How to make your home safe for your child

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Instructions for future and current parents to help protect children from injury.

Usually, parents buy a crib, a pot, a high chair and toys and calm down on this. Sometimes a baby monitor or a diaper bucket is added to the purchase list. But there are things that are more important than a stroller, because the safety of the child depends on them.

Around 2,000 children around the world die every day from accidental injuries. Most of these injuries occur at home, near their parents. Children drop weights on themselves, stick knitting needles into sockets, swallow batteries and fall out of windows. Typically, most of these injuries could be prevented with little effort.

How to prepare the floor

A child's independent acquaintance with the world begins, as a rule, from the floor. Children crawl and test the strength of everything they can reach.

Make a non-slip floor

Even when the child does not know how to walk and crawl, parents who have a child in their arms can slip. What to do to prevent this from happening:

• Choose a non-slip floor covering.
• Put rugs on especially dangerous places.
• And all these rugs must be glued (or at least keep them on silicone pads so that the rug itself does not slip).
• Glue the corners and edges of large rugs to the floor to prevent tripping.

Remove small items from the floor

Small items are coins, needles, buttons, batteries, nails, jewelry. All boxes in which small and friable are stored must be at a height of at least one meter.

Hide wires, ropes and bags

Wires and ropes are tightened around the wrists, wrapped around the legs and even the neck. And the bags suddenly end up on their heads and interfere with breathing, so store them in places where they will not attract children with rustles and bright colors. All wires (even from extension cords) should either be rolled up and folded, or secured to walls and floors so that they cannot be tripped over.

Close the entrance to dangerous places

For example, you have a staircase - to the second floor or to the basement. The entrance to this staircase must be closed with a special screen, and the screen must be firmly fixed. You can make such fences with your own hands, but in general they are sold and outwardly resemble children's playpens.

Take the flowers away

Rearrange flowers that may be poisonous. Children can easily taste a couple of leaves. Just make sure that the leaves do not hang down to the floor, otherwise there will be no point in rearranging the pots.

How to prepare furniture

Most often, children injure their fingers due to slammed doors and drawers, and they also drop objects from the shelves and the shelves themselves. Therefore, the furniture must be secured and secured.

Close the shelves

Do not leave furniture with open shelves at home. Shelving is unsafe. A child can climb it like a ladder, and how it will end is unknown. If you don't want to change the shelves, you should at least make sure that they are firmly screwed to the wall, and that each shelf is securely fixed and capable of supporting the weight of the child.

Remove the tablecloth from the table

A tablecloth with dangling edges can only be left on the table if there is nothing on it, and the table itself does not wobble and cannot be knocked over (because it is bolted to the floor).

Secure the furniture

All furniture must be attached to the walls. Too often, children's curiosity overcomes gravity, and the investigated cabinets, dressers and shelves fall on the children. In such cases, a simple fracture is already luck. TVs, stereos, speakers and all other equipment also need to be fixed.

Make the corners soft

Cover sharp corners with rubber or silicone pads, which can cushion the impact.

Close the bottom drawers

Best of all - on the lock. Children love to discover and explore the content. Any boxes can only be used if the child cannot pull them out completely. If it can (even theoretically), then it is also better to close them so that it does not turn out that the child pulled the handle and overturned the box with all its contents.

If the drawer is small (and the child cannot climb into it and accidentally close there) and light (and the child will not crush his fingers), and there is something soft and safe inside (socks), then the lock is not required. But if it is a box with tools, buttons or household chemicals, then it must be locked (and the key is higher).

How to prepare windows and walls

Don't leave windows open

The windows should be closed so that the child himself cannot accidentally open them. When you need to ventilate the room, use restraints that prevent the window from opening to such an extent that a child can crawl through the crack.

Don't rely on window screens. They will help keep the cat from jumping out into the street, but under the weight of the leaning child, they fall out or even break. Therefore, leaving a child in a room where a window with a mesh is open is even more dangerous than in a room with a window just open - because of the false illusion that the mesh will not let fall.

Do not place furniture under windows to prevent your child from climbing onto the windowsill.

Check the curtains

From a safety point of view, curtains and blinds are sets of large and small ropes. Sometimes they still have little things that are dangerous for breathing: stoppers, beads. Therefore, complex structures with a large number of cords, fringes, decorative elements from the windows must be removed and replaced with the simplest ones. Desirable ones that the child cannot reach.

Replace or block outlets

The best option is to reinstall the sockets throughout the apartment, replacing them with safe ones. Plastic plugs are better than nothing, but only if they are really hard to get. Otherwise, there is a risk that the child will only be interested in this little thing, which is so cool to knock out of the wall.

Protect mirrors

Cover the back of the mirrors with a protective film. If the mirror breaks or falls, then the fragments will not fly in different directions (or fly, but not as much as without the film).

How to prepare the kitchen

The kitchen is the most dangerous area in terms of injury. Therefore, special rules are needed on it.

Hide the cutlery

Store knives and forks in a safe place. And in general, all spicy kitchen items: a grill spit, even a spicy grater and a bottle opener. The child must be introduced to such items under parental supervision.

Hide dangerous products

Move dangerous food items higher. These are bottles of vinegar, packs of soda and salt, hot spices, bottles of alcohol.

Make the stove safe

Use gas stoves and panels with gas control sensors: such sensors turn off the gas supply if there is no fire on the burner. This will protect your home from accidental leaks if your child turns the knob on the stove.

A special screen can be installed on the edge of the stove, which will not allow the child to reach out to the fire or hot surface.

Get in the habit of not placing hot objects on the edge of the table.

How to prepare a bathroom

In the bathroom, the main danger is slippery floors and water. Drowning is one of the most common causes of childhood injury deaths because young children don't need much. They can literally drown in a bucket or basin of water. Therefore, the bathroom has its own rules.

Do not leave your child near water

Even if you just put a basin and poured clean water into it for the child to play. Play with him, do not leave him alone with water. Even on a swim slide, even with an inflatable ring at the neck. It is clear that as the child grows up, this rule will become less strict.

Place an anti-slip mat on the bottom of the tub to prevent your child from slipping or hitting the edge of the tub.

Hide dangerous substances and objects

Take household chemicals as far away and close as securely as possible. Poisoning and burns caused by a child tasting pipe cleaner are incredibly dangerous. Keep shampoos, shower gels, and aftershave lotions away from children's curiosity too.

There may be dangerous objects in the bathroom: razors, tweezers, tongs, hair dryer. Find a place for them that the child cannot reach.

Hide any aerosols. Even if there is nothing poisonous in them, they are dangerous in contact with the eyes.

You can, of course, say that this list is too long, that children do not need a super-safe environment, that difficulties should temper the child, that before somehow everyone grew up without problems. But in such cases, the law of meanness works: everything that can break, deteriorate or harm, will definitely do it. So introduce your child to all the surrounding objects under strict parental control and supplement the list with your own tips in the comments.