Say what? Girl eats toys...

I heard a news story while driving to work this morning (listening to my favorite station, www.plr.org). It seems an 8 yo girl ate some of her toys. Now the parents are campaigning to recall the toy that she ate. Pardon me, but shouldn’t an 8 year old know better? Personally, I had a 12 year old who swallowed a thumbtack, and it was stupid even though it WAS an accident…but you don’t see me lobbying to recall thumbtacks or keep them in child-proof (not!) containers, or even require an ID check to buy them. No, I just made it very clear to my kids that eating office supplies is a dumb thing to do and the one who swallowed a thumbtack and was nearly airlifted to Seattle Children’s Hospital was never going to live it down! Is there so little personal responsibility-even for your KIDS-that we need to sue or legislate every idiotic decision that one might make?
Do we really think that this is the first time this girl has eaten something that wasn’t food? Can you make the leap from mashed potatoes to Magnetix without some sort of gateway toy? Do you suppose when she was six some kid on the playground offered her a Polly Pocket accessory and from there it just went downhill? Gee, if she hadn’t been stopped I am sure Lincoln Logs would be next…and then our kids would never be able to buy them again, for fear of mass cabin ingestion. And don’t even think about those little army guys. I am sure I could easily swallow an entire Playmobile Confederate General!
I actually played with a very similar toy (the dollar store version, no less!) with a six year old and a two year old a week ago. Neither attempted to put a piece in their mouths, but neither was left alone with the toy, either. I sat with them the whole time, on a blanket so that none of the pieces would roll away unnoticed. It’s remarkable how parental (or parental-ish, as these were not my kids) supervision and training avoids this kind of tragedy.
So, open letter to her parents: You should already be embarrassed…don’t make it worse by making a public spectacle of yourselves and the fact that you couldn’t do your job well enough and are trying to blame someone else.
Oh, and by the way…we found a handheld metal detector (sold by National Geographic) very handy in determining when things had *ahem* passed on through. And the metal detector has no small pieces.