This cable may prevent heavy furniture from tipping over onto kids

Baby-proofing your home can be a daunting task. Especially when babies start crawling and eventually walking, there’s a period of time when it seems like they get into everything.

Besides causing a mess (toddlers are notorious for emptying kitchen cabinets as often as possible), there are some situations in the home that can pose possible dangers to a child. One such risk is that of top-heavy items like dressers or bookshelves tipping over and falling onto them. It’s something furniture companies have been warning parents of in recent years, often including wall anchors with some pieces.

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If you have furniture that didn’t come with an anchor but could potentially tip over, there’s a product now available that’s recently become popular thanks to a viral video.

A company called Hangman Products makes a Furniture Anti-Tip Kit, which includes an aircraft-grade steel cable that connects your furniture to a bracket installed into a stud on the wall. The company claims it’s able to hold 400 pounds.

A video of the product in action has been viewed on Facebook more than 36 million times. Check it out below.

The Furniture Anti-Tip Kit sells at Hangman Products’s website for $9.99.

A Common Hazard

To raise awareness of the danger tipping furniture can cause and to provide prevention strategies, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has launched the Anchor It campaign. According to the organization, a child is hurt in the U.S. by tipping furniture every 30 minutes and 91 percent of tip-over fatalities occur in the home. A child dies every 10 days when a TV or furniture falls onto them, according to the group.

As shown in the video above, a TV can fall with the force of thousands of pounds, which is 10 times more powerful than being hit by an NFL lineman.

The commission offers a number of tips to prevent such accidents, such as mounting your TV on the wall, not placing “tempting” items on top of high furniture and anchoring top-heavy furniture to the wall. The group notes that a number of anti-tip devices are available on the market. A quick search on Amazon returns dozens of products similar to Hangman’s.

Even if you feel your home is safe, it’s important not to fall prey to certain blind spots, like thinking that you don’t have to worry about a certain room because your children do not play there or simply thinking that your children know not to climb onto furniture. Kids are unpredictable, and these accidents can happen quickly.

Do you have any furniture that could be a tipping danger?