Over time, they say, parents remember only the good times
and block out the difficult ones.
Why, then, do I have such vivid memories of grocery shopping with young
children?
With an infant in tow, this outing was always a dreaded struggle
for me. One day I’d try carrying
the baby in a front pack, the next a backpack. Maybe shopping using the baby stroller? Each plan I’d devise
seemed workable, but I’d nonetheless leave the grocery store a frazzled mess
with a fraction of my intended purchases.
Back in those days, we had another option: infant CRs had built-in clips so they
could be attached to the seating area of the shopping cart. Aside from posing a fall hazard, I
found that, once attached, I couldn’t get the darn thing back off the cart! My fumbling attempts to remove the
device from the cart were enough to convince me—riding atop a shopping cart
isn’t safe for baby!
Of course, today’s CR manufacturers all agree. These clips are long gone from today’s
models and all say that CRs should never be used in or on shopping carts. So it was certainly sad for me to hear
that a Macon, GA, 3-month-old died just a few months ago when, strapped into
his infant seat, he toppled off a cart in a grocery store parking lot.
This spurred my interest in researching shopping cart
safety, and I was really surprised by what I learned. For instance, did you know that in the U.S. we have a
voluntary standard for shopping cart safety, but that this standard fails to
address basic stability issues?
And that several years ago, the AAP formally
requested, to no avail, that the Consumer Product Safety Commission revise
these standards to help prevent the more than 21,000 annual injuries to
children under five due to shopping cart incidences?
This and other interesting facts about the shopping cart as
an oft-overlooked transportation risk to children can be found in the most
current issue of SRN. This article
has also been posted at www.saferidenews.com. Denise Donaldson
