Chairs with lead legs for child safety?

by philg

A friend with four children has spent perhaps 400 hours repeating the same order: sit down in your chair. Why? If a child is standing up and grasping the back of the chair there is a risk of tipping over (static rollover).

Now that we find it necessary in our own household to replay these scenes I am wondering if there isn’t a technical solution. Why not kitchen chairs with insanely heavy lead-filled legs? Then the toddlers can do whatever they want on the chairs without risk of toppling. Probably have to combine the lead-filled legs with appropriate geometry (legs contact the ground behind the chair back) to avoid a dynamic rollover.

Has anyone tried this?

Separately, what the most tip-proof chairs that are easily found on the U.S. market right now? Could it be that standard office side chairs (Allsteel Relate Side as an example) are the most stable? The back legs seem to go pretty far back, as though the designers were trying to ensure that the cubicle farm remained a safe zone for all sitting styles.

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24 thoughts on “Chairs with lead legs for child safety?”

  1. Then, when child falls into the chair, said kid could sustain serious injuries due to immovable, hard object not giving way.

  4. Toddlers fall many times a day anyway. They only learn from mistakes. Learning to sit on a chair without falling seems worthwhile to me.

  8. @Fazal,

    Actually my girl managed to put her feet to the side of the table and push with such force that she managed to tip it over backwards. Luckily she was OK, and has never fallen off the chair since :-p

    So certainly not a panacea, but the ability to adjust it every year to make it fit just right is real benefit too.

  9. @Jan, @Fazal. My 19month also does some sort of a barrel roll twist out of the Stokke to get out and try to tip – over I have no idea how.

    @DaveP, @Phil: maybe heavy lead shoes? lower shipping cost, and will keep from standing up – lower center of gravity?

  10. George is correct. The world is not made of nerf. By constantly protecting our children we are robbing them of the time that they can most easily learn about the world.

    My sister’s youngest is the most agile of the three precisley because her mother no longer had the engergy to say “Sit down” four hundred times a day. Consequently, she had a few falls early on and learned where her center of gravity was, where the chair (or high chair) had its center of gravity and how the two interacted.

    I didn’t believe it until I saw her, at two, climb out of a typical restaurant high chair unassisted.

    By trying to find a non-tipping chair you are crippling your child. Leave it to Mindy.

  12. Maybe the solution is not to have children sit high in the air? If “high chairs” weren’t so high then Junior wouldn’t have so far to fall and it would be easier to create a stable base. I assume that high chairs are an idea so stupid that only the mind of Western man could conceive of it and that in other cultures kids sit on the ground or on their mother’s lap or at low tables or something.

  13. Is nobody reading the original posting? It is not about stability when sitting. It is when a child climbs up into the chair, then stands up, then grabs the back of the chair with hands. So there is a big lever arm from the rear chair legs to the top of the chair back.

  14. I did! My solution is to buy a robot whose job is to catch falling toddlers. Child doesn’t grow up fearful and risk-averse, you keep child intact. Win/Win

    Tangentially, do you have a ‘splash-guard’ deployed below the chair? The hours of cleaning that saved us…

  15. We switched out our very-tippable Pantons for the Starck Victoria Ghosts when the little one wouldn’t desist from standing on them. Pretty stable so far, but this little one is not the most rambunctious. Children under the age of two or so can’t connect the pain of a hard landing back to the foolish act of climbing too high (I read this in popular child development book, can’t recall which one) so you are not helping their cognitive development by failing to make your home safe for them.

  16. Thanks, Diana. $1400 for a set of four plastic chairs. That’s painful! Are they super comfortable? Do they not look like something one might purchase at Target?

  18. Try the Stokke “Tripp Trapp” as suggested above. Norwegian quality, looks great, solid wood, and you can reconfigure it as the kids grow. The combined effort of three children has not been able to roll it over the way you describe in our household.

  19. Albert: The Stokke chair doesn’t seem like a viable solution. Our resident toddler likes to climb up on any available chair. So we need chairs for grown-ups to sit in that can’t be knocked over by standing toddlers.

  21. Our Ghost chairs are knockoffs, I think we got them for $150 each. It looks like Target sells something of the sort. But we had them long before the baby. They’re no less comfortable than any other flat hard seat.

    Filling the chair legs with lead sounds like a good idea. I guess you would only want to treat the front legs.

  22. Use benches rather than chairs around the table (and thus remove the lever arm problem by removing the lever). Cushions and boosters can be used to improve comfort and give the toddler the appropriate seated height. Worked well for us.

  23. Also, standard office roller chairs with a 5 pointed base are substantially harder to tip than a 4 legged char. However, rollers would create their own set of hazards.

  24. Besides having multiple Stokke chairs for the children (as almost everybody in Europe – it seems like) we recently bought some cantilever chairs ( http://www.team7.at/en/node/387 ) for the adults. They seem to be quite difficult to tip over. Maybe this type could be an idea?

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