A dresser is a lever

Stand a dresser against a wall and it’s stable. Pull the top two drawers out and most of its weight moves forward of its feet. Add a 30-pound child climbing the drawers like stairs, which is exactly what a two-year-old sees them as, and the whole thing comes over. Same goes for a bookcase with the heavy books up high, and for a television sitting on something that wasn’t built to hold it.

Nothing about this is rare. It’s an ordinary chest of drawers in an ordinary bedroom, and physics does the rest. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has been counting the results for two decades.

Open drawers move the weight forward. The strap holds the top to the wall so it can’t follow.

The numbers

From 2000 through 2021, the commission counted 482 children killed by furniture, televisions and appliances tipping over. Eighty-eight percent were under five. Counting adults too, the 2022 report put the total at 581 deaths, and in most of the child cases a television was involved.

There’s some good news in the same reports. Emergency-room visits for tip-overs fell by about 55 percent between 2011 and 2020, mostly because heavy tube televisions left living rooms. Even so, NPR’s reading of the data notes that roughly 11,000 children a year still end up in an emergency room because something fell on them.

A rule for new dressers took effect in 2023, after years of recalls. It helps with furniture bought since then. It won’t help the dresser you already own or one you buy second-hand.

The strap in the box

Most flat-pack dressers, bookcases and wardrobes ship with a small bag holding two brackets, a strap or a cable, and screws. It’s the last step in the manual and the one most people skip. The furniture stands up fine without it, and now the wall has to be drilled.

  • Find a stud. A strap screwed into drywall alone pulls out under load. Use a stud finder, or tap and listen, and put the wall screw into wood. If there’s no stud behind the right spot, use a toggle or snap-toggle anchor rated for the weight, not a plastic plug.
  • High on the piece, high on the wall. The bracket goes on the back of the furniture near the top, and the wall bracket level with it or slightly above, so the strap pulls up and back.
  • Two straps for anything wide. A long dresser or a wide bookcase wants one at each end.
  • Televisions get their own. Strap a television to the wall or to the furniture, or mount it. Mounted into studs on a bracket rated for its weight is the safest place for it.
  • Check it after a move. A strap that came off for the move won’t go back on by itself. Neither will the one the painters took down.
After a move is when most anchored furniture quietly becomes unanchored furniture.

A ten-minute walkthrough

Walk through your home with this list. It takes about as long as reading it.

  1. Every dresser, chest and bookcase taller than a child is strapped to a stud or a rated anchor.
  2. Every television is mounted or strapped, and nothing heavy sits on top of a dresser.
  3. Heavy things live in the bottom drawers and on the bottom shelves. Light things go up high.
  4. Drawers close all the way, and the room has nothing that invites climbing beside the furniture.
  5. Lamps, speakers and plants sit on low, wide surfaces, not on top of the tall piece.

If you’re putting new furniture together, include anchoring in the job. Ask whoever does the assembly to leave the piece secured to the wall.