Window Blind Cords Still Pose A Deadly Risk To Children

Andrea Sutton, a mom in Firestone, Colo., was trying to put her 3-year-old son Daniel down for a nap, but he wasn’t having it. It was January, too cold for him to burn off much energy outside, and he was restless. She read him some books to settle him down and then left him to fall asleep.

She returned with her 4-year-old daughter a little while later to check on him. They found him hanging from the cord of the window blinds, wearing like a necklace the V-shaped strings above a wooden knob that lowers when the blinds go up.

“When my daughter and I found him, we didn’t know how long he was strangling,” says Sutton, who now, eight years later, lives in Berthoud, Colo. She immediately called 911 and did CPR until the paramedics arrived. “They tried to do as much as they could, but I knew he was gone,” she says. “A mom just knows.”

She does not know exactly what happened. The coroner said Daniel probably wanted to look out the window, and Sutton said he may have pushed his small car-shaped toddler bed slightly closer to the window to reach. The blinds had only a single cord below the wooden knob, and the cord was tied up — both precautions the industry had recommended to reduce risk of strangulation.

But it wasn’t enough, as most industry precautions have been over the years. Now, the industry is about to make their biggest change yet, removing nearly all blinds with cords from the market. But millions will still be hanging on parents’ windows.

“People think it won’t happen to them, that it’s a fluke, they say ‘I watch my kids,’ ” Sutton says. “Nobody watches their kids 24-7.”

Sutton’s story isn’t unusual. In fact, more than 16,000 children in the US were treated in emergency departments for injuries caused by window blinds between 1990 and 2015, an average of almost two children every day, according to a study published Monday in Pediatrics. Although most of those children (93 percent) weren’t seriously injured, 271 children died during that time.

Almost half of injuries overall involved being hit by the blinds, usually causing only cuts or bruises, but more than 1 in 8 children (12 percent) became entangled in blinds’ cords. Two thirds of children who became entangled in the cords died, averaging nearly one child every month for the past 26 years. And those are just the injuries and deaths recorded in the two databases used for the study.

The researchers analyzed all injuries between 1990-2015 to children under 6 years old reported in the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) and the In-Depth Investigation databases maintained by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). But these databases underestimate actual injuries, since they only include children treated in emergency rooms, explains Dr. Gary Smith, a study coauthor and director for the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

“Injuries treated in emergency departments do not represent the complete spectrum of injuries associated with blinds,” Smith wrote via email. Some injured children stay home or see a non-emergency medical professional. “In particular,” Smith added, “the NEISS may not capture fatal injuries that are not transported to the emergency department or occur after inpatient admission.”

Like 3-year-old Daniel, most of the children who die are toddlers, and 43 percent were last seen asleep or going to sleep. Another third were playing, and 14 percent were watching TV.

“Most of these accidents happen during nap time or when they’re supposed to be sleeping, and no one watches their child while they’re sleeping,” Sutton says. “It only takes under a minute for a child to lose consciousness because their air supply is cut off.”

And that makes strangling silent, like drowning.

“You can’t make a lot of noise because you can’t breathe,” Sutton says. “You can’t yell out.”