There's still a lot of judgement involved, and I'm right there with you on children being overprotected in general. But they need to be kept from the unrecoverable mistakes.
One of the interesting things about child proofing your home, if you are of an introspective mindset, is the cataloging of how much danger you causally live with. Or at least, danger from a certain point of view.
[1]: Not 100% perfectly, of course. But there's a qualitative difference between our natural instinct's ability to deal with fall damage, and eating rare earth magnets.
Unless those mistakes involve trampolines[1], because wheeee! Those are cool.
What I'm saying is that there are a lot of dangerous things, but we don't necessarily ban all of them.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/7-terrifying-statistics-tramp...
One thing about trampolines is that AIUI, the vast majority of the danger comes from having multiple people on one at a time. Most of the remaining risk is manageable, more in the normal range of risk, especially with supervision. As evidence, I cite that in lawsuit-crazy USA, there are businesses like Sky Zone that provide trampoline play commercially. That kinda bounds the upper level of risk...
I have some additional considerations that require that for other reasons, but I think I'd still feel the same way even without them.
Great! The whole point is that you are capable to do that, and that the total ban is unreasonable. Nobody is arguing that having small magnets around little kids who don't know better is a good idea.
In the past few weeks I've seen a couple articles about people breaking their spine doing flips into foam pits. I would avoid that particular activity, at least.
I had a trampoline as a kid. It resulted in a few very painful injuries, but it was a lot of fun. My brother broke his arm rolling off of it (nobody was even jumping). You can't fall off the edge at those businesses because the trampolines are built into raised floor areas. That removes one of the larger dangers from the equation.
I think you're kind of appealing to nature in a fallacious way. Hundreds of years ago, these magnets wouldn't exist. So, yes, there's always ways for bad things to happen, but even if that's "natural" and therefore necessary, that's not a reason to retain a particular hazard that has existed for a short period of time historically.
That's a good point. I hope they keep these magnets out of kids' hands. The article ends on a promising note in that regard:
> We remain willing to work with the CPSC to develop the magnet safety standards for which we’ve already petitioned, and which will be more effective and reasonable than the all-ages, nationwide ban we succeeded in vacating in the Tenth Circuit. As we’ve already been doing, Zen Magnets looks forward to providing not just the highest quality magnet spheres on the market, but also the safest in terms of sales methods and warnings. Now that the war on magnets is over, hopefully we can all focus towards the war on magnet misuse.
That said, I do understand they can cause great harm. But what do we lose when we choose to isolate our kids from reality?
That said, I wouldn't ban magnets myself, though I'm against selling then directly to young children.
People have been doing it for generations, so consider it something you'll want to think about for yourself before having children.