Forget Everything You Knew About Baby Safety

If our childhoods were a series of death trap challenges we somehow survived; what's a new parent to do?

There’s this photo of me from when I was a baby where I’m in my crib, peering through its bars, one meaty little hand gripping the top of an orange and yellow crib bumper as I bite the vertical cushion as hard as my toothless gums could. A lot of people who were born before the turn of the millennium have their own version of that photo— baby, tiny little personality showing through in the aggression they showed the soft inserts their mothers tied into their cribs to keep them safe from bumping their heads and hurting themselves.

Except now we know that those little baby bumpers are dangerous and can suffocate babies. Policymakers have dubbed them so not-worth-the-risk that they’re banned in Maryland, Ohio, New York, and Chicago, and every piece of contemporary literature on safe sleep I’ve been exposed to advises against them. Rather than installing bumpers, it would have been safer if our mothers (or fathers, but, let’s be honest– mothers) had just left us to bang into the crib’s slats– provided the slats weren’t so far apart that they were also extremely dangerous).

I was surprised to discover after Josh assembled Juniper’s crib that its sides didn’t drop– nobody told me that drop-side cribs like the kind my brother and sister used in the 80’s and 90’s are actually dangerous, too (to be fair, I wasn’t going around investigating cribs before I needed to acquire one, so there would be no reason for me to know this). That once-ubiquitous piece of nursery furniture was banned in 2011.

If something had gone wrong with our perilous cribs, not to worry: our parents would have driven us to the hospital while one of them held us on their lap or put us in a car seat that was not crash tested, since car seats for infants weren’t required by federal law until 1985 even then looked a little bit like a metal child holder surrounded by an attempt at padding. (Doing some basic research on the origin of my brother’s janky little car seat that lived in the back of our Dodge Omni, which was itself a vehicle that looks like it was one semi truck collision away from being turned into a metal highway crepe.)

I’m not trying to defend old practices or ridicule the new ones; like many new parents, I've grown weary of the defensive Boomer case of “you slept in a rusty cage and we fed you pureed glass and you turned out fine." We know more about parenting now than we did then. It is good that we know to avoid certain obvious dangers. There’s been significantly more research done since the time that baby (me) from the aforementioned crib bumper photo was in her stomach-sleeping, spoon fed baby pureed food from a jar, riding on a parent’s lap in the front seat heyday, and thus parents of today are working with more and better information than our parents were. But parsing good and bad information can get time consuming.

I went down this horrifying k-hole of new mom anxiety fodder this week because we’re coming up on a couple of baby milestones: Juniper is starting to act like she’s thinking about crawling– and by that, I mean she’s sitting up by holding onto her ankles and gradually leaning forward until she reaches the slow face plant event horizon (I always stop her before she actually face plants, natch.) She's also lying on her stomach and holding her head and feet off the ground, occasionally staring at something she wants directly in front of her as she slowly moves backwards, away from the thing she wants. She doesn’t quite understand how her arms fit into the whole process, but we’ll get there.

I wanted to see if there was a way to help my daughter along in her eventual quest to walk, and started looking into baby walkers. I thought I remembered my brother or sister–or maybe some younger cousins?-- walking with the aid of a wheeled walker with a seat in the middle of it. I was surprised to find that they’re banned from sale in Canada. They injure thousands of kids a year, and the AAP has been trying–unsuccessfully– to get them banned from being manufactured and sold in the US for years.

Parents take calculated risks all the time and following the APA’s advice to the letter is impractical for most normal families (Baby sleeps in parents’ room for a year? Exclusive breastfeeding for a year or more?). I’ve mentioned in this newsletter that we have been cosleepers because if we didn’t, we’d be nosleepers. We take risks because there are benefits associated with those risks.

The wheeled walkers I remember relatives scooting around on, according to the AAP, offer no benefits. They don’t help kids learn to walk; they delay walking! Is this common knowledge? First I’m hearing about this! A woman I follow on Instagram with a baby a few months older than mine just posted a photo of her kid in one of those walkers. There’s a whole aisle of them available at my local Target, between bottles and strollers.

“They wouldn’t sell it if it wasn’t safe,” is something my husband said to me in reference to a baby product this week, as though there was a benevolent “they” looking out for the well-being of babies over the possibility of profit. But “they” are selling whatever people will continue buying, until somebody forces them to stop.

Another fun realization about parenting is that there is no “they” safeguarding parents from unsafe products and practices in a reliable sense; for me, staying informed on infant product safety is more a patchwork of keeping up with the mom grouptexts and message board links to three-paragraph writeups which I then have to follow up on to make sure they’re legitimate safety concerns issued by reputable medical or regulatory bodies and not some crunchy anti-vax gateway drug quackery. And I get paid to pay attention to parenting stories and write about the experience of motherhood! If I can already see that it will be cumbersome to keep up with what products for sale actually shouldn’t be for sale, then who outside of the narrowest of circles has the time? It’s just another thing that parents (let's be honest-- usually moms) have to manage, without getting tangled up in the neuroses and superstition that tends to flourish in information vacuums.

So I’m thinking about baby-proofing, to the extent that we can. It seems as though babies are hard-wired to outsmart any attempts their parents make to keep them from hurting themselves; it’s one of our stupidest evolutionary features as a species. But still, I’m going to try to take reasonable precautions to prevent common household injuries to our soon-to-be-mobile baby.

I think I’ve got the basics down– that the most important things a parent can give their child is love, stability, safety, and space to grow into good, responsible adults. The how of that what is a little more complicated, especially considering how many products and practices marketed to parents can put kids in harm’s way, and it’s on me, the parent, to figure out what it is.

(Congratulations are in order, by the way, to all of the former children who made it unmaimed through the Lawn Dart Era.)

Image via Shutterstock