Kids in Danger - Context On Children's Product Safety

Context On Children's Product Safety

KID produces monthly newsletters that cover recent developments and recalls in children's products. In depth research on product safety topics is another ongoing project of the group. Funded by an ethics grant from the Kemper Foundation, a case study entitled The Playskool Travel-Lite Crib was published.A book entitled It's No Accident, was written on this topic.

State legislators have passed and are in various stages of passing laws known generally as "The Children's Product Safety Act." One feature of these laws is the prohibition on the sale or lease of any children's product that has been recalled. Illinois, for example, passed this legislation in 1999. Arkansas, in addition to passing its Child Product Safety Act, maintains a special website located at http://www.childproductsafety.com/ that provides details on the legislation, recalls by year, recalls by category, and recalls by company.

In late July, 2008, federal legislators reached agreement on improving children's product safety. The course of KID's role in the legislation and the portion of the law named in honor of Danny Keysar was described in the Chicago Tribune as follows:

Ginzel has spent the last decade pushing for tougher testing of children's products before they're sold and more effective ways of sweeping dangerous products off store shelves...."We'd rather have our son," Ginzel said, choking up. "But whatever we can do to protect other families-it's not really a choice we can make. It's something we have to do".... That part of the law (named after Danny Keysar) forces the US Consumer Product Safety Commission to enact tougher safety rules for durable nursery products, including cribs, and requires that manufacturers test their products to those standards before they're sold.

Read more about this topic:  Kids In Danger

Famous quotes containing the words context, children, product and/or safety:

    The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.
    Susan Sontag (b. 1933)

    Too many existing classrooms for young children have this overriding goal: To get the children ready for first grade. This goal is unworthy. It is hurtful. This goal has had the most distorting impact on five-year-olds. It causes kindergartens to be merely the handmaidens of first grade.... Kindergarten teachers cannot look at their own children and plan for their present needs as five-year-olds.
    James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)

    [As teenager], the trauma of near-misses and almost- consequences usually brings us to our senses. We finally come down someplace between our parents’ safety advice, which underestimates our ability, and our own unreasonable disregard for safety, which is our childlike wish for invulnerability. Our definition of acceptable risk becomes a product of our own experience.
    Roger Gould (20th century)

    There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.... Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.
    Joseph Heller (b. 1923)