Babies and Toddlers

I subscribe to the Consumer Product Safety Commission's email alerts for toy and kids' product recalls (I highly recommend it ... got to http://www.cpsc.gov/cpsclist.asp to sign up). Several times a week, I get a notice about a new toy that has been recalled because of unsafe levels of lead. Clearly, until they got found out, producing children's toys with lead paint was China's business-as-usual practice. I shudder to think how many lead-contaminated toys I might have in my house that were never tested by manufacturers.

I wonder, though, how much China's economy will suffer because of these recalls. Maybe I'm not typical, but I've gotten pretty nervous about any product stamped with the words "Made in China," not just stuff I plan to give to my kids.

Earlier this week I went to the store to buy some Halloween cookie cutters. I found a cute set of four colorful cookie cutters for 79 cents each. They were coated with a kind of plastic painted in orange, black, purple and white. I grabbed a couple of other things I needed and got in line. Then as I was standing there, I looked closely at one of the cutters and noticed that the paint was chipping off in several places. I flipped it over and lo, "Made in China."

All four cookie cutters went right back on the shelf.

I'm not making cookies for my family with any product stamped "Made in China," especially a product that is chipping paint before I've even got it home.

This week I'm taking my daughter in for her 15 month appointment. I'm planning to ask about testing her for lead levels, and I also plan to get a lead testing kit to use around my home.

And perhaps most significantly, I'm going to avoid "Made in China" products as much as possible.

I don't know if my little crusade will hurt China's economy, but I hope there are enough other people out there who are planning to do the same. It makes me angry to think that those manufacturers in China care so much about their bottom line that they deliberately put something in a child's product that might cause harm to the kids who play with it, in the interests of saving a few pennies. If I can fight back by stinging China a little bit with my purchasing choices, that's exactly what I'm going to do. I hope others will do the same.