Parents begin throwing out children’s cheap jewelry

Associated Press

Kathy Sanders waited until her 4-year-old daughter, Emma, was distracted with a video game Thursday. Then she made her move.

With the excuse that she needed to collect the laundry, Sanders sneaked upstairs and scooped up the toy jewelry from the Disney princess set Emma had received for Christmas. Then she tossed it in the trash.

There have been lead scares, baby- bottle scares and Christmas-toy scares. And now, Sanders and other parents have something else to worry about: cadmium, which the nation’s product-safety chief warned this week could be present in cheap jewelry.

The warning came after The Associated Press reported that tests had showed high levels of cadmium in children’s jewelry imported from China. Like lead, cadmium can hinder brain development in children and even cause cancer, according to recent research.

It wasn’t clear if Emma’s new trinkets were dangerous, but Sanders, of Corfu, N.Y., wasn’t taking any chances. And she wasn’t the only parent rummaging through the toy box this week.

In Chicago, Jennifer Seaver was planning to throw away all the cheap jewelry her 7-year-old, Julia, had amassed from goodie bags or gifts.

“I’m definitely only going to let her wear jewelry that’s gold or silver that I buy her,” said Seaver, 38, who was shopping on Michigan Avenue. “I figure it’s an easy thing to avoid,” she said of the cadmium. “Those are all cheap things that can easily be thrown away.”

Seaver said she felt relatively calm about the warning from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s chairman, Inez Tenenbaum — perhaps because there had been so many scares in recent years. “Maybe because it happens so frequently, it makes me immune,” she said.

Others were angrier.

“When is America going to learn?” asked Theresa Savoie, a 53-year-old grandmother strolling through a mall in Gretna, La., with her 16-month-old grandson. “Everything you buy says ‘Made in China,’ and every time you turn around, there’s another government warning.”

Many were concerned about the lack of specifics in the government’s guidance.

“I wish somebody would give me a little bit more detail as to what’s bad and what’s not, so we don’t overreact,” said Cynthia Dermody of Pleasantville, N.Y., a mother of two and an editor of the popular parenting Web site cafemom.com.

The CPSC said its main concern is young children biting, sucking on or even swallowing the trinkets.