You also want to buy products for your family they’ll use and which won’t harm them. The problem is that you have no way of personally knowing what products on store shelves might harm your family members or not. You did not personally test those products, so you have to rely on various governing bodies that test them to make sure they’re safe.

With that in mind, let’s talk a little bit about product recalls. They happen pretty often, and you should watch out for them if you’re a parent.

The J and J Sunscreen Recall

One thing you should realize is that product recalls happen relatively often. It’s a little bothersome to realize that a product you thought was safe one day could face a recall by the manufacturing company the next, but that does happen fairly frequently.

The J and J sunscreen recall this year is just one example. J and J stand for Johnson and Johnson, and you probably know at least a bit about them already. The company has been in existence for years, and they make all kinds of products. They make one of the Covid-19 vaccines that the FDA approved for emergency use during the current pandemic.

J and J recalled many of their aerosol sunscreens this year because some of them might have Benzene in them. Benzene is a carcinogen, meaning that humans exposed to it can develop certain cancers.

There’s nothing that makes the J and J sunscreen recall this year stand out, other than the fact that some of the sunscreen gels and sprays included Aveeno and Neutrogena ones, two of J and J’s more popular lines. 

It’s a stark reminder, as someone with a family, that you need to keep your eyes and ears open for these sorts of recalls. Virtually any product you thought was safe might turn out to be dangerous if the company or some other agency tells the public that.

The FDA

The most common way you might hear that a product is no longer safe for your family’s use is probably if the company itself issues the recall. If that happens, it’s often national news, so you might see it on TV or read about it online. You can’t always count on that, though.

The FDA, or the Food and Drug Administration, is an entity you can trust when they tell you your family can utilize a product or not use it. The FDA employs doctors, scientists, and other experts who test products very carefully before releasing them to the public.

If the FDA says something is safe, that is not a one hundred percent guarantee that it is, but it’s one of the best systems you have in place if you’re trying to protect your kids and other family members from disease or injury. You can take advantage of their recall alerts by going on the FDA’s website periodically and checking the list.

The FDA has that recall list prominently featured on their site, so it should not be difficult for you to find. If you worry about what products this organization deems unsafe, you might make a habit of checking the site every week or so, just in case you missed the news that some major company has issued a recall.

This isn’t a foolproof system, and even if you want to keep your family as safe as possible, it could be that a product that’s going to harm them will slip past you. Since you can’t test all of them yourself, you have to trust at some point that the companies themselves, plus entities like the FDA, are doing their jobs well enough.

The reality is that certain dangers exist in the world, and you can’t shield your family members from all of them, despite your best intentions. All you can do is the best you can. As a parent, you can hope that’s enough and that some misfortune will not befall one of your kids or other family members, despite your efforts.