Mom Warns Other Parents After Daughter’s Fingers Get Stuck in Target Shopping Cart

When Emily McMaugh (@emannem13) stepped inside a local Target store to shop for groceries, she could never have imagined that she would come face to face with a new parenting fear. After the shopping was done and she was ready to exit the store, her 3-year-old complained that she was stuck inside the shopping cart where she had been sitting all the time. In a TikTok video, McMaugh shared some pictures of the incident and how Target employees helped her get her daughter’s fingers out of the cart. “New fear unlocked. Be careful with your littles and shopping carts,” she cautioned her viewers.

The carousel of pictures shows Target’s red shopping cart with circular and ellipsoidal holes. In one of the little holes, a kid’s fingers are stuck. The kid was McMaugh’s 3-year-old daughter who was seated in the cart along with her younger sister. “Normally, I have two carts and my husband will push one and I’ll push the other. This time I let her sit in the cart. I went to get them out and I realized that because of the shape of the openings, she stuck her two fingers in the little hole,” McMaugh told PEOPLE.

The mom of two tried Vaseline. Even the employees at Target jumped in to help. But when nothing worked, the fire department had to be called in. Until they arrived, the girl was keeping her calm. But once they started chipping away the cart’s metal, she was overcome with frenzy and soon started screaming. “She was really calm, at first. The only part where she started freaking out is when the paramedics had to actually like cut the cart,” McMaugh said. The employees even gave the toddler a “cake pop” to divert her attention, but all in vain. The mom added that it took almost 20 to 25 minutes to get the toddler unstuck from the cart.

The entire episode perked up the mother’s stress to unimaginable heights. “My husband ended up meeting us at Target because I was like, ‘I can’t handle this by myself.’ So luckily when he got there he did calm her down, but it was definitely a stressful situation,” she recalled. “She doesn’t speak in full sentences yet, so I’m sure it hurt but she couldn’t really tell me what she was feeling.” The carousel shows Target employees around the cart trying to release the kid’s fingers from the top while others seem to be pushing upwards from the bottom. Coming out of the nightmare, McMaugh appreciated Target employees for their kind and quick action. “They were prepared to help no matter what the case,” she shared with the media channel.

At the same time, she urged the company to change the formatting of their carts so this incident wouldn’t happen again with other parent shoppers. “I’m glad I shared it because maybe more people can be aware. When I filled out the incident report from Target, they asked if I wanted to pass a message on to them,” she said. “I wrote that maybe they should change how the cart is formatted so that this doesn’t happen. Apparently, it does happen more than you’d think. It’s a new fear unlocked.”

You can follow Emily McMaugh (@emannem13) on TikTok for vlogs of her everyday life.