Spiked: Caution, danger of suffocation!

Babies and toddlers have the bad habit of making everything that comes in front of their mouths disappear into it. Don't worry, this column won't degenerate into a mommy blog. But an EU safety regulation forces me to once again address the joys and sorrows of young parents here.

So: We are still in the wetland of the child's mouth. A foreign body that gets in here has three ways to escape. A: It fights its way back into daylight. B: It enjoys a tingling bath in the stomach acid. C: It takes the tracheal diversion and thus puts its host in acute danger of death. This is also why mommies and daddies secure every new environment like a crime scene and remove anything smaller than an empty toilet roll from their pet's reach. Moms and dads of children under 4, mind you.

However, the EU Commission for Consumer Safety has now found that blowing up a balloon poses an acute choking hazard even for 7-year-olds. According to the Commission, party whistles that unfurl into a long tongue when blown into the balloon pose a risk up to the age of 14. Ergo, children under the age of 8 may only blow up a balloon if an adult is present. The same applies in the case of whistles, except that the offspring have to endure the presence of their parents for a few years longer. I honestly wonder who whispered the magic numbers 8 and 14 to the EU experts.

What developmental step does a child take between the ages of 7 and 8 and between the ages of 13 and 14? Why is a person on the threshold of adolescence more likely to swallow a piece of party pipe than a drunken adult? Or even a sober adult. If you haven't learned by the age of 7 that a balloon only gets nice and round when you blow air into it, and not when you inhale the rubber, you won't learn it again by 18. As a child, I once accidentally bit into plasticine instead of my chips - because I was engrossed in playing. But accidentally swallowing a balloon? I dare say that even a toddler would have a hard time feeding the stinky, sticky rubber thingy to the organs described at the beginning of this article under B and C. The EU Parliament's zeal for regulation seems boundless. Yet Brussels is having a hard time with the really important regulations. Isn't the scenario of a handful of unsupervised investment bankers plunging the world economy into misery more likely than an unsupervised child swallowing a balloon?

Or are the new security guidelines even a pitiful attempt to get to the root of the banking problem? The future financial elite is being taught at an early age that creating a bubble filled with hot air requires sacrifices. And that even a whistle blower puts his life on the line. It is more likely, however, that the EU bureaucracy will have to justify its existence with an impressive output of laws.

Fortunately, the new regulations will have no impact on everyday life. Who wants to check whether an adult is watching when little Udo, Florence, or William, with their heads high and red, blow more saliva than oxygen down the narrow throat of their balloon. Perhaps in a quiet minute the EU Parliament should take a closer look at its own potential danger: "Danger of suffocation due to flood of paragraphs."