Safe and Secure? Your Furniture Should Be

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Screen Shot 2016-02-04 at 9.08.36 AMThe week leading up to the Super Bowl is one of the country’s busiest times for buying TVs. But before you kick back with your new big screen, take a few minutes to make sure that TV is safe for your family. And while you’re at it, make your other furniture safe, too.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission is ramping up its “Anchor It” campaign, focused on making sure furniture and TVs are anchored to a wall to prevent tip-overs on small children. According to the CPSC, a child is injured by falling TVs or furniture every 24 minutes, and a child dies from it every two weeks.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably wear your seatbelt and properly strap your child into an appropriate car seat every time you get in the car. But is anything securing your TV right now? Are your dressers anchored to your walls?

This isn’t the kind of accident anyone is immune from. Even CarseatBlog’s own Alicia, a safety advocate and nurse, had a brush with a dresser tipping over onto her child. Alicia’s son was lucky. A woman in my local SafeKids organization was not. She’s one of the moms featured in this powerful video from CPSC:

Tip-over injuries are so preventable with just a few minutes and the right materials. You can find information on how to secure your furniture and TVs at the CPSC’s page here. Many TVs and pieces of furniture come with anchor kits. If not, or if you have older items to secure, you can find anti-tip kits at home improvement stores or at Amazon.

To paraphrase one of the women in that video, a hole in your wall is far preferable to a hole in your heart.