Photo credit: Vika Glitter
by Daniel Fink, MD, Chair, The Quiet Coalition
With approaching holiday celebrations — Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and others around the world — it’s again time to write about noisy toys. This report from TV station KTSP in Minneapolis reminds us that noisy toys can damage children’s hearing.
That’s absolutely true. Unfortunately, the report cites the American Academy of Audiology’s advice that the safe noise level is 85 decibels. That’s dead wrong. The only evidence-based safe noise level is a time-weighted average of 70 decibels for a day. The actual safe noise level may be much lower, 55 A-weighted decibels* for a single noise exposure and an average of only 44-50 decibels for a day.
The report discusses measuring sound levels using a sound meter app, and I recommend the free NIOSH sound meter app. But better than any app is a parent or grandparent’s common sense. If the toy sounds loud, it’s too loud and the child’s health is at risk. Take out the batteries, put a piece of tape over the toy’s sound source or disappear the toy when the child is asleep. Better yet, don’t buy toys with batteries. For thousands of years — literally since prehistoric times, based on archaeological finds — children got along just fine with toys that didn’t make noise.
Your little darlings will do fine without noisy toys, too.
*A-weighting adjusts unweighted sound measurements to approximate the frequencies heard in human speech. This adjustment underweights low frequency noise.
