50 Years of Child Resistant Packaging: Does Knowledge from Packaging Application Translate to Child Development Research?

• In Event: How Children Learn the Everyday Designed Artifacts of their Culture

Abstract

The development of child-resistant packaging presents an interesting paradox for designers. The package must serve as a significant barrier for children under 5 years of age, but at the same time, facilitate entry for aging populations and people frail from illness or injury. Although prior research documented a dramatic reduction of unintentional poisonings of children under 5 years of age since the introduction of child-resistant packaging in the early 1970s, the protocol for determining a package’s child-resistant efficacy has remained largely unchanged. Despite the fact that protocol testing was primarily developed by engineers with limited insight from child development experts, a review of findings offers opportunities for new insights into child development research.

This talk begins with an historical overview of the protocols for testing young children and elderly people and then presents findings from an experiment on child-resistant packaging with relevance to research in child development. In brief, the standard protocol to determine whether packaging meets child-resistant criteria involves asking two children at a time to open a package. If children do not succeed in five minutes, an adult briefly demonstrates how to open the package, and children are encouraged to try again for another five minutes.

Traditionally, child resistant package design attempts to slow late-stage processing (e.g., making the package difficult to understand or open). We tested whether the addition of a visual distractor which incorporates the illusion of motion using holographic and facial imagery would capture children’s attention and thereby delay them during early perceptual processing, rather than late-stage cognitive and motor processing.

To test this prediction, we provided 108 pairs of children (24-51 months) with vials without child resistant closures. Each test pair was provided with a single treatment condition (with or without a distracter) and instructed to do whatever they wished with the packages. Successful openings and time to opening were recorded as dependent variables, and data were analyzed using generalized, linear mixed models.

Although we found no evidence for a difference in time or success in opening when age groups were compared on the condition without distracters (p = .64), opening in younger children was hampered by the presence of a distractor more so than opening in older children (p = .05). Specifically, older children were nearly four times more likely to open packages with a distractor present compared with their younger counterparts. Moreover, even when children opened the vials successfully, the presence of a distracter prolonged the time to open; opening with a distractor took approximately 3 times the amount of time compared to the condition without distractors (p < .04).

These findings provide evidence of a promising new paradigm that could be leveraged to the benefit of child-resistant design. However, we include as a cautionary note the possibility that distracters can attract children to engage with the object, and this possibility is not yet studied. Nonetheless, our data also provide evidence of opportunities for researchers in child development to participate in applied research for the benefit of ensuring children’s health and safety.

Authors

• Laura Bix, Michigan State University
  Presenting Author

• Rita Chen
  Non-Presenting Author