The recalled danger in the daycare
Deadly infant sleepers found in 1 in 10 child care facilities
“They have what?” was my initial response after my wife informed me that our son Elon’s daycare still used Fisher-Price Rock ‘N Plays. I was shocked — these were the same sleepers that had been recalled months before after infants died in them.
The next day, I notified Elon’s daycare teacher, and got an even more concerning response. She was confused because she thought Fisher-Price had only issued a warning that the sleepers were safe if used properly.
That wasn’t the case. Just days after the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and Fisher-Price issued this warning, further analysis found some of the 32 infant deaths occurred even when the child was buckled in correctly and of appropriate age. It was only then that the CPSC issued a complete recall for the Rock ‘N Plays and then the Kids II Rocking sleeper, another product linked to a number of deaths.
After hearing this, Elon’s child care facility immediately removed the inclined sleepers in question. But it got me thinking: what about other daycares?
I’m not just a father — I’m the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG)’s Consumer Watchdog. So like any good Watchdog, I set out to gather more information. We launched a survey to investigate how widespread a problem this was, and within a month, we had an answer: 1 in 10 child care facilities we audited were still using recalled sleepers. Like my son’s daycare in Philadelphia, many daycare owners and teachers were confused by the recall information, or had never heard about the recall in the first place.
The problem wasn’t just relegated to child care facilities, either. I’ve seen email chains and parent forum chats, where people often offered to give away these recalled sleepers for free.
This confusion, and the danger that goes along with it, shouldn’t happen in modern society. It’s easier than ever to disseminate information. We’re inundated by information about products through social media, email, online ads and elsewhere. Companies collect and buy vast amounts of data, based on our online habits and the information we put out into the world, for their targeted marketing campaigns.
And they’re often accurate. Based on the ads I see, they peg me as a dad of a 1 year-old who needs baby utensils and some slightly older toys.
If companies can collect all this information (disturbing in its own right) and use it to sell us products, they should also be able to use it to warn us if we’ve purchased dangerous recalled products. Right now, recall orders usually don’t require this. If you filled out a product registration card for the infant sleepers (something you should always do), you will have gotten a notification. But otherwise, Mattel and the CPSC mostly relied on parents and caretakers to hear about the recall through traditional media.
Companies can and should expand their efforts to protect children with easier access to information. In one afternoon, a U.S. PIRG Education Fund intern found information on tens of thousands of child care facilities through online databases — and emails for more than 10,000 of them. You’d have to imagine that a company with the financial resources of Mattel, or a government agency such as the CPSC, could at the very least do the same. Not only that, they should be required to.
I have a few policy recommendations as well. Moving forward, the CPSC should work to ensure that any recall plan for children’s products, especially those as ubiquitous as sleepers, require that child care facilities and other consumers who purchased the product be notified. Then, they need to develop a consistent and rigorous process to track the success of those efforts in removing the products from homes and day cares.
Parents and caretakers alike want to keep kids safe. But they can only do that if they have the right information in a timely manner. At a time when we have so much information at our fingertips we’re nearly drowning in it, it’s hard to believe we can’t obtain the information we need to keep kids safe.
