Ikea Recalls 27 Million Drawers After Toddler Deaths, So Please Anchor All Your Furniture To The Wall

malm-kommode-mit-schubladen__0107512_PE257194_S4Most of us probably have a fair amount of Ikea in our homes, and that’s usually a pretty safe option. But accidents do happen sometimes, and now Ikea has announced a recall of 27 million different sets of drawers after two small children died after pulling them over.

According to CNBC, two children were killed in 2014 when MALM chests of drawers fell on them. Neither of the chests in question was anchored to a wall. Ikea and the Consumer Product Safety Commission say everyone should stop using any of their chests over 23.5 inches tall unless they have been securely anchored to the wall. That applies to 7 million MALM units and 20 million other chests of drawers by Ikea in the U.S.

Ikea is offering free wall-anchoring kits so you can make sure any such furniture is safely attached to the wall. Mounting furniture to the wall is also a very, very good idea, whether or not that furniture is Ikea.

According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, this problem is nowhere near limited to Ikea products. Two children were killed by falling MALM dressers in 2014, but the CPSC says a child is killed every two weeks and injured every 24 minutes by furniture or TVs falling over onto them.

Kids can pull over furniture you would never believe they can move. Just a few weeks ago my mother mentioned that she had not worried about a big, heavy, antique armoire when I was small, because she said she knew it was too heavy for us to pull over. She had no idea that a friend and I had actually pulled it over once by accident by pulling the drawers out to “shield us from the rain” while we were sleeping under it at a sleepover when we were quite small. It definitely came right down on top of us and we caught it and pushed it back up and did not tell anybody, but in retrospect that was lucky. If we hadn’t both been watching at the same time, the falling armoire could easily have injured somebody.

Children can knock over anything, so please anchor all your furniture to the walls. Anchor the Ikea. Anchor the antiques. Anchor everything. Just nail it to the wall, even if it is pretty and you don’t want to damage it and don’t think the kids could pull it over. And that advice goes double for any furniture with a TV or computer on top of it.

(Photo: IKEA)

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