At every holiday cycle, families and friends start shopping in earnest to spoil loved ones with gifts and presents. Sometimes caution is thrown to the winds as shoppers consumed with the shopping frenzy that accompanies the month of December, shop with zest and abandon. That is a costly mistake. When shopping for products and toys for young children, you should exercise caution and diligently inquire if the product is suitable and safe for your child. This year alone, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) recalled hordes of unsafe toys as well as many of the children’s most basic products such as furniture, car seats, and strollers.

To avoid committing some shopping blunders that may cost your child their health and safety, consider the following shopping tips:

Beware of Recalls. The CPSC database records every specific product that they have recalled. Search the database to check if the specific product you are about to purchase for your child has been recalled.

Below are some of the well-known recalls that you can check against:

Graco Recalls. Earlier this year, 2015, Graco decided to recall sticky-buckles that, allegedly, were trapping kids in their seat. More recently, it recalled 4.7 million faulty strollers that can amputate one’s fingers. In fact, there were ten fingertip amputations and a laceration of one finger before Graco decided to recall the 11 stroller models. Since 2010, the strollers were available for purchase at Amazon.com, Walmart, Toys R Us, and Target.

Furniture Recalls. Some home furniture has been the culprit for some child injuries this year. After an unfortunate case where two adventurous children unzipped two bean bag chairs manufactured by Ace Bayou, crawled inside and suffocated to death, 2.2 million bean bag chairs from Ace Bayou were recalled. Therefore, as a precaution, anybody with any of the defective chairs from Ace Bayou should contact the company to be given a repair kit to make the bean bag chair’s zipper inoperable.

Buy only age-appropriate presents. To minimize the occurrence of accidents as well as grant more benefit to the recipient of the gift, buy age-appropriate products for children after reading the age recommendation on children products and toys. If the recipient of the present is a child and has younger siblings, buy a product that can’t endanger the safety, health and life of the younger children.

You should also exercise due vigilance when shopping online. Though it is illegal to sell recalled products in physical or virtual stores, some unscrupulous merchants would go ahead and offer the products for sale. They exploit loopholes in the system and/or the fact that auction and online listing websites hardly monitor private sellers closely. To be safe, avoid these sites when holiday shopping for your children.

Beware of suffocation and choking hazards, too. Balloons, marbles, toys with small pieces that children can insert into their mouths and small magnets are some of the things a responsible adult should avoid because they have the potential to cause choking and suffocation. The magnet disks that were formerly popular in yesteryears are now extremely dangerous for small children.

Just in case you bought a defective item that has caused harm, you can contact a personal injury lawyer to get justice for your case.