The Best Furniture Anchors for Baby Proofing

Almost every anchor on the market is strong enough on paper. The variable is the install, so these are the things I judge before anything else:

• Where the wall-side screw lands. A stud beats every anchor rating in the catalog. Drywall alone, with the little plastic cone from the bag, is the most common failure I see.
• How high it attaches. Anchor as high on the furniture as the frame allows. The higher the attachment, the less leverage a climbing child has.
• Hardware quality. Short screws sized for a flat-pack carton are not the same as screws meant for a wall. This is the main reason a dedicated kit beats the in-box strap.
• Whether the whole path is rated. A strap is only as strong as its buckle, its screws, and the wall. One weak link makes the printed number meaningless.
• Whether you will actually install it. An adhesive anchor on the wall beats a superior kit in a drawer.

There is genuinely good news here. The STURDY Act — Stop Tip-overs of Unstable, Risky Dressers on Youth — was signed into law on December 29, 2022, and CPSC adopted ASTM F2057-23 as a mandatory safety standard effective September 1, 2023. Units manufactured after that date have to pass stability testing on carpet, with multiple drawers open and loaded, and simulating a child of up to 60 pounds — crucially, without relying on opened drawers or doors to stay upright.

Here is the part that gets missed, and it is the reason anchoring is still your job. The standard applies to detached clothing storage units at least 27 inches tall, at least 30 pounds, and 3.2 cubic feet or more — dressers, chests, armoires, bureaus, door chests. It explicitly excludes bookcases, office furniture, and built-in units. So the tall bookcase in the hallway, the desk hutch in the home office, and the shelving unit in the playroom are all outside its scope entirely.

It also only applies to furniture manufactured after September 1, 2023. Everything already in your house — and everything bought secondhand, which is most of the furniture in most homes — predates it. A newer dresser is meaningfully harder to tip than it used to be. It is not a reason to skip the strap, and it does nothing at all for the categories the rule leaves out. For what to look for when buying new, see my best dressers picks.

This takes about ten minutes per piece and the order matters more than the product does:

• Find the stud first, then place the furniture. Locate the stud with a finder or a magnet hunting for drywall screws, and position the piece so a stud sits behind it. Do this before you load the drawers, not after.
• Mount high on the furniture. Attach to the top rail or the upper back panel, into the solid frame — never into thin backing board, which will tear straight through under load.
• Keep the run close to level. A strap angled sharply down loads the hardware in the wrong direction. Match the wall height to the furniture height.
• Use a toggle if there is no stud. If a stud is genuinely unreachable, a toggle bolt rated well above the furniture's weight is the fallback. The plastic cone anchor in the bag is not.
• Take up the slack. The furniture should not be able to rock forward before the strap engages. Snug, not straining.
• Re-check after a move. Anchors get unhooked when furniture is pulled out for cleaning or painting, and they very often never get re-attached.

While you are back there, load the piece correctly too: heaviest items in the bottom drawers, lightest up top. It lowers the center of gravity and works with the anchor instead of against it — the same principle behind assembling furniture properly in the first place.