Toys, Lead and Buttons
The most significant issue regarding children today is the possibility of children choking on small toy pieces and lead paint on toys. Parents are eager to start their children on literary and artistic careers early in life. There seems to be no problem with giving a 2 year old a box of colored pencils with very sharp points and a coloring book. Where is the logic, therefore, when a blunt stick that may be used in packaging, packaging that gets thrown away when the toy is opened, is cause for massive and expensive and pointless ‘recalls’.
We see toddlers in diapers on the beach playing in the sand which contains billions of small stones and shells but no one seems concerned that they are a choking threat. What about our pennies and dimes? Does this too require a US Government recall? There are all sorts of questions raised about specific holiday plants at this time of year and their toxicity but parents seem unconcerned about the house plants that are in the home all year or the outside plants where their children play. Why does it seem that is there no sensible way to deal with our everyday environment? Why do some parents initiate lawsuits because of a button that can be pulled from a doll yet are totally unconcerned about the pebbles in their child’s sandbox? I’m afraid this has nothing to do with protecting children but it has everything to do with greed and the possibility of financial gain from a lawsuit.
Can we believe that manufacturers have just recently started to use lead paint on toys or had they always done so.?
Think about this a bit.
I am quite certain that the hundreds of millions of us adults have played with toys with as much, and certainly more, lead in painted toys than exists today. All toys were painted before plastic was invented. Many toys themselves were made of lead. I, and all the boys I knew, played with lead soldiers and lead cars.
If one considers the technological, scientific, literary and art achievements that have been made in the last 70 years it is obvious that our minds have not been hampered by that lead.
We are only aware of its presence today because we are testing for it.
If a child becomes unruly in a classroom one of the first things that is suggested is testing for chemicals in the blood, specifically for lead. How about the rest of the children in that classroom? They may have as much or more lead in their bodies but they act ‘normally’ so they are not tested.
If one considers the extreme cases of the lead miners or the battery workers and how much exposure it takes to create biological problems and analyzes the duration of exposure and quantity of lead involved then a reasonable attitude might evolve.
We ingest a lot of unsavory material that really has little or no effect on us. If anyone were to look at a drop of water with a microscope from their favorite lake or river where they swim or boat they would never go into that water again.
We are comfortable with our food, water and objects that we handle as long as we don’t know the specifics.
We have out-performed and outlived our great grandparents who played with stones, and sand and unpainted wooden toys.
In spite of our sharp sticks, marbles, buttons, dangling strings and lead paint, we have lived long enough to become a burden to our Social Security System to an extent never anticipated by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In short, if you look hard enough for problems you will find them whether it’s toys, water, food or your neighbor.
It’s true my dear. My mum told me there wasn’t so many cases of food poisoning in her time. Asians have been eating rice and leftovers for centuries, we didn’t die from some bacteria. I’m still alive and kicking. Guess most of us are just getting weaker??