Count all the ways you can kill your children....

[shawnndan.livejournal.com]

 

Let's see, strangled in the playpen between the support bars, or perhaps dain bramaged from falling from the high chair?
Maybe Mom left the stroller on an incline (no lockable wheels!). The potty trainer looks to be the least deadly, and you could 
probably kill yourself in that somehow. (shudders).

Comments

[gairid.livejournal.com]

Being the age I am now, I remember my mom having a stroller very similar to that one for my younger brothers and my sister, as well as a similar playpen. The stroller did have locking wheels, at least. Still, they do look pretty dangerous, but we all somehow survived our childhoods!

[garden_hoe21]

Then again, the people who didn't aren't here to refute that...

[7ofclubs.livejournal.com]

Actually, this playpen is the "safe" version, compared to the previous generation's, which simply had wooden "bars", much unsafer (though somehow a whole generation of Baby Boomers managed to grow up just fine from them).

[janenx01.livejournal.com]

Hey, I have a baby crate just like yours!

When I was a baby, my mother just wrapped me in a blanket and stuck me in the back window of their VW bug. When she eventually got a "carseat" (and I use the term loosely), she said they were designed more to keep a kid contained and out of your hair than for safety. If we'd actually had an accident when I was in the thing, I would have been thrown out or paralyzed or snapped in half or something.

[kartusch.livejournal.com]

my mom kept me in a "carseat" as a baby. It was a collapsible, blue vinyl bassinet thing that you laid baby in all wrapped up, that could be strapped into the car. So much more a place to lay baby so it doesn't roll away than a safety device. I hear tell once I was about a year I got put in a new more new-fangled carseat with straps and all that bears a passing resemblance to modern ones.

[gairid.livejournal.com]

I remember those carseats. They just sort of hung over the backrest and they often had a little steering wheel with a horn. I remember my brother sitting in one and sterring the hell out of it. Also, there are pictures of my sister in the wooden-bar type playpen. That would have been in 1964.

It *is* pretty amazing we didn't all die!

[kartusch.livejournal.com]

I have a picture of my mom as a baby in one of those wooden playpens. The concept that they pen must have mostly came from the fact that the babies knew not to leave them since the bars were like 8 inches apart. (ok maybe I am exaggerating... but not by much looking at the picture I imagine many a baby breaking free and only the big heads getting caught. )

[7ofclubs.livejournal.com]

They were more like 4 inches apart--I recently helped a friend clean out his parents' attic, and HIS old playpen was still up there (he is almost 60!) from the 1950s! It was actually all there, but nobody would ever use one like that today.

[thatjamiegirl.livejournal.com]

My mom and her siblings had those high chairs and play pens, none of them got hurt, and I'm quite sure that stuff was used for me when I came along, too. Me just fine, me think, I is? Maybe they're not telling me something.

Does that potty seat have a strap, though??

[bbcaddict.livejournal.com]

I'd take one of those over the monster truck looking hunks of plastic parents seem to think they have the right to push into your shins nowadays.

[7ofclubs.livejournal.com]

No shit--they aren't used for transporting children, they're used for battering rams!

[kdiddy.livejournal.com]

I had a very similar playpen and one of those seat things that I believe sometimes doubled as my "carseat." my parents have a picture of me at about 4 months old sitting in the seat...that they had perched at the edge of the kitchen counter. my parents were idiots.

[kartusch.livejournal.com]

You know as some one that had babies in extremely small apartments I hate that folding high chairs went out of fashion. So I bought a vintage seat much like that and added my own restraint system to it... I rarely used it. When you have a small place only use high-chair when needed so baby is very rarely left alone in it and babies that do not sit up well are never in it which in mostly the falling trouble. That isn't meant to sound as judgmental as it seems to sound, I just think we are way over afraid of everything anymore. Babies fall and the vast majority of the time they are just fine.

[shawnndan.livejournal.com]

I have to admit, there is some truth to the statement that "we are way over afraid of everything anymore." Having said that, you have to admit that in comparison these are like the difference between an open wheel Model T and a modern car. As a child, I didn't have most of these things myself. Growing up in the 1970's, my "playpen" was a blanket on the bed surrounded by pillows, my dad's lap was my 'jumper', the potty chair was wooden and had arms, and I can remember at age 3 or 4 rambling around on the front seat and floorboard of my dad's '66 Chevy Impala, completely unrestrained and feeling invincible. I think I was in more danger from the Impala's engine catching fire (which it did twice) than I was of being killed in a crash.

[garden_hoe21]

I think the safety precautions started happening about the same time litigation started becoming so popular.

[gutterboylive.livejournal.com]

...and yet, back then, parents didn't routinely 'forget' their children in the back seats of cars.

Stupidity will always find a way.

[amelia-eve.livejournal.com]

I grew up with just about all of these products. What I remember most about them was the very thin layer of padding over the hard fiber-board construction. And the rough edges of the vinyl upholstery where it was gathered at the corners. I didn't manage to contract any really good injuries until I was way too old for this stuff, and I don't remember my brother or sister being harmed either.

And you'll note that not a one of these items is PINK. That girly foo-foo crap was not constantly pushed in those days the way it is now. For one thing, people expected these items to last through their whole family, boys and girls. I remember a lot of white, yellow, and beige.

[gloomchen.livejournal.com]

EVERYTHING KILLS BABIES

I have no idea how I survived with all of that stuff. Or my entire generation. I mean seriously, we must all be superheroes.

[nokomarie.livejournal.com]

That's the infamous drop-sided playpen with netting. As a new mother back in the 80s, I received a publication from the US Consumer Safety Commission that had me measuring every rattle I had gotten in the baby shower.

The thing with the drop-sided mesh playpen was that it could be used with the mesh down on one side. Infants almost from birth can roll down into the pocket created and suffocate.

Let's see. The jumper is in need of a protector over the x-joint to prevent finger entrapment and a wider wheel base.

I don't see a belt on that high chair.

The cradle seat needs a wider base.

And the toilet seat just looks like some sort of a torture device.