Anchoring furniture can prevent tragedy

AKRON, Ohio — Alexandra Errington thought her toddler son was in bed.

But then she heard a crash and a scream "like I've never heard him scream before."

The South Akron, Ohio, resident rushed to son Jordan's room to find him on the floor, a dresser and TV set on top of him. The top of the dresser was pinning his legs up to his knees. The TV, which had sat atop the dresser, covered the 21-month-old from his thighs to his neck.

Errington doesn't know whether Jordan got up to change the channel or to get something from one of the dresser drawers. All she knows is that somehow he pulled the whole thing over on top of him.

She's not even sure how he managed it.

"I didn't think he was that strong," she said.

Fortunately, Jordan suffered nothing worse than a bump on his head. He was taken to the emergency room at Akron Children's Hospital and kept overnight, just in case.

Other children aren't so lucky.

Tip-overs of furniture, appliances and TVs send about 22,000 children 8 and younger to emergency rooms in the U.S. every year, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. From 2000 to 2010, 245 children died.

That's a child dying every two weeks.

As families across America gather in front of the new big-screen TVs they found under their Christmas trees, it's a good time to think about making homes safer for the littlest among us.

TVs are a good place to start. They're the biggest source of tip-over injuries — usually head and neck injuries — in children younger than 10, the Center for Injury Research and Policy reports. And of children who died in tip-over accidents, about 70 percent were killed by falling TVs, according to the commission.

Even something as simple as an infant or toddler grabbing onto a TV stand to pull himself up could be disastrous.

Don't think supervision alone is adequate.

"Kids are just looking to be active," said Lisa Pardi, a nurse at Akron Children's Hospital and its injury prevention coordinator. They bump into things, they climb things — and as every parent knows, they do it the moment your attention is diverted.

That's what happened last summer as my family was packing at the end of our beach vacation.