Parents say wary after China product recall

By Matthew Bigg

ATLANTA (Reuters) - The recall of millions of Chinese-made toys by U.S. toy company Mattel Inc. will make Americans more cautious about buying toys made in China but will not deter them, parents said.

U.S. companies were as much to blame for importing sub-standard goods as Chinese manufacturers who produced them, said parents interviewed in Atlanta and Phoenix.

They said parents were under two types of pressure: to buy particular makes of toys and dolls for children and to buy cheap. That means it would be near impossible to stop buying Chinese-made toys.

"I am going to be a little more vigilant and I am happy that there is some kind of standard," said Lauren Bays, a mother of two small children, said after learning about the product recall.

"I would pay more for (toys made by) a company that was safe," said Bays, eating at an Atlanta shopping mall with her family.

She said it would be reassuring to buy U.S.-made products but just because a toy was made in the United States did not automatically make it safe.

The recall on Tuesday involves 18.2 million magnetic toys globally including 9.5 million in the United States with magnets or magnetic parts that can be dislodged.

The toys involved include Polly Pocket dolls, Doggie Day Care magnetic toys, Barbie and Tanner magnetic toys, Batman and One Piece play sets.

Some parents said the recall raised the issue of whether Chinese-made products could be trusted at all.

TRUSTING TOY COMPANIES

"We need to trust the toy companies and I'm not sure that we can trust the things that are made in China anymore," mother Marie Thearle told Reuters as she left a Toys R Us store in Scottsdale, Arizona, with her 2-year-old daughter.

Thearle, a medical doctor, said she had checked the Mattel recall list before setting off for the toy store on Tuesday and had decided not to buy anything made in China.

"I'm just not sure that they have the same regulations that we have in the United States to make sure that things are safe ... Previously I didn't really think about it but now I am not going to buy anything that was made in China," she said.

But living without purchasing Chinese-made products is not easy, as author Sara Bongiorni discovered when she attempted to do so for a year. She detailed her attempt in the book "A Year Without 'Made in China,'" which was published this year.

Bongiorni said she wanted to make Americans aware of how tied they were to the global economy and did not have a protectionist agenda.