fisher price doesn't hurt kids; kids hurt kids

so fisher price is recalling 87 hundred thousand million gajillion toys because of safety concerns. as a mom, this piqued my concern, so i figured i'd better pay close attention to the toys being recalled and the circumstances surrounding such a massive recall.

and here's where we get all 2010: the toys are being pulled because kids playing on them could get hurt. huh? can't kids playing on pretty much anything get hurt? don't kids get hurt fairly regularly even without toys? not that i advocate being a neglectful parent, but i think kids getting hurt is part and parcel of being a kid. i remember scrapes and cuts and gashes and bruises and that is without any more than a bicycle, a swingset, and some grass. my own kids, no matter how much i hover, stubbornly insist on falling down, tipping over, and tripping on patterns in carpeting. although we've managed to avoid stitches (hurray for crazy glue!), we've seen other (equally careful) families whose children sport black eyes, busted lips, and nearly broken noses. one of my daughters has a scar through her eyebrow from a plastic bucket like you put sand in at the beach. one of my sons has a large silvery purple badge of honor on his leg from a broken mason jar that was inside a bag of garbage he was carrying out to the trash cans.

so, what's my point? why would fisher price be coerced into a major recall because kids are kids??? i know that parents are overly paranoid about every little thing these days. women have been driven so far away from their natural instincts that they now obsess over everything from BPA in water bottles to chemicals in flame retardant pajamas to kids needing full safety gear to so much as break a sweat.

which reminds me- the other day my daughter was riding her new roller skates. actually, she was kind of clomping her feet in big ungainly steps in the kind of toddler roller skates that clamp on over shooes and have four wheels for stability and an automatic brake preventing the wheels from going backward. so a well meaning friend says to me, "um, don't you think she should be wearing a helmet?" and i told her my helmet rule: unless the child can move faster on a toy than she could walk unassisted i really don't think she needs a helmet. so, this friend was inappropriately horrified, which i always chalk up to being way too brainwashed by the wrong people. seriously, should your child wear a helmet if he wants to play tag? or if he is riding a bigwheel? i'm thinking it is more important to concentrate on balance and have better awareness of what is going on in their peripheral vision. i would rather have them see and hear a car that is pulling into a neighbor's driveway that have their heads ensconsed in a foamy dome in case of violent ejection from a tricycle.

but back to the recall. what ever happened to kids being kids? what ever happened to adults using reasonable caution in choosing age-appropriate toys for their own children and just accepting that sometimes, accidents happen. even with all of our good intentions and all the baby-proofing in the universe, sometimes kids will just get hurt. that's why accidents are not called deliberates. sometimes, stuff happens and it's not really anyone's fault. even a super rich toy company which we should apparently all hate on principal because their toys are-gasp- engaging -and they don't give them away to starving AIDS infested orphan kids in subsaharan africa.

or do they???