Are second-hand baby toys safe? A five-minute check

Mostly yes. Wash it, dry it properly, then check two things: whether it is painted and old, and whether the wood is still one solid piece. Germs are the worry parents arrive with and the smallest of the three. The paint question has a date attached to it and takes about a minute to settle. The condition question is the one that sends toys back on the shelf.

One gap is worth naming before we start: nobody has measured whether secondhand toys, as a category, harm children. There is no study, so any number you are handed about it was invented. What exists is a handful of dates in federal regulation, one very well documented recall, and the state of the object in front of you.

Washing it is the easy part

Warm water, a drop of dish soap, a cloth wrung out until it is barely damp. Go over the whole thing, dry it, done. Wood is porous, so the method is fussier than it would be for plastic, and the fussiness is all in how wet you let it get.

• Do not soak it. A wooden toy left sitting in a sink swells, then dries rough, and rough wood raises splinters where there were none before.
• The dishwasher is where wooden toys go to warp. Heat and a long wet cycle open glued joints. Bleach is the other one to skip: left sitting on bare wood it leaves the surface chalky.
• Stand it somewhere warm for an hour before it goes near a toy box. A radiator or a sunny window. That secondhand smell people describe is usually a damp toy that went into a box too early.

Fabric parts go in the machine. Plastic parts take hot soapy water. Beyond that, a wooden toy from another family's house is not a biohazard. Wash it the way you would wash anything that has been in a stranger's kitchen, then let that worry go.

The date that matters is August 2009

Picture the toy this section is really about. A painted wooden pull-along in a cardboard box in somebody's parents' basement, red and blue, the paint worn off the corners where it was dragged along a skirting board. It has been down there since about 2006, and nobody knows what is in that paint, including the family who owned it.

Federal law has capped lead in the surface paint on children's toys since 1978, at 0.06 percent, or 600 parts per million. That cap dropped to 0.009 percent, 90 ppm, effective 14 August 2009, under 16 CFR 1303. So the pull-along was regulated. It was regulated to a limit about seven times looser than today's. Plenty of pages will tell you pre-2009 toys were held to nothing at all, which is wrong, and it is checkable.

A second limit covers lead in the material itself. The statute, 15 U.S.C. 1278a, counts in intervals from 14 August 2008: 600 ppm after 180 days, 300 ppm after a year, 100 ppm after three years, so the strictest figure arrives in August 2011. The CDC says the same period in plainer words, warning that toys "made before 2009 might contain more lead", and that "Painted toys or collectibles that are passed down through generations may contain lead".

Bare wood sits somewhere else in this. 16 CFR 1303 governs coatings, and an unpainted, unfinished toy has no coating for the paint rule to apply to. The content limit still exists in principle and covers the wood itself. We know of no route by which lead gets into a plain beech ring that was never painted, dyed or lacquered, and we would hand one to a child.

The Thomas trains are why this question exists

On 13 June 2007 the CPSC published recall 07-212. RC2 Corp. pulled about 1.5 million Thomas & Friends Wooden Railway toys, sold from January 2005 through June 2007 for between $10 and $70. The notice is one line long where it counts: "Surface paints on the recalled products contain lead."

Three months later came a second notice, 07-308, covering roughly 200,000 more, sold from March 2003. That extension is the part worth carrying around. The affected manufacturing window runs back to 2003, and these were expensive, hard-wearing, much-loved toys. Nobody threw them out. They went into basements, and basements are where hand-me-downs come from.

One limit on that story. Both notices record injuries as none, a record of what people reported to the agency. Nobody went looking in homes afterwards, and no study since has measured harm from secondhand toys as a category.

Our advice here is less careful than the CDC's

This is where we part company with a federal health agency, and you should know it before taking our version. CDC guidance is that children should not play with toys manufactured before 2009 at all. Ours is narrower. We would leave old painted toys on a display shelf, and we would hand a child bare, unpainted, unfinished hardwood of any age.

A blanket rule is the right call for an agency writing for every household at once, including the ones with a chipped 1960s pull-toy and no way to tell what is underneath. I think the narrower rule is better for a parent who can pick the thing up and look at it in daylight. It is a judgement made by a shop, and nobody here has a public health remit. If you want the version with an agency behind it, take theirs.

The five-minute check, standing in the shop

Run this one in a thrift store with a toddler on your hip.

• Bare unpainted wood is the easy yes. No coating, nothing to flake, nothing to test. Wash it and take it home.
• If it is painted and clearly old, admire it and put it back. Chipped, crazed, worn down to bare wood at the corners. Age on its own is a good enough reason, and you do not owe the volunteer at the till an explanation.
• Search the brand on your phone before it goes in the car. The CPSC's own recall database, at cpsc.gov/Recalls, is searchable by product name. Thirty seconds.
• Do not settle it with a home swab kit. CDC's position is that do-it-yourself kits "do not show how much lead is present", and that only a certified laboratory can test a product accurately. We would not decide anything on one.
• Under two, everything goes in the mouth. Be stricter about anything that will be gummed for an hour at a time, because at that age the paint question stops being theoretical.

Check that it is still one solid object

We inspect wooden toys for a living, and the faults we find are almost never chemical. Wood dries out. Glue lets go. A toy that has been through one childhood has usually done a little of both, quietly, in a box.

• Open any split with a thumbnail. If it moves, it is a pinch point, and it will keep opening for as long as the toy is in the house.
• A chipped edge or corner. Chipped wood splinters where a rounded edge would not. Sandpaper fixes the small ones. Anything that has lost a chunk is finished.
• Wobble every peg and knob. A loose peg becomes a small part, and a small part in a house with a crawling baby is a different category of problem. Our shelf for babies under one exists largely because of that line.
• Puzzle backing that has come apart. Plywood boards separate into layers after enough damp, and once the veneer lifts it keeps lifting.
• Somebody has already repaired it. Glue, tape, a replacement screw. The toy failed once in a way that seemed worth fixing, and it will do it again.

That is about a minute of work, and none of it involves chemistry.

What we would buy new anyway

Not everything should be secondhand, and this is where we would spend.

Anything a baby will mouth for months is worth buying new. At that age you cannot inspect your way out of it. Whatever sits on the surface ends up in the child, and a piece that works loose gets swallowed rather than dropped. Most of the sensory toys we stock are in that group, along with most of what a baby holds before they can sit up.

Almost everything else can come out of a grandparent's basement. Blocks, a sorting box, a puzzle with every piece present, a set of nesting bowls, a child-sized dustpan for the practical life shelf. If you are buying for somebody else's child and a hand-me-down would land badly, our gift ideas are grouped for exactly that.

Wash it. Look at the paint. Then hold the thing in both hands and see gently whether it stays one piece. Most hand-me-downs pass that, and we would sell more toys if they did not.