Killer TV's and Responsible Furniture Use

Posted by Chris under Industry News on December 15, 2009

A recent AP news article reported that TV and furniture-related injuries are on the rise. According to the article, about 14,700 furniture-related injuries occurred each year between 1990 and 2007—almost half due to TV sets, the most common article involved in the accidents—and resulted in about 300 deaths.

According to Furniture Today, part of the problem may be that people are moving their old, bulky TV's. But I think the problem is simpler than that. Flat screens are easy to knock over because they don't have the wide bases of the old tube and projection varieties. Plus, they often hang on the wall, which is an added risk, and because of their thin size, people are putting them in more precarious places than they used to. And of course, anyone who has been around children long enough (or remembers being one!) knows that they love to climb on things, and it seems likely to me that a child would try to climb up the front of a flat screen TV since, given enough time, a child will climb on everything they lay eyes on.

This situation reminds me of a time, several years back, when we came into some extremely heavy solid wood furniture (I'm talking several hundred pounds for a chest of drawers). At a show, we were on the brink of selling one of these gargantuan chests to a woman when she told us it was going in her young child's bedroom. We had to refuse the sale, because we knew that if the child tried climbing the chest, it could tip over, quickly rendering the ingredients for a New Guinea meat pie.

What's my point? As much as we try, we don't always make the most responsible decision when it comes to how we use our furniture (and our TV's). To me, the solution seems obvious, but that may be because I own two ferrets whose primary purpose for living is to find new ways to get into my stuff, including my oven, my recliner, and of course my wire-stuffed TV cabinet. I am always developing new ways to keep them out—and just like ferrets, the best way to keep children off of a TV would be to lock it up in a TV cabinet or linen press, which is what plenty of people do, in any case—e.g. our TV cabinet selection.

But you don't have to shop with us to avoid being one of those 14,700 homes per year that discover the perilous ingenuity of children. Televisions, other appliances, and topple-ready furniture—killer or otherwise—should just be kept locked away or out of reach from children, because, as with all things, otherwise they will eventually find a way to make a mess with it.

Tags: falling tv, linen cabinet

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