WARNING: Do Not Put Bag Over Face; You Will Die

You go food shopping or on some other miscellaneous shopping excursion and come home with a bevy of products in those nifty convenient plastic bags.

Sure, you could be on that "I'm GREEN" bandwagon and use those cloth re-usable bags. Seriously? I re-use those plastic ones. Trash can liners, left-over lunch carriers, etc. I am green too....they're usually recycled...and FREE.

Any who.

Those bags have this warning on them, because clearly some parents didn't put 2+2 together and realize that kids with plastic on their heads could choke on their own. "WARNING: Do not put bag over face, you will die"
I get it, it makes sense.

What does NOT make sense to me however, knowing full well the suffocation hazard of covering a small child with plastic will likely cause impending doom, is those ridiculous baby carriage covers that envelope your child....ENTIRELY IN PLASTIC.


Is it me?

I know, I know, it's raining out. You don't want your precious spawn to melt. You know what smart parents do when it's raining outside??

They stay in the house.

They do not put their kids into a carriage and then Saran Wrap them into it with the hopes that maybe perhaps they won't get wet. It’s freaking water. From the sky. A natural occurance.

Because clearly staying dry is far more important that keeping your child alive. Idiots.

I drove to grab some lunch today and saw just a contraption. A portly mother pushing her plastic-packaged off-spring down the street. And I thought to myself, the things they have for babies is ridiculous.

My cousin had a baby 2 days ago, so I feel the relevance of a baby paraphernalia rant is warranted, seeing as I am going to be hitting Babies R Us to purchase a "Welcome to the World" gift for the newest member of my family.

However, I look back on stories from when I was a baby, hell even remembering when my son was one just 6 years ago, and I think the over paranoia and laziness of parents is astonishing.

When I was a kid, I think the extent of child safety precautions boiled down to a plastic outlet cover and moving your breakables up a shelf.

Car seats were essentially useless. No mass amount of padding or headrests for safety. Oh no. It was like a sled turned right side up and strapped in. No slide out cup-holders and Eddie Bauer branding.



My parents didn't need to lock the fridge or the toilet. They didn't need a tent to keep us from climbing out of our cribs. (Although out of all the neo-safety products, I DID have this one for Dylan as a baby and it was a wonderful and torturous device to lock them in at night...also doubled as a great tool for punishment...they should make them for adults.) I mean sure, the cabinets under the sink where the poisons were was locked somehow, but everything else was fair game.

We didn't have a special soft form-fitted thingy to go in a shopping carriage in order to stay sanitary. We sat in that bitch freestyle and liked it. We got germy. We didn't attack ourselves with hand-sanitizer and antibacterial crap like an old man with OCD. And oddly, we didn't get sick very often.

I think that the over abundance of child safety precautions and gizmos and gadgets is absurd. That again, this "Time-Out" generation is going to be screwed.

We didn't have any of that. Nor did our parents and theirs before them. I wonder when we became so paranoid. Too paranoid to not hover over our children, too paranoid to not put a pretty little bubble over anything that could physically or emotionally "harm" our children, too paranoid for real discipline.

I find it ironic that the generations that didn't have these so called advances in safety, the generations whose parents beat the snot out of them if they screwed up, are the ones who weren't shooting up their high schools. Funny.

Maybe it was the lack of warning on the plastic bags.