When it comes to infant safety there’s no substitute for careful supervision, but to cut danger to an absolute minimum it’s worth baby-proofing your living space.
We’re not talking mollycoddling – just a few sensible precautions that will help fend off mishaps and worry. Here's one Dad's guide to home safety:
Coffee-table corners
And any other furniture that has hard edges below knee-height – all gruesome forehead dents waiting to happen.
- Health and safety gone mad: Refurnish your living room with inflatable tables.
- Sensibly safe: Cushioned corner guards and edge protector strips are widely available and cheap.
Electrical outlets
Finger-sized holes? Buttons?! Surely these things were made for me to dribble on then prod…
- Health and safety gone mad: Plaster over all sockets, switch off the mains supply to your home and go fully clockwork.
- Sensibly safe: Invest in a set of plastic plug covers and slot them in to any sockets you’re not using. Better still, encase all your sockets in childproof cover plates.
Appliance cords
Yankable, trip-over-able and tangle-up-in-able – and attached to heavy lamps, kettles and irons.
- Health and safety gone mad: Convert all your appliances to run on batteries, spending a fortune on double-As for your kettle.
- Sensibly safe: Keep cords as short as possible. Hang them behind furniture, tuck them under carpets and run them through other hard-to-reach places. Also, try mounting flex holders to the wall.
Stairs
You can’t stop toddlers falling over – but you can limit the distance they drop.
- Health and safety gone mad: Employ a 24-hour guard to man the barriers at the top and bottom of your stairs.
- Sensibly safe: Just go for the gates. There are various styles on offer, but it’s best not to go for the old-school concertina type since there is a danger of trapped fingers.
Kitchen cupboards
One of the first things kids will go for when they get mobile.
- Health and safety gone mad: Replace your bleach, detergents and stain removers with orange juice, milk and tubs of baby rice, and use these to clean your kitchen instead.
- Sensibly safe: Dangerous substances should be stored well out of reach and should always be properly labelled.
Fires and heaters
Each year 6,000 fires are caused by children under the age of ten. So if you have a fire on the go, constant supervision is required.
- Health and safety gone mad: Relocate your family to an igloo in Greenland.
- Sensibly safe: Where kids and fires are both present, fireguards are required by law – secure yours to the wall or floor so that your toddler can’t budge it. It’s also a very good idea to keep a fire-extinguisher in the house. And fit smoke alarms, however your home is heated. Test them regularly: working smoke alarms mean you and your family are twice as likely to survive a fire in your home.
Your man drawer
To you it’s a treasure trove, but to a toddler that drawer where for years you’ve been carefully accumulating drawing pins, broken screwdrivers, match-winning darts and a collection of semi-pornographic beer mats is a lucky dip of peril.
- Health and safety gone mad: Finally get rid of ‘all that junk’, in accordance with the mother of your child’s wishes. (Ridiculous, of course. Never going to happen.)
- Sensibly safe: There is a wide variety of childproof drawer and cabinet locks available, ranging from simple catches (a couple of quid) to penitentiary-lockdown-style magnetic jobbies (£15-£20).
Windows
Scarily, around 2,000 under fives are injured by falling out of buildings every year.
- Health and safety gone mad: Surround the exterior of your building with a moat made of mattresses three layers deep.
- Sensibly safe: An adhesive glass safety film will prevent panes from shattering. For higher-up windows, you can find all manner of childproof window locks that are cheap and easy to install. Keep chairs, sofas and other climbable furniture well away from the windowsill.
Doors
Being fairly accomplished at moving from one room to another, we adults tend to take doors for granted. But for infants, these vast planks of wood on finger-crushing hinges are the equivalent of a ‘Tomb Raider’-style booby-trap.
- Health and safety gone mad: Go and live in a field (and perhaps arrange for your next child to be born in a barn).
- Sensibly safe: You can fit hinge-cavity finger protector strips, but at around £30 a door these can be expensive. A cheaper option is to deploy doorstops and wedge doors open. Cushion-like door guards, which clip around the door edge above the handle, are useful for saving fingers from a grand slam.
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