Melamine Dishes
Melamine Dishes and More!
| Anyone who has kids or who has had experience with kids, especially the young ones, will know that even the toughest of things can break in their hands. Expensive titanium golf clubs can bend, die-cast metal toys can break, hard rubber balls can be cracked and punctured and dishes can break. Dishes, cups and cutlery are especially susceptible to pudgy fingers and tiny hands as they break with far more regularity than other thing |
inside the household. Therefore its best to minimize damage, for that reason its best to minimize damage both to your dishware as well as to your tiny tot.
While some people go the metal way, rounded kid-friendly metal cutlery are often very difficult to find while the metal dishes themselves can sometimes be heavy enough to hurt your child. This is especially when they get it into their heads that banging themselves with the metal dishware is a good idea, just to hear the clang of the noise. Melamine dishware on the other hand are lightweight, tough and relatively inexpensive. Kids can throw their melamine dishes, bowls and cups against the wall or drop it from the balcony and still get no result. However, on chance occasions, melamine cups and the like have broken, but only after severe drops or impacts. Not to worry though, as the material doesn't break into teeny tiny pieces of dangerous shrapnel so you don't need to take the same precautions compared to if a glass or porcelain dish fell.
The only major weakness with melamine dishes and cups is that the material cannot take any heat. This is because the melamine absorbs heat. Steady direct heat from a microwave can severely damage melamine dishware and there have been instances of melamine dishes exploding inside the microwave. Thankfully this is not an instantaneous effect, as it takes time to cause enough damage for it to explode.
However, if you have been doing stuff like heating your child's oatmeal in the microwave with a melamine dish or bowl its an even better idea to stop doing that and throw away the affected melamine dishes. Melamine cups and bowls can still hold hot soup and the like but be aware that this also does have an effect on these dishware, causing about the same wear and tear as a normal porcelain mug or cup. While it won't cause these melamine dishes to melt into a puddle of hot cocoa and melamine resin, it will introduce structural flaws in the plastic, which may make it weaker towards falls, drops and the occasional throw against the wall. Sometimes this results in chipping, when that happens don't wait for it to break completely as ingestion of actual melamine chips can be dangerous over the long run.
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