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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

You missed the point.

Almost everyone lets toddlers play with toys that say "Choking hazard: Ages 3+", because that warning comes on basically all toys, including stuff like Jenga blocks, sidewalk chalk, ....

Any parent who disallows their child from playing with any “age 3+” labeled toys/objects before age 3 is going to be significantly delaying their child’s development of basic fine motor skills.

Some parents might become desensitized to the labels since the warning is used over-broadly, and might not realize that tiny magnets are something you have to be extra careful about, because the effects of swallowing magnets are generally worse than the effects of swallowing some little piece of plastic.

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No, you've completely missed the point. Whether or not "almost nobody heeds the warnings" is true or not is irrelevant because regardless of whether or not they're reading the labels their observed behavior is that most of them do not give toys like this to young kids.

You don't need to read a warning label, or even know of the special medical threat of swallowed magnets to think this 'toy' was a bad idea for a small child. Would you give a toddler a box of completely inert culinary grade stainless steel BBs to play with? Of course you wouldn't. Your kid could eat them and shit them out to his hearts content, but he still might chip a tooth trying to bite them and even if he were toothless why would you give a kid even harmless metal balls? They're just going to wind up stuck in his nose or something. Nobody gives inert glass marbles this small to young kids. It's a bad idea all around even discounting the unique threat magnets pose. Which is probably why there are very few confirmed cases of kids actually eating these magnets.

> box of completely inert culinary grade stainless steel BBs to play with?

If you did, it wouldn’t really be a big deal. Toddlers daily encounter playgrounds full of tiny rocks, wood chips, etc. which are more dangerous than the BBs. Swallowing BBs is comparable to swallowing cherry pits. It’s very unlikely to be life threatening. Typically there is no noticeable effect, or there might be some minor discomfort as it works through the digestive system.

I would be entirely comfortable letting my under 2 year old play with BB-sized steel or glass balls, under loose adult supervision, from a safety perspective (from a that’s-going-to-be-a-mess perspective I can well imagine avoiding giving kids BBs). More realistically, I can imagine letting an older child play with a box of BBs without worrying that a toddler would eat a few and die. Larger marbles are more of a choking hazard, and require closer adult supervision.

But swallowing magnets is much more dangerous.

> I would be entirely comfortable letting my under 2 year old play with BB-sized steel or glass balls, under loose adult supervision, from a safety perspective

You'll be spending time in ED having them removed from the nose or ear.

Fair enough. Thankfully we haven’t yet had any pebbles shoved in nose or ear, and we play with those on a regular basis. I feel like little objects making it into the mouth is significantly more common.

It’s very easy to overlook the risk of these magnets pinching the intestines.

Similarly children often swallow batteries and no one thinks it that’s a good thing but many people do not realize that the child can die from it and it should be treated as an emergency.

Did you miss the part where basically nobody would give their child a box full of non-magnetic BBs anyway? Even if you had no clue magnets were dangerous, if you thought they were the safety equivalent of stainless steel BBs, you wouldn't give a toddler a box of them.

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