Living & Family Room
The room the whole family lives in holds the two hazards parents most often miss: the TV that isn't anchored and the remote with a coin battery inside. Both are ten-minute fixes.
The 5-minute fixes
- CPSC's advice: anchor TVs and furniture such as bookcases and dressers securely to the wall. TV, Bookcase & Media-Console Tip-Overs
- Reese's Law (enacted August 16, 2022) led CPSC to adopt a mandatory standard, ANSI/UL 4200A-2023: consumer products with button or coin batteries must have a compartment that opens only with a tool or two independent, simultaneous hand movements, plus warnings, and the batteries must come in child-resistant packaging (packaging cutoff: batteries made or imported after February 12, 2023). Button Batteries in Remotes, Key Fobs & Scales
- CPSC's rule (16 CFR part 1262, effective October 21, 2022) sets a strength (flux index) limit on loose or separable magnets small enough to be swallowed in products designed, marketed or intended for entertainment, jewelry, mental stimulation or stress relief. Magnet Sets & Small Strong Magnets
Start here
Of 217 tip-over deaths CPSC counted from 2013 to July 2023, 47% involved a television and 55% were children aged 1 to 3
U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (incl. SaferProducts.gov), 2024
From 2011 through 2021 CPSC counted 27 deaths and an estimated 54,300 emergency-room-treated injuries tied to swallowed or inserted button and coin batteries
U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (incl. SaferProducts.gov), 2023
CPSC counted about 26,600 emergency-department-treated magnet ingestions (magnets of all types) from 2010 through 2021; about 5,000 (20%) of those patients were hospitalized or transferred
U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (incl. SaferProducts.gov), 2022
Next up
CPSC counts about 1,600 fires, about 70 deaths and about 160 injuries a year from portable heaters, including electric space heaters (annual averages, 2019–2021)
U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (incl. SaferProducts.gov), 2025
A glass-front gas fireplace with no barrier, or one a child can reach while it is on or still cooling; a wood fireplace or stove with no sturdy screen; a gas fireplace whose on-switch a toddler can reach; a fireplace in a rental, grandparent's home or restaurant that nobody has childproofed.
From 1999 to 2008, children under 5 were treated in U.S. emergency departments for stair-related injuries at an average of more than 93,000 a year — about one every six minutes
Nationwide Children's Hospital, Center for Injury Research and Policy, study of stair-related injuries to children under 5 (1999–2008, NEISS data), Pediatrics, April 2012.
When you have a minute
EPA: many VOCs average 2 to 5 times higher indoors than outdoors, and are sometimes up to ten times higher
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2026
Air in this room
What can end up in the air here, from fumes and off-gassing to combustion gases.
Read more about air
Shop safer for this room
Our reviewed picks for the products that live here. Each one links to its category page, not to a store.