Fisher-Price Recalls Rock ’N Play Sleeper Linked to Infant Deaths

I'll have to research a safe alternative.

Ours had mesh sides which I think would allow breathing even if the baby managed to roll, so I'm not 100% what the dangerous scenario that triggered the recall could be.

We had one child who had acid reflux which doctors suggest putting them on an incline, so we had them sleep in there a few years ago before they could roll.

Hopefully a safer equivalent comes out for future parents.

Yeah I get a feeling people were using these to kind of get out of soothing the baby at night. People were putting their baby in it and like walking away or going back to bed.

The Snoo I think is what most people want, but it's pretty expensive. But you can put the baby down, restrain them properly and then walk away or go to bed.

The American Academy of Pediatrics is clear: the only safe way to sleep is on a baby’s back, with no padding and on a flat surface. This product was never certified for safe sleep; Fisher-Price calls it a ‘sleeper’ instead of a regulated term like bassinet or crib to get around this fact.

At 4 a.m., when the mother checked, all was well, but by 7 a.m., the baby had stopped breathing. Her head was tilted to the side with her chin on her shoulder, compressing her airway. She was pronounced dead at the scene from positional asphyxia, or an inability to breathe caused by her position.

and

In one, on July 25, 2014, a 7-week-old boy was placed in a Rock ’n Play Sleeper while his grandmother was in the room, according to a lawsuit filed against Fisher-Price that was ultimately dismissed. The grandmother, Jan Hinson, of Greenville, S.C., says she looked at her grandson and saw he was “cocked over all the way, and he was blue and lifeless. It was absolutely awful.” She got the infant breathing again, and after a stay in the hospital, he was released.

https://www.consumerreports.org/recalls/fisher-price-rock-n-...

These weren't caused by children placed in the rock n play with extra stuff in it or children that rolled over, it was because an infant sleeping at an angle puts them at risk of dropping their head down and cutting off their airway.

We have a newborn 4 weeks old and received a rock n play as a gift. I put the baby in it next to me while I was working at my desk and I was constantly worried his head was tipped too far forward, it's not surprising to me that accidents like this have happened. When the baby was in the NICU the doctors highlighted to us multiple times that when babies sleep they need to be on a flat firm surface with no other items with them.

In 2010, the CPSC made it their recommendation that only flat angles of less than 5 degrees were safe, but Mattel lobbied to add a separate exception for surfaces of greater than 10 degrees so the rock n play would not violate their standards.

Safety-critical fields like aviation assume that trained, certified pilots are fallible and design their systems to be resilient against human error. This is a product design to be sold to and used by not just laypeople, but laypeople who have probably only gotten four hours of sleep in the last four weeks.

( without first screaming until 4am)