When a child is hurt by a defective toy or nursery product, families are left with fear, confusion, and hard questions. A product marketed for babies, toddlers, or young children should never introduce hidden dangers into the home, the car, the backyard, or the pool.
At Breit Biniazan, we handle product liability cases involving dangerous consumer products, including children's products and toys. Our team investigates how a product failed, whether the company knew about safety concerns, and whether that defect contributed to a child's injuries.
This page is a starting point for families looking for information about defective toys, child product safety issues, and the kinds of products that can cause serious harm. Some cases involve recalled products; others involve products that were never recalled at all. A recall can be powerful evidence, but it is not required to bring a product liability claim.
What Makes a Children's Product Defective?
A children's product is defective when it becomes unreasonably dangerous because of the way it was designed, manufactured, labeled, tested, or marketed. Often, the danger is not obvious until a child is badly hurt.
These cases are typically investigated under theories such as design defect, manufacturing defect, failure to warn, marketing defect, negligence, and breach of warranty.
Across the country, product liability claims are frequently described in broader terms that also include strict liability. Virginia is different. Here, product injury cases are generally pursued through negligence and breach of warranty rather than strict liability in tort. That distinction shapes how a case is built, but the central question stays the same: was the product safe for its intended or reasonably foreseeable use, especially when used by or around children?
Why Child Product Safety Cases Are Different
Children are far more vulnerable than adults. Infants cannot move away from danger. Toddlers explore by touching, chewing, pulling, climbing, and swallowing. Older children often use products exactly as the advertising encourages, even when a hidden design flaw makes that use dangerous.
This is one reason federal regulators apply separate rules to many children's products. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) requires testing and certification for many children's products covered by federal safety rules, and many durable infant and toddler products must meet product-specific standards. A Children's Product Certificate, or CPC, is part of that safety system.
Even with these safeguards, unsafe products still reach families. When they do, the consequences can be devastating.
Types of Defective Children's Products We Investigate
This page covers several major categories of children's products that can lead to serious product liability claims.
Infant Sleep Products
Infant sleep products are among the most sensitive areas in child product safety. Families rely on them during the earliest months of a child's life, when even a small design flaw can turn deadly.
Products in this category include inclined sleepers, bassinets, loungers, swings, cribs, and play yards. The CPSC regulates infant sleep products and maintains separate rules for items such as bassinets, cribs, and play yards; a play yard with a bassinet attachment must satisfy both sets of requirements. Federal law has also tightened in recent years. The Safe Sleep for Babies Act, which took effect in 2022, banned inclined sleepers and crib bumpers after both were linked to infant deaths.
The most common injuries in these cases involve suffocation, positional asphyxia, entrapment, and strangulation. A sleep product can become dangerous because of its angle, side walls, straps, padding, gaps, attachments, stability, or instructions. Danger also arises when marketing suggests a baby can safely sleep in a product that was never designed for routine sleep. Guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics reinforces how narrow the margin for safe infant sleep really is.
Ride-On Toys
Ride-on toys can look harmless, but many rely on batteries, motors, steering components, wheels, and braking systems. When those parts fail, a child can be thrown, pinned, burned, or struck.
This category includes electric ride-on cars, scooters, hoverboards, and wagons. Common defects include brake failure, steering failure, tip-over hazards, and battery fires, along with weak frames, unstable wheel design, failed speed controls, and inadequate warnings about age, terrain, or supervision. A claim may arise when a ride-on toy does not perform the way a parent would reasonably expect, or when it was marketed to children despite a preventable safety risk.
Toys for Babies and Toddlers
Toys for babies and toddlers raise a distinct set of concerns because young children routinely put objects in their mouths. Small parts, magnets, batteries, coatings, and detachable pieces can all cause severe injury.
Common recall and defect issues include choking hazards, magnet ingestion, lead paint, button batteries, sharp edges, and small detachable pieces. Federal rules address several of these risks directly: children's products covered by CPSC rules must pass small-parts testing, and children's surface coatings are held to strict lead limits. Button batteries carry a particular danger, because swallowing one can cause serious internal burns within hours. The National Capital Poison Center treats button battery ingestion as a medical emergency, and Reese's Law now requires stronger safety standards for products that use them.
A toy does not have to look dangerous to cause life-changing harm. Sometimes the defect is hidden inside the product; other times the toy simply breaks apart during ordinary use.
Furniture and Nursery Products
Furniture and nursery products are used constantly, often many times a day, during feeding, diaper changes, play, and sleep. When these products collapse, tip, or trap a child, the injuries can be severe.
This category includes dressers, high chairs, changing tables, activity centers, and booster seats. Common injuries involve tip-overs, falls, entrapment, and collapse, and cases frequently trace back to unstable furniture, failed restraints, broken locking systems, poor assembly design, or misleading instructions. For many durable infant and toddler products, federal rules also require registration information so manufacturers and retailers can reach families about recalls and other safety notices.
Water Products
Water products for infants and young children can be especially dangerous because they may create a false sense of security. A float, bath seat, or pool toy can look protective while still leaving a child exposed to a serious drowning hazard.
This category includes infant floats, pool toys, and baby bath seats. Common problems involve drowning, strap failures, instability, product collapse, and marketing that leads families to overestimate a product's protection. These products become the focus of a claim when their design, warnings, or performance does not match how families are realistically likely to use them.
Car Seats and Related Child Safety Products
A car seat is a critical piece of safety equipment, but defects still happen. A case may involve a failed buckle, a broken shell, loose harness hardware, a defective base, misleading installation instructions, or a related stroller or adapter failure.
Car seat and child restraint recalls are tracked by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), while some related child transport products and adapters appear in CPSC recall notices instead. Families can search current recalls and open safety issues through NHTSA's recall system.
Common Injuries in Defective Toy and Child Product Cases
The injuries in these cases depend on the product and the way it failed. Some of the most serious include brain injuries, broken bones, crush injuries, burns, internal injuries, suffocation and asphyxia, drowning, and, in the most tragic cases, wrongful death.
At Breit Biniazan, we handle product liability cases involving catastrophic injuries caused by dangerous consumer products, including traumatic brain injuries and claims arising from a child's death. Our work usually begins by determining exactly how the product failed and whether that failure was preventable.
Recalled Products and Unsafe Products That Were Never Recalled
Families often start by searching for toys that were recalled after a child was hurt. That is a reasonable first step, but a recall is only part of the picture.
Some dangerous products are recalled quickly. Others remain on the market long after injury reports surface. And in some cases, no recall is ever issued even when a product has a serious defect. You can check whether a product has been recalled through the CPSC recall database, but the absence of a recall does not mean a product was safe. That is why product preservation, recall research, incident history, testing records, and warning labels all matter during an investigation.
How Breit Biniazan May Be Able to Help
A child injury product liability case calls for careful review of the product, the incident, the warnings, the product's history, and the medical evidence. Our team works with engineers, product specialists, and other experts to evaluate how a dangerous consumer product failed.
If your family is dealing with injuries tied to a defective toy, an unsafe crib, a dangerous nursery product, or another child product safety issue, we may be able to help you understand whether the facts point to a product liability claim. When a product defect takes a child's life, we also handle wrongful death claims on behalf of grieving families.
Speak With a Product Liability Child Injury Lawyer
When a child is hurt, families deserve straight answers. You may not yet know whether the problem was a design defect, a manufacturing defect, poor warnings, or something else entirely. What matters first is understanding what happened and preserving the evidence.
Our team at Breit Biniazan handles complex product liability cases involving dangerous consumer products, including those used by children and families. To discuss what happened and learn whether we may be able to help, contact our team for a free consultation.
