Hint: It's not working.
I've been pawing through Connery's Thomas the Tank Engine paraphernalia, trying to figure out if I've been slowly poisoning his brain by buying him train sets. Like most little kids, Connery loves Thomas, and while we've avoided the madness temptation of getting him the crazy table with the gazillion-dollar setup, piece by piece, he does own several sets of the "Take-Along Thomas" toys. None of them seems to be among the items recalled, but when has that ever stopped a worry-crazed mother?
Besides, I'm sure that the set at Barnes & Noble is the wooden, expensive, recalled kind, and we've wiled away plenty of shopping hours there. Hell, B&N is a bona fide destination, the kind of thing I can use to bribe Connery with if we've got a bunch of not-so-fun errands to do. I have no idea what we'll find the next time we visit there.
The whole thing really pisses me off. The vast majority of toy manufacturers sent their factories off to China years ago. Have you tried to find something Made in the USA in Toys 'R' Us lately? It's much like searching for some mythical creature that you've heard about but never seen. (Santa Claus? I last saw him on Aisle 26, but don't expect him to be there when you get there.) Toys are Made in China, even the expensive ones like the wooden Thomas sets. Made in China means that many of the laws we like to adhere to in the United States--crazy, far-out things like "no lead in paint for kids" and "no deadly chemicals in toothpaste"--are not enforced in any way. I wish I were exaggerating. Here's what the New York Times reported this morning:
China manufactured every one of the 24 kinds of toys recalled for safety reasons in the United States so far this year, including the enormously popular Thomas & Friends wooden train sets, a record that is causing alarm among consumer advocates, parents and regulators...
...Over all, the number of products made in China that are being recalled in the United States by the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission has doubled in the last five years, driving the total number of recalls in the country to 467 last year, an annual record.
It also means that China today is responsible for about 60 percent of all product recalls, compared with 36 percent in 2000.
Add that, if you will, to the pet food recall and poison toothpaste and I would hope that you'd get some consumers wondering what the hell is going on. Of course, it's partially our own fault. We didn't choose to have our manufacturing sector move everything offshore, but we didn't exactly stage boycotts of the products or rush out from the local WalMart and Target to look for artisinal U.S.-made toys. How many of us even bothered to look where a toy came from the last time we shopped? If you're like me, you probably knew it was made overseas but felt like there weren't many other options.
And it's not just the toys. Other items made for kids--like furniture--are also being manufactured without many safety standards in factories far from us. There was a woman in Bozeman who tried to make a go of selling only non-toxic, high-quality furniture for kids. It was beautiful stuff, but not enough people were willing or able to pay the price for the better stuff. She closed after less than a year. Still, the cheaper stuff ought to be safe as well. Just because you can't afford a thousand-dollar crib doesn't mean you love your baby any less.
I don't know what the answer is. I do hope that this will open some eyes as to the trade-off we've all made for cheaper goods. We all love a bargain, but not at the cost of our health.