And when a colicky baby finally falls asleep, I just don’t have the heart to disburse the baby, reach to the back of the neck and yank that bib off. Then what happens, I get that tremendous feeling of guilt when I find the bib covering the baby’s face.

Child safety is a hard issue to compromise. One child injuring from a poor design is one child too many. There are guidelines that do go “to far” and beyond reality but I’m surprised there hasn’t been a better solution to the common bib – well, at least not until I started my product line.

I have a better memory than most of things that happened to me as a child, and I have a clear memory of a winter coat I wore when I was six whose drawstring occassionally got caught on the playground slide. My solution to the problem was to climb up the few inches to the top of the slide by grabbing the edges and detaching the string from the gap it got hung up on. It wasn’t particularly traumatic, the reason that I remember it is that it pulled the drawstring partially out of the casing and my grandmother taught me how to work the drawstring back through to fix it.

However, an adult woman of my aquaintance lost a leg a few years ago when a bag she was carrying caught in a train door. She was dragged by the train because she was wearing a heavy winter coat and wasn’t able to disentangle herself from the bag. But I’m not ready to declare drawstrings and shoulder bags “unsafe at any speed.”

The truth is that a kid is much more likely to die from falling off a piece of playground equipment than from getting caught on it. Back when I was a kid our playground equipment was directly on a paved surface, but that doesn’t mean I’m against having soft surfaces under playground equipment today. Safety standards change over time.

I wonder what the CPSC would make of the “leading strings” that were commonly attached to 18th century toddler’s clothing to make them easy to hang on to while they were learning to walk? I bet kids in leading strings didn’t get the now common dislocated elbow injury which is caused when a small child falls while an adult is holding his/her hand. But today there are probably more dangerous things to get caught in then there were in the 18th century.

P.S. Here’s an interesting detailed report about a slide-strangling: http://www.triodyne.com/SAFETY~1/SB_V19N3.PDF
Looks like allowing two-year-old involved to play on a slide without supervision was also an element of the accident.

But cones and barricades are one thing and excess regulations that end up not improving things and making them crappy is another.

I can see never having baby clothes with drawstrings but would be fine for older kids, maybe.

In a way, it seems to me that DEs follow a form of Agile methodology (software development!) which focuses on frequent face to face communication within the team, trusting skilled individuals to provide quality work, frequent iteration and development, and welcoming changes that add value. Excess legislation and protection of the *helpless* consumer (who could actually just chose not to purchase the item)seems silly to me. If you expect someone (the consumer) to be inadequate and incapable of making a reasonable decision … in the end they will be.