By Cindy Dampier / Chicago Tribune
When outfitting a young child’s room, it’s easy to get caught up in the design details you can see: a cool color, a decorative object, favorite toys and books. But choosing the right furniture means navigating a very real — yet hard to spot — danger that can threaten kids’ safety.
According to a Consumer Reports study released recently, injuries from furniture tip-overs have continued to rise in the U.S. The latest data show that, in 2016, 2,800 children in the U.S. were injured by tipping furniture, an increase of 33 percent over 2015. Though the reasons for the increase are not clear, researchers at Consumer Reports believe it may simply reflect the increasing availability of products that are not built with safety in mind.
Though an image of overloaded, toppling bookcases may still come to mind when we think of teetering furniture, when it comes to tip-over injuries to children, the most likely culprit is the dresser.
Dressers, it turns out, pose a danger to kids younger than 6 for a few reasons. They’re in the bedroom, where children are most likely to be left alone to nap — so adults are less likely to stop them from climbing. They’re tempting to climb on — pulled-out drawers can look a lot like stairs. And we often place enticing objects on top of them, including heavy televisions.
“Over 80 percent of all the furniture tip-over injuries and deaths are children under the age of 6,” said James Dickerson, chief scientific officer at Consumer Reports. “They are the most vulnerable people.”
Yet, safety standards for dresser manufacturers are completely voluntary, Dickerson points out, meaning that manufacturers don’t have to comply with them, and stores don’t use labeling to inform shoppers about products that do comply. In addition, Dickerson’s team found that the current industry standards, which call for a dresser to remain upright when a weight of 50 pounds is placed on an open drawer, aren’t stringent enough.
“We want the weight associated with the standard to be increased to 60 pounds,” he said, “which covers the average weight of children under 6 in the United States.”
After testing 24 dressers of different sizes and price points, Consumer Reports found that there were dressers that passed the weight test in all categories, meaning it’s not price or materials that makes the furniture safe, but good design.
“You can make a dresser that is light and safe, you can make a dresser that is heavy and safe, you can make a dresser of any shape or size that is safe,” Dickerson said, “because people are already doing it.” Even the new model of Ikea’s Malm dresser, which was recalled in June 2016 after being linked to the deaths of three toddlers, passed two of the three Consumer Reports tests — though not the test with a 60-pound weight.
Dickerson would like to see those voluntary standards become mandatory standards, he said, a measure that has been supported by the furniture industry, which would welcome the level playing field created when all manufacturers are forced to produce dressers to the same standard. The change has also been called for by other consumer advocates, including Lisa Siefert of Barrington Hills, who lost her son Shane to a dresser tip-over in 2011. “The normal consumer has no clue,” Siefert told Consumer Reports.
She’s right. Dickerson confirms that his team’s research revealed no clear way that a shopper can tell whether a dresser will tip — and he doesn’t recommend you push down on open drawers to test it out in the store. “We’re not advocating that people go out and try to replicate their own experiments,” he said. “Just by looking at it or fiddling around with a dresser doesn’t guarantee that it’s going to be stable.”
Instead, Consumer Reports has two pieces of advice for parents: Avoid putting anything enticing or large on top of a dresser — this especially applies to televisions, which are often cited as additional toppling hazards. And use wall anchors to attach the furniture to the wall.
“Anchor, anchor, anchor,” Dickerson said. Wall anchor kits are often included with a new furniture purchase — you may have seen Ikea’s included anchors and storewide campaigns about anchoring — and are easy to find online.
“We should not put all the burden on the consumer” to make dressers safe, he said, but until manufacturers improve their safety standards, the anchors are a must. “This is a completely preventable issue,” he said, “and we all want to increase safety for children.”
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