5 Dangerous Products Parents Should Avoid to Keep Their Kids Safe
CR’s safety experts reviewed scores of incident reports and parent reviews
Updates: On Aug. 21, 2025, the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced that it had finalized new safety rules for water beads and infant neck floats. The agency previously announced on Oct. 16, 2024, that it had voted unanimously to adopt its new safety rule for infant support cushions, including loungers.
Most people assume that if something is for sale in the U.S., it must be safe to use. Especially baby gear, when the stakes are so high, right?
The reality is that while many kinds of baby products do have to undergo safety testing before hitting the market, a lot can still slip through the cracks. For instance, new types of products might not yet have mandatory safety standards, and so they hit store shelves before any independent testing has taken place. Or sometimes, even when regulators and safety advocates think a product on the market poses a risk, the manufacturer doesn’t agree to a recall.
So it’s often up to consumers to research product safety themselves, by reading reviews or looking things up on the public database of incidents reported to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the federal agency that oversees thousands of household products. Consumer Reports is also here to help however we can. Here are five products that CR’s safety experts say parents and caregivers should skip when they’re getting geared up for a new baby or when they have children of any age in the home.
Infant 'Loungers'
When you’re taking care of a baby 24/7, you’ll need a few safe, comfortable places to put the baby down every once in a while to give your arms a break. But when it comes time for the baby to nap or sleep overnight, the American Academy of Pediatrics says, they always need to be on a firm, flat surface, with nothing soft around them. That’s why “infant loungers” are dangerous. Many of them have pillowy sides that look like good protection but can actually pose a risk of suffocation.
Source: Cutelions, DockATot, Amazon Source: Cutelions, DockATot, Amazon
Otteroo 'Neck Floats'
Otteroo baby neck floats are inflatable rings that fit around a baby’s neck to hold them afloat in the bathtub or pool, and the company markets them for use on babies as young as two weeks old. The CPSC pointed to dozens of incidents that the agency had received of babies having to be rescued by caregivers after their heads had suddenly slipped through the floats into the water below. Several babies have been sent to the hospital, and one baby drowned and died, according to incident reports in the CPSC’s public database.
Photo: Consumer Reports Photo: Consumer Reports
In the past two years, both the Food and Drug Administration and the CPSC have issued public warnings about baby neck floats generally, with the CPSC calling out this product specifically. But Otteroo has so far refused to cooperate on a voluntary recall and is still selling them online. The company maintains that they are safe as long as parents stay within arm’s reach of their babies, as the instructions say they always should.
“You cannot rely on warnings,” says Oriene Shin, policy counsel for CR. “Warnings don’t absolve a company of the requirement to create a safe product. These products are not safe, cannot be made safe with warnings, and should not exist. Especially for newborns.”
Weighted Baby Blankets, Swaddles, and Sleep Sacks
Weighted blankets are a popular trend for adults, but medical experts say that weighted baby blankets, swaddles, and sleep sacks should never be used on a baby. Even “gentle pressure” on a baby’s chest or body can potentially inhibit breathing and make it difficult to get out of unsafe sleeping positions that they find themselves in, pediatricians told CR.
Source: Dreamland, Nested Bean Source: Dreamland, Nested Bean
There are two main manufacturers of weighted sleep products for babies—Nested Bean and Dreamland Baby—and both told CR that a lack of reported injuries related to their increasingly popular products shows that they are safe. But the CPSC has said that there is at least one infant death that has been linked to a weighted product, and the American Academy of Pediatrics said in a letter to regulators that they shouldn’t wait until tragedy strikes again to act against this dangerous category of product.
“Waiting for the emergence of confirmatory data about these concerns while these products proliferate is an unacceptable outcome when each of those data points will be a family whose lives are forever marked by unfathomable tragedy of their infant dying from a sleep-related death,” the letter read.
In April 2024, Amazon and Target told CR that they were amending their policies to no longer allow sales of weighted infant sleep products on their sites or store shelves, citing safety concerns. Baby registry website Babylist stopped selling them as well. However, the products have not been recalled, and they remain available for sale elsewhere. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., has also called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Dreamland Baby and Nested Bean for potentially engaging in deceptive advertising when they depict their weighted products as safe for infants, citing Consumer Reports’ reporting in his letter to the FTC chair.
Water Beads
Orbeez is probably the most recognizable brand of “water beads,” but it’s a big market with a lot of companies selling expandable gel balls for “sensory play.” Kids just add water to the little tiny seeds and watch them grow to many times their original size. But the problem with that super-expansion is that if the beads accidentally end up inside a human (or an animal) body, they can expand and cause life-threatening injury, like bowel obstruction or, if inhaled, lung damage. (Read CR’s investigation into the dangers posed by water beads.)
Photo: Adobe Stock Photo: Adobe Stock
The warning labels that are common to many water bead packages (like “nontoxic” or “choking hazard”) fail to warn parents about the gravity of the risk they pose if ingested or inhaled—especially to small babies, who explore the world around them by putting things in their mouths.
“The risks can’t be ignored,” says Michael Alfonzo, MD, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at NewYork-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital and Weill Cornell Medicine. “If you have a child under the age of 3, I wouldn’t have them in my home.”
Orbeez’s parent company, Spin Master, told CR that it rigorously tests its products for safety, but that there are “many copycat products on the market that do not consistently meet safety requirements, particularly as it relates to size.” When asked about the safety of water beads as a category, the Toy Association, an industry group, said that the toy versions of water beads are all required to be tested for safety and labeled as not appropriate for children under 3, but that parents and caregivers should always take precautions with them.
CR’s safety advocates called on the CPSC to ban water beads from being sold as toys or similar children’s products, and support the Ban Water Beads Act in Congress. They also urged retailers and online platforms to stop selling water beads immediately, and contact previous buyers to warn them about the risks. Following CR’s reporting and advocacy, many retailers did stop selling water beads that were marketed as toys, including AliBaba, Amazon, Etsy, Michael’s, Target, and Walmart.
CR recommends that parents and caregivers keep water beads out of the home if children or cognitively impaired adults are always present.
High-Powered Magnet Sets
Tiny, strong magnet sets typically have been marketed more to adults than to children—they’ve been sold as fidgety desk toys, or stress relievers. But, unfortunately, kids find them irresistible, too.
If accidentally ingested, these high-powered magnets can find each other and bind together inside the body, causing potentially life-threatening internal injury. They are much stronger than the typical refrigerator magnet—as many as 30 times stronger—and what makes them so fun to play with is also what makes them so dangerous. Over the years, children have died from ingesting magnets, and thousands more children have gone to the hospital. Many require emergency endoscopies and abdominal surgeries to find and remove the magnets from wherever they are stuck.
Photo: Getty Images Photo: Getty Images
Unlike water beads, this isn’t a risk that’s much worse with babies or toddlers, either. The CPSC has received multiple incident reports involving teenagers who were injured after using the magnets to pretend they had nose or tongue piercings.
Several brands of small, high-powered magnet sets have been recalled, and a new CPSC safety standard took effect in October 2022, but some of the magnet sets are still on the market. The CPSC is working on enforcing its new magnet regulation, but in the meantime, CR safety advocates advise against buying them—and they say that if you already have them in your home, you should simply (safely) throw them away.
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