridge, or that time you fed your babysitter a Tabasco-laced peanut butter sandwich just to see what would happen.
All parents can do is try to ensure hazardous toys are kept away from those tiny aforementioned fingers. But with those toys that either resemble something out of Star Trek or a magical animal from the land of tiny-mouth-sized-things, it’s hard to avoid all of those little hazards the experts warn us about.
The organization World Against Toys Causing Harm (W.A.T.C.H) recently posted their 10 Worst Toys of 2008. The standard choking, eye-gouging toys all got a mention, but it never even occurred to me that hair on a plush toy would be considered an “ingestion hazard”. So why are we buying these crazy toys, with their tiny parts and long choke-prone chords? What we really need to give kids this Christmas is a stick.
