I just wanted to make sure that parents know the basics when it comes to product recall information.  Other than checking here and various other resources for recall information (I’ll list some of these resources at the bottom of the post), one of the best (and most important) ways to make sure you are not using a child product that has been recalled for whatever reason is by REGISTERING the product with the manufacturer.  If you’re like me, you probably have thrown away those warranty or registration cards on various products that you’ve bought in the past.  But when it comes to the safety of our children, we need to be a little more proactive.  Fill out the registration card and send it in right away.  I’ve always ignored them because I didn’t want any more junk mail than I already receive, but unfortunately, this is the only way the manufacturer knows you own their products and they have a responsibility to alert all their customers about any product recalls that may affect their customers.  They can’t let you know about the recall if they don’t know you are a customer.  So it’s very important to fill out those registration cards.

It’s also a good idea to check online about product recalls – because although it’s standard practice for a store to send back any products that are on their shelves that have been recalled, it’s not ALWAYS done.  So it’s good to know ahead of time whether a product has been recalled so you can check the manufacture date to make sure you’re not buying a product that wasn’t properly replaced when it was recalled.

Some other resources for checking on product recalls are listed below:

• Office of Defects Investigation – This is primarily for vehicle recalls (mostly regarding safety restraints) but they do have a section just for child safety restraints and car seats.
• US Consumer Product Safety Commission – This is a great resource for many things regarding safety and product recalls.  They too have a section related to child products – which they separate by ‘toys’ and ‘everything else but toys’
• Child Product Safety – This site was started by the Arkansas government and shows product recalls separated by year or category.
• Baby Center – This is Baby Center’s Product Recall Finder site – which gets the recall information from ODI mentioned above (Office of Defects Investigation).

Many of these sites also have RSS feeds that will update automatically when a product gets recalled, which are very useful.  An RSS Feed is just a file that lists all the posts of a site/blog and gets updated automatically if you subscribe to them (there’s many readers that can access these feeds) – so once you subscribe to one of them, you can just open your reader and it will show all the lastest posts, or in this case, the latest product recalls.  I have one of these feeds showing on this blog – in the right sidebar.  It’s displaying ODI’s child product (not toys) recall feed.  It will get updated anytime they add a product to that list/feed.