7 Tips to Buy Safe Toys This Holiday Season

As parents and family members shop for their little loved ones this holiday season, here are some safety tips from Jahn Avarello, MD, director of pediatric emergency medicine at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New Hyde Park, that they should keep in mind to ensure they are buying safe toys.

• “Make sure with a toy that it’s age appropriate. Make sure that the toy is going to engage interest from the child too, so don’t buy something that’s for a 15-year-old for a 4-year-old and expect that they’re going to have a good time with it…. If you have a toy that has real thin plastic and little parts that come off, such as a bow on a doll’s head, that would not be appropriate for a younger child because they can pull it off and it can become an airway risk.”
• “Read the labels; make sure that there is nothing on there that’s toxic. And most of the toys will tell you non-toxic on the label.”
• “For young kids, you should not be getting anything with plugs.”
• “There are some magnet toys out there that are very dangerous. I would avoid any magnet toys, especially for the younger kids… Now, if you ingest two [magnets], especially at separate times, then you can actually, if you can picture the intestine as a long piece of hollow spaghetti, and then the two magnets are in the hollow spaghetti, your intestines, they’ll come together and the magnets now pinch the intestines and they cause a hole. And that’ll cause a blockage and that will cause a kid to get very sick very quickly.”
• “[Avoid] anything with a button battery that can be accessed by a child. Most of the toys now will have a panel in there in which you can’t access it, but kids are savvy. If kids are playing iPad games, then I’m sure they can figure out the button battery aspect.”
• “[Avoid] anything with a long string. If you have something on there that has a long string for a child, it poses a choking risk. And there are actually a few toys on the recall list with those strings.”
• “There are a few kits out there, chemistry kits, and I think they’re really great for learning. They’re good to get kids interested in things like chemistry and just building their brain, but on the other side, you may have a 5-year-old whose really interested in it, but these chemicals can cause fires, they can cause burns, they can often cause eye irritation and can be toxic if they’re ingested. So if there are multiple chemicals that are accessed in a kit type of scenario, I wouldn’t get them for a younger kid. And be careful getting it for the older kid that the younger kid is going to want to get involved in it. Those are the toys you’re going to want to keep on the top shelf and away from younger kids.”

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