“Just Throw Them Out”: Mom Warns About Kids’ Tub Toys

There never has been a guide book made to help you with every single aspect of parenting. You might think something is fine, until is goes wrong. That's what happened with a mom who's son was diagnosed with severe cellulitis after getting water from a rubber bath toy in his eye.

Cellulitis, according to Stanford Children's Health, is a serious type of infection and inflammation that can occur in different parts of the body. The most common cause of cellulitis of the eye, the organization said, is an infection with bacteria. All of this from playing with a toy in the bath water.

In a Facebook post that has been shared by parents all over New York State and beyond, Eden Strong expressed how the toys could be the reason her son could lose vision in one eye. That's what the doctors who examined him expressed as a concern.

It all started after the family nanny told Strong that her son "squirted himself in the eye with a tub toy." She noticed his eye was a little bit red, but assumed it was from the irritation. Then, when she put him in his high chair for dinner, his eye looked worse. Strong and her husband figured it was pink eye, After a quick trip to urgent care, the doctor agreed that it looked like pink eye and sent them on their way with eye drops, assuring he would be better by morning.

Unfortunately, it wasn't better.

When he woke up at 6am and I laid eyes on him in his crib, I screamed to my husband to get in the car. His eye was so swollen that the white part was bulging out from between his eyelid and his iris was being obscured. He felt hot to the touch and a temperature check showed that he had a raging fever. Despite having another child with epilepsy and therefore being pretty good at keeping my cool, I cried the entire drive to a larger hospital, praying that he wouldn’t lose his eye.

After a trip to the hospital, multiple IV antibiotics, some TLC from doctors, and some prayers to the man upstairs, Baylor's eyes cleared up and healed.

Strong urges other parents to throw those toys out, since it almost cost her son his vision.

You cannot clean them, you just can’t. I don’t have any moldy tub toy pictures to show here, because there was never any visible mold to take a picture of. You can't see bacteria and I've known that since 6th grade science class but I thought I was better than dirty tub toys. I was wrong.

Many bath toys, especially ones that squirt water or squeak, have holes in the bottom which can be a target for water to enter and mold to grow. This is actually a large majority of what exists in the market.

Parents.com wrote an article about why bath toys "may not be such a fun idea after all," and they suggest skipping the toys all together.

"Hand your child some plastic measuring cups for filling and dumping. Or entertain your kid without any toys at all—play children's music, sing songs and nursery rhymes, make up stories, practice counting and spelling, or splash around with your hands."