This case was a tragedy. And accidents do happen even to the most careful of people. And, sometimes toddlers do something completely out of the blue and unexpected and a tragedy results. This is not a reason to ban things.
The parents of a Gloucestershire toddler who died after getting her head stuck in window blind cord have started a campaign to have them banned.
Sophia Parslow, aged 17-months, was playing at home in Tirley near Gloucester on 27 June when she became tangled in the looped blind cord.
As I said, a terrible tragedy. Our house has these types of blind cords and no one has trapped themselves in them. And as we don’t have children, I fail to see why we should be adversely affected. If parents are worried, then it is their responsibility, having realised what can happen, to install a different type of blind – not to expect the rest of us to endure a ban becuse of it.
Once again, we have a tragedy being used as an excuse for hard-of-thinking control freakery. So, no, under no circumstances should they be banned. Child safety is a parental responsibility. It’s time people got used to the idea and stopped expecting the state to wield a big stick at the rest of us.
A quicker approach than replacing the blinds is to just cut the cord to remove the loop.
Now don’t go being all sensible…
I saw a similar story about a toddler who suffocated in a Bed settee, I turned to my husband and said how long before there is a move to ban bed settees.
I agree with you accidents happen, tragic as they are but they do happen, and you can never totally protect everyone from every sort of possible accident, not with legislation or rules, the only way is to lock us all in padded rooms in straight jackets and then I bet you someone would still die.
People die it’s a sad fact of nature, and the more you mess with nature the more it throws up things to stop us over running the planet.
Since the invention of things like penicillin and other medications, (which halted the natural culls of humanity) mother nature has had to fight harder and harder , to keep us in check. We live longer but we are definitely more stupid.
I had these blinds in my house I had 3 children and no one died.
You can’t ban everything that may just one day harm someone, just in case, if you did where would you draw the line?
No more cutlery, ban the push bike, I nearly choked on a humbug the other day do we ban these too.
Well, I almost choked when I saw Millipede’s waffle at the Lab conference:-
Surely you’d agree with banning him & his conference as a hazard to public health (and sanity)…
ho ho ho Ted yes okay I will give you that one. 😀
Ban Millipede and his twaddle and his conference chums and their twaddle too.
I too saw this and felt exactly as you; the default setting in our society seems to have become BAN IT! I am also rather unsettled by the fact that this type of thing spills over from the grieving process, something which, in my humble opinion, and speaking as someone who lost a partner in tragic circumstances, should be a specifically private process. The parents of this unfortunate child want, as far as I can tell, to ban blind cords ‘in memory’ of the deceased. I find this really morbid; I don’t know why but I do. A more cynical person might say that placing the blame firmly on the inanimate object abrogates all responsibility towards the person who should have been watching over the child, but not knowing the exact circumstances I wouldn’t like to say whether anything could have been done to prevent the death. Having young children of my own, what I do know is that, at 17 months we still had a playpen in the front room in to which our toddlers were placed whenever we had to leave the room, and that my parents, who have blinds of this type, actually installed the hooks which allow the cords to be held in place out of reach of any childish hands. It is very sad when any child dies, but I can only come back to the old standard – hard cases make bad laws…
very adequately put Starship Fighter, and you are 100% right in what you say.
This isn’t the first such tragedy and it isn’t the first such campaign to have these blinds banned. New parents should really do their homework on child safety because the average house is far from child safe, you need to make a lot of changes.
We have these blinds and one of our cats kept getting herself tangled up in one. Just the one cat and just the one blind in the bedroom but we had to remove the bottom cables to stop it happening. Now they are safe.
They don’t need banning, they just need a bit of thought. Something sadly lacking these days.
And what is it with the current trend to turn private grief into a public campaign?