The Experts Aren’t Always Right, Part One: Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad, Choking Hazard? (Guest Post)

Two things this week: One, I’m starting a new occasional series, this one called “The Experts Aren’t Always Right.” And two, I’m going to treat you to a guest post as Part One of the series, by my colleague and fellow blogger, Debbie Koenig, who writes the (seriously) delicious blog, Words to Eat By.

The experts are, I believe, trying to get it right, trying to give us life-saving advice. Use car seats, for example. Don’t smoke two packs a day while pregnant. But when the attitude veers from helpful to paternalistic and big-brother-ish, and when following it means erasing your own instincts, I get prickly. And so does Debbie, who has written a hilarious and spot-on piece about how she — a food expert! — has, unbeknownst to her, been bucking received wisdom the whole of her son Harry’s life by feeding him the dreaded choking hazards.

Here’s her piece. Let me know what you think:

Debbie Koenig's son, Harry, aka "Mr. Hot Dog"

Apparently, I’m trying to kill my son.

Or so it would seem, now that the American Academy of Pediatrics has issued a policy statement pointing out the choking hazards lurking in my kitchen—even going so far as to suggest that manufacturers redesign the hot dog (a notion which strikes me as being just short of insanity). When the statement appeared, it included a helpful list of the 10 biggest choking hazards for children under five. This list zoomed all over the momosphere; thanks to parenting blogs, message boards, and social media, I heard about it from at least a dozen sources. Like all my friends with preschoolers, I read the list, felt a chill run down my spine, and promptly began to beat myself up for the countless times we narrowly escaped tragedy.

Let’s see, which of the foods on that list have I given my four-year-old recently?

• Hot dogs: Frankfurters are, without a doubt, Harry’s favorite food. It’s no surprise—my husband and I are raising him to appreciate the finer points of a well-made dog. We actually take road trips just to sample renowned weenies. The AAP recommends cutting them lengthwise until age five, but we stopped doing that months ago.
• Nuts: He doesn’t eat them often, and so far it’s only been as part of a trail mix that features chocolate. (In fact, we’ll only let him have this mix if he eats the nuts—no picking out the chocolate, junior. Further proof I’m trying to kill him.)
• Seeds: That trail mix I mentioned? Sunflower seeds.
• Whole grapes: For the first two years of Harry’s grape-eating career, I meticulously cut them up. Heck, at first I skinned them entirely. But once he became a kid more than a toddler (to my mind, at least), quartered grapes seemed like overkill.
• Raw carrots: Seriously? Baby carrots are among the few vegetables Harry eats willingly. Thanks to his disdain for squishy food, I gave up steaming them when he turned three.
• Popcorn: Harry had his first taste about six months ago. To be honest, I knew this was a choking risk and was pretty terrified—but so many of my friends had been giving it to their tots, I had begun to feel like a wuss. So I sat with him on the sofa and insisted he eat one piece at a time, chewing thoroughly before swallowing. No surprise, that level of vigilance has eased. I don’t leave the room when he’s eating popcorn, but I don’t watch him like a hawk, either.
• Apples: Again, seriously? Harry must wait another year to experience the perfect pleasure of biting into an apple while we cruise the farmer’s market?
• Marshmallows: Yeah. These, we actually used as potty-training incentive. For pee, he’d get one mini-marshmallow. For poop, two. I shudder to think how I risked my son’s life, just so I could say goodbye to changing diapers.
• Hard candy: Only a single transgression here, a few months ago. There was a sucking candy in the goody bag from a schoolmate’s birthday party, and Harry got to it before I did. I blame that kid’s mom.
• Gobs of peanut butter: Harry only gets thin shmears. Phew! At least there’s one item on the list I haven’t used for attempted filicide.

You probably assume I changed my dangerous ways once I read that list. Eh, not so much. According to an analysis performed by Stats.org, a nonprofit research center that interprets statistical mumbo-jumbo, the AAP’s policy statement may be a wee bit inflammatory: “To put the risk into perspective, approximately five children died each year in the U.S. from choking on a hot dog—along with, approximately, 3.3 from candy, 3 from peanuts or other nuts, 2.7 from grapes, 2.3 from other meat, 2 from carrots, 1.7 from popcorn, 1.5 from apples…” And all of these deaths were children younger than three. As creepy as it is to discuss in such terms—and believe me, I know every single one of those children left behind a devastated family—more children Harry’s age die each year in car crashes (or by gunshot) than from choking on the top 10 hazards combined.

Which is not to say I haven’t made adjustments. Reflexively, I check that Harry’s peanuts are halved before he eats them. He’s fully potty-trained, thank heavens, so we’d already cut out the marshmallows. Popcorn remains an occasional treat. And lately we’ve been serving him what we call “dogburgers”: a hot dog cut in half lengthwise, then again across the middle, served on a hamburger bun—a practice instituted when we were out of hot dog buns, not in response to the AAP’s statement. Harry seems to prefer it that way, and if it makes me feel less like a would-be murderer, so much the better.