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Baby Knee Pads And the Rest of the Kiddie Safety-Industrial Complex

      The jazzy strains of CBS's morning show theme song are coming from the living room. “Parents of any age are about to get something a little extra on Mondays,” promises the pleasant host. “This morning we launch our weekly segment called ‘Parental Guidance,’ with a look at some potential dangers found in almost every home.”

      Help for us clueless parents. Hooray.

The show goes live to a Manhattan apartment where James Hirtenstein, a professional babyproofer—yes, it's a real job now—is perched at the top of a steep staircase. He is about to take us on a tour of all the scary parts of this apartment, though I promise you, if you're talking about a duplex in Manhattan, the scariest part is the mortgage. Hirtenstein begins with the stairs, of course, recommending a special kind of gate. Then he goes to the living room, where he recommends little stoppers that keep the doors from shutting all the way, lest they chop off a child's fingers. In the kitchen, he recommends locks on the fridge, lest a child … I'm not quite sure what. Grab a beer? And then he is ready to discuss perhaps the scariest room in the house.

      “Bathroom!” he says. “Extremely dangerous.” He's speaking in staccato now, like a Marine. “Toilet lid locks have to be on every toilet in the house!”

      “Why?” asks the host.

      “Why?” the babyproofer replies. “On average two children a week die in toilets.”

      Two a week? What a horrible way to go!

      Some parents probably didn't even wait for the commercial before sprinting off to call a professional babyproofer. But if they had sprinted off instead to the website run by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission—the federal agency that warns us about everything from recalled baby swings to defective toasters—they could have looked up the actual statistics on death by toilet bowl drowning. And guess what?

      “The typical scenario involves a child under three years old falling head first into the toilet,” reads the agency's home drowning study. “CPSC has received reports of sixteen children under age five who drowned in toilets between 1996 and 1999” (the most recent stats they've compiled).

      Sixteen children over the course of four years. That's four a year. Not two a week.

      Of course, any drowning is a terrible tragedy. And little children do need to be supervised in the bathroom, and never left alone in the tub. It is always a good idea to keep the bathroom door closed for a whole lot of reasons. But the babyproofer's stats were off by a whopping 2600%! Millions of viewers will now be more certain than ever that their children are living in incredible danger.

      Which works very nicely, if you happen to be in the biz of selling kid safety products.

This is not to say that all purveyors of these products are out to hoodwink parents. It's not even to say that there aren't some wonderful products out there that really do make children safer, like car seats, which have lowered the chances of a fatal car injury by over 50%. It's just to say that in order to sell literally $94 billion worth of safety products to parents worldwide and make raising a child an extremely pricey—not to mention nerve-racking—proposition, businesses have to convince parents that minor dangers are major. Which is exactly what has happened.

      Let's take a look at some of the safety products being marketed to parents, starting with baby knee pads.

      Yes, knee pads. Exactly what you'd want your nine-month-old to wear if he were drafted into the NFL. Except that these pads are for crawling.

      “Non-slip silica gel points … can protect the baby's knee from abrasions and prevent the baby from slipping while crawling.” Who doesn't want to prevent slipping and abrasions? Luckily for humanity, those safety features come standard in almost all infants: Dimpled, all-terrain knees covered with the tough, flexi-grip material known as “skin.” And yet there's a whole slew of baby knee pad companies plying their wares on Amazon.

      What kind of fools do they take us for, that we'd be worried about this time-honored stage of babyhood? Yet look what a mom wrote on the One Step Ahead website, under the baby knee pads “product review.”

      “Sometimes my daughter has problems going from carpeting to the wood and marble floors. It helps her with traction to keep from spinning out. Unfortunately, she did not like the feel on her legs and refused to wear them.”

      Score one for the baby! But that mama—she really worries about her daughter “spinning out” like a Buick in a blizzard. Parents writing to other knee pad sites were just as sold.

And I would have left the whole topic right there but literally TODAY, even as I was scrolling through my e-mails to avoid my writing duties, I got THIS PITCH:

       “Learning to successfully crawl and creep are critical milestones for motor development for babies and there's a new line of specially made clothing that gives your child the best advantage!

       “Progressive Crawlers makes organic cotton pants for babies designed by a pediatric physical therapist. The pants have specially placed innovative grip patches …”

      The thing that kills me about a product like this is that it suggests that it is normal to need and heed a “pediatric physical therapist” even if your child has no discernible disabilities. People talk about the “medicalization” of common human predicaments, like shyness, or loneliness. But in these products we see the “physical therapization” of childhood, as if no child is up to snuff—or at least that they will fall behind the kids with superior crawling abilities, perhaps forever.

      Another dumbfounding safety product is the “Thudguard”—a helmet to protect your child while he's engaged in that extreme sport known as toddling.

      “It's about time that someone has addressed the diffuse head injuries that are … on the rise for toddlers learning to walk,” wrote one doctor in an endorsement of the product.

      Oh, really? On the rise? Because suddenly evolution made a U-turn and now children are careening into walls and tables like never before?

And even if babies do bump and bumble, are they really in danger of sustaining serious “head trauma,” as claims the ad for this helmet (that makes your child look like he just had brain surgery)? Let us consult again with calm, wise pediatrician/professor Dr. F. Sessions Cole of Washington University and the St. Louis Children's Hospital.

      “We see 65,000 to 70,000 patients a year,” says Dr. Cole. “How many are associated with significant head trauma that resulted from instability as toddlers learned to walk?”

      None.

      It's enough to make you bang your head against the wall—and wouldn't that be ironic?

      Scroll through Amazon's world of child safety products and you'll find unsurprising stuff like cabinet locks and electrical outlet covers. Ridiculous stuff like spoons that change color if your baby food is “white hot.” (Good if you're cooking rice cereal in a forge.) And then there's a whole display of special car mirrors that allow you to watch your baby in the backseat as you drive. I once saw a dad buying one of these in a store and asked, “What do you need that for?”

      “To see if the baby's OK,” he said.

      I suppose I knew he'd say that. But what we're talking about here is a parent checking up, while driving, on a child who is already strapped snugly into a federally approved car seat. A child strapped in there with a five-point belting system specifically to be “OK.” It's really hard to imagine how the child would not be OK, and besides, if he were fussy, you'd hear him. Then, at a stoplight, you could turn your head and look at him.

      But now, with about ten different special child car mirrors to choose from, it starts to feel as if good parents do have to check on their car seat baby even more often. That means they have to take their eyes off the road. And that's really too bad, because

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