Kids, toys and product liability


Video Transcript:

Hello, this is Darrell Castle. I’m an attorney licensed to practice law in the state of Tennessee. And on this video
today, I’m going to be talking about injuries to children: injuries caused by toys, children playing with toys and being injured by them because they are defective.

Nothing can replace your child. The loss of your child would be so devastating, certainly money can’t replace it. Money can’t calm the emotional damage that long-term injury to your child would cause; but money is all we have to do these things with. And money can pay your medical bills; money can pay the cost of long-term rehabilitation; money can make your life a little bit easier as you deal with it; and money can help restore a sense of justice that may have been lost.

And it can also help prevent the same accident from happening to other children, because it is a warning to the people who make the toys.

Now let me give you some figures from the US Product Safety Commission:

In the last year 2013, over 200,000 children were injured by toys badly enough to seek care at hospital emergency rooms. Many were injured far worse than that, of course.

In 2007, Mattel, the largest toy maker in the world, recalled about 20 million toys because there were problems that year with toys coming to America from China. Chinese toys had different problems with them.

Fisher-Price recalled 10 million. So that’s about 30 million toys now. The Commission tells us that many of those toys escaped the recall, meaning you have them on your shelves. They’ve already been sold—it’s too late to recall them, because the consumers have them. And so your children are out there playing with them every day.

Many of these toys are fire hazards. They’re not fire retardant. They’re swallowing or choking hazards of some type. Children fall off defective toys—they fall on to certain parts.

Keep in mind while all this is happening that children are really too small to appreciate the risk. They can’t be charged with with negligence. They can’t be negligent—they’re too little to understand what negligence is, or what responsibility is, or anything like that. So it is very, very difficult to be a child when you’re handed a defective toy.

Sometimes children are injured in nursery accidents, toys involving their nursery playground equipment—all those things are injurious to children when they are defective. So keep all those things in mind out there and watch your children. Be careful.

Hello this is Darrell Castle. I’m an attorney licensed to practice law in the state of Tennessee, and if your child has been injured by a defective toy, playing with the toy, I’d sure like to talk with you about it. Give me a call at 901-327-2100 for a free consultation or contact me online.