Allocation of Responsibility for Child Safety

Abstract

A study was carried out to explore how people allocated responsibility for child safety during the use of or exposure to a product. Thirty-three subjects assigned safety responsibility for twenty-five different products to the manufacturer, the retailer, the parent and the child. The age of the child was varied from 2 to 18, and different combinations of the products were considered for the different ages. Forty percent of the total responsibility for child safety was assigned to the manufacturers of the products and 12 percent was assigned to retailers. These allocations did not vary as a function of the age of the child. Responsibility assigned to the child increased linearly from 6 percent to 40 percent from ages 2 to 18, and the responsibility assigned to parent decreased linearly from 42 percent to 10 percent across the child age categories. At early adolescence, approximately age 13, children begin to be allocated more responsibility for their own safety than their parents. These findings indicate that the tradeoff in a child's responsibility for personal safety moves from the parent to the child with increasing age, while the responsibility assigned to those entities in the chain of product distribution, the manufacturer and the retailer, is stable at about 50 percent.