Effort to Ban Baby Walkers Leads...

Doctors at Harborview Medical Center about two years ago began noticing the number of children admitted to the emergency center with injuries related to baby walkers.

At the burn unit, toddlers showed up with scalds from liquids they were able to reach and tip over. Pediatricians saw babies with cuts and broken bones. Neurosurgeons treated babies with severe head injuries.

Doctors compared notes and found that more than 20 children had been admitted to Harborview within a year with walker-related injuries.

So, when yet another toddler who fell down a flight of stairs in a walker showed up at Harborview with a serious brain injury, Dr. Abe Bergman decided: “Enough is enough.”

Bergman, director of pediatrics at Harborview and founder of the hospital’s Injury Prevention and Research Center, has since been leading a campaign to ban baby walkers nationwide.

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He and other doctors have squared off against the baby-products industry in a battle that has raised questions about product safety, parental duty and consumer rights. Government regulators and parents are caught in the middle.

Many consumer groups and pediatricians say baby walkers--the plastic, wheeled devices that kids sit in and push around with their legs--do nothing for an infant’s development and are nothing more than “injury vehicles.”

“It’s a product created for diversion, but babies would do very well without them,” Bergman said. “There would be no loss if they disappeared.”

Baby-walker manufacturers say the play seats are an entertaining occupier of children as well as parents and are safe when used under parents’ supervision.

“Any product for babies is only as safe as it is used. A baby walker is never meant to be a baby-sitter,” said Debbie Albert, spokeswoman for the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Assn. in Marlton, N.J. The national trade association represents more than 250 companies that manufacture or import baby products.

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In California, a bill to ban the walkers from child-care centers is on Gov. Pete Wilson’s desk. The measure, sponsored by Assemblywoman Jackie Speier (D-Burlingame), passed the Assembly by a vote of 43-27, and the Senate, 21-11. Wilson’s position is unknown.

The state of Washington’s Department of Health banned baby walkers from day-care centers last November, becoming the first state to do so.

But the three-member U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission last spring unanimously rejected a petition to ban baby walkers nationwide as “mechanical hazards.” The petition came from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Consumer Federation of America, the National Safe Kids Campaign and Consumers Union.

The commission voted 2-1 to spend $50,000 to study the issue further.

According to commission data, hospital emergency rooms treated about 27,000 children under 15 months old with walker-related injuries in 1991, the last year for which figures were available. The commission staff estimates one child dies each year from baby-walker injuries.

The figures suggest “there may in fact be some potential hazard associated with the use of baby walkers,” commission Chairwoman Jacqueline Jones-Smith wrote in recommending that more data be gathered.

Bergman, who in the 1960s helped write the legislation that led to the creation of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, called the agency’s rejection of the ban “incompetent and inept.” He said it’s now up to doctors and consumer groups to educate the public about the devices.

“The very nature of the product makes it inherently dangerous. It gives babies mobility sooner than their brains are able to accommodate,” Bergman said. “It’s like giving a 13-year-old the keys to a car, where the kid can reach the gas and brakes but doesn’t have the sense to negotiate in traffic.”

Bergman says walkers are associated with more injuries each year than any other baby product, including strollers, highchairs, playpens and cribs.

The product safety commission and the industry say the proportion of severe injuries related to baby walkers is about the same as for other juvenile products.

“We don’t sell any product that’s not safe,” said Dwight Anderson, vice president of marketing for Graco Children’s Products of Elverson, Pa., the nation’s largest baby-walker manufacturer.

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Baby walkers have been around since Victorian England, but their use in the United States has increased dramatically since the 1940s. About 2 million baby walkers are sold annually in the United States, according to industry figures.

Graco says three out of every four children have used walkers.

Baby walkers don’t actually help infants learn to walk faster--something the industry doesn’t dispute.

“They’ve never, ever been put on the market to teach a child how to walk. They’re purely for entertainment purposes,” said Albert of the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Assn.

Graco, in testimony to the commission, said walkers have several benefits. They allow children to “explore the environment through controlled-safe movement” under a parent’s supervision. They can serve as a feeding chair and entertainment center. And children enjoy them, the company said.

Graco said the injury figures were extrapolations from a small sampling of hospitals and have a wide margin of error. Most injuries that did occur--those related to stairs--could have been prevented had the caretaker properly supervised the child and blocked off the top of stairways with safety gates, as manufacturers’ instructions recommend, the company said.

“It’s the same as if you don’t watch your child near a hot stove. Whether they’re in a walker or not, they can burn themselves if you’re not watching them,” said Chris Moye, product manager for another baby-walker manufacturer, Century Products of Macedonia, Ohio.

“It’s just a tool that needs to be used appropriately, but it does not need to be regulated,” said Beth Rogers, a Phoenix psychotherapist who does marriage and parental counseling.

Others say it’s impossible for even the best parents to keep watch over their children every second of every day.

“I’m not saying we should be regulated out of our brains. I just don’t think it’s a good vehicle,” said Patsi Arkin of Tacoma, Wash., whose 8-month-old daughter suffered a brain injury when she fell down the basement steps in a walker in March, 1991.

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Harborview’s Dr. Vincent Biggs, who helped write the petition to ban baby walkers, noted that Canadian manufacturers a few years ago instituted a voluntary standard requiring that the devices have wheelbases wider than the average doorway. This came after the government considered imposing an outright ban.

Biggs organized a national baby-walker “bash” last June. Harborview and hospitals and pediatricians in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Cincinnati encouraged people to bring in baby walkers to be destroyed.

Bergman says baby walkers, when compared with products such as cigarettes and all-terrain vehicles, are far from public enemy No. 1. He simply wants less business in his emergency room.

“I just think it’s a useless product, and people’s money should be spent on products that entertain kids that aren’t as dangerous to them,” he said.