Children are daredevils. No matter their age, their imaginations or sheer rebellious nature put them in precarious positions that give parents heart attacks. Your child sees the leap from sofa to the sofa as a way to dodge the lava on the floor, while you see their head split open and the impending hospital trip. It’s not real, but the anxiety surrounding the safety of your child is. You made your child from scratch. Every eyelash, every fingernail and every crease of their soft skin was made by you from scratch. It’s only fair that in return for all that hard work, your children keep themselves safe and in one piece. We live in a world where things are dangerous, and essentially, we are all raising our children to be away from us. From the moment that we teach them to walk and to talk, we are teaching them a fierce independence that will carry them through to their teenage years. You can’t look at your pre-schooler and imagine a day when they are married, living away from home and having their own children. And yet there you sit, doing exactly that.
Keeping your children safe is about far more than telling them not to leap from sofa to sofa to avoid the lava that their imagination shows them. It’s about preventing injuries by buying the best convertible car seats. It’s about educating yourself on early weaning and the issues that can present in later life due to it. It’s about knowing that one day, your teenager is going to branch out and away from you to have their own life – and you have to let it happen. Each of these things is imperative for the safety of your children. When you want to ensure that your children are physically and emotionally safe, you will go above and beyond to make sure that it happens. Getting from birth to adulthood in one piece is your responsibility, and we’ve got some safety tips so that you can ensure that your child doesn’t come to any harm in the meantime.
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Car Seat Drama
We’ve mentioned researching the best car seats for safety, and reading about extended rear-facing car seats will be half the battle, so check out this article. Children are mini Houdini’s in the car, but if you give the car seat a good tug where the seatbelt goes, and you notice that it moves more than an inch at the base, you need to tighten it up. There’s nothing wrong with your driving, of course, it’s the rest of the road users you have to think about, though!
Furniture Anchoring
You may not have thought about this much as a child when you were the one climbing the bureau and balancing on the wardrobe to pretend to fly. However, in this day and age, there are far too many incidences of children who use furniture as a climbing frame when it is not secured. Furniture is heavy, and being flattened under it can be avoided. Check out these furniture straps so that you can anchor your heavy pieces of furniture properly and avoid the emergency room.
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Alarms Are Alarming
Your house is going to designed with safety in mind. Burglar alarms, fire alarms and carbon monoxide detectors are all common features in the modern home. You should be testing these regularly, and if you find that something is amiss, you can speak to your local fire department about getting replacements. The alarms themselves should be replaced every ten years, and you and your children could spend some time making up your own fire escape plan. It can be a fun activity, even if it is a serious subject.
Safe Storage, Please
Bleach, medicines, washing up liquid and washing tablets are all harmless to an adult who knows how to use them and how dangerous they can be. For a child, they look like interesting things to taste. Children explore with their mouths and if you haven’t stored your poisons and cleaning products in a hard to reach place, you are risking your children being tempted to taste. Take the temptation away, and you can relax about them getting into the cupboard under the sink.
Secure Toys
Every day new toys are made with weird and wonderful features. Some can sing, some can dance and nearly all of them come with fiddly pieces and batteries. The fiddly pieces are a pain to keep hidden and sometimes the toy isn’t complete without something fiddly on it. The batteries? A good screwdriver is a way to keep the children off the backs of their toys. Swallowing batteries can be fatal, so don’t give your child the chance to get the back of the toy open.
Sports Safety
Children who go to classes and extra-curricular clubs are likely being watched by a trained and trusted first aider. If you ask after each class whether there has been any collisions or injuries to worry about, then you will know whether or not to be on concussion watch. Take the time to learn about what to look for by reading this article.
Eliminate Distractions
When you are having bath time, or the children are playing outside, it’s time to put down the phone or the book you are engrossed in and keep an eye. Yes, we all know about the time that you could leave your home in the morning and not be home until the evening. The good old days were great. However, these are not the good old days and there are dangers that need adult supervision. Get stuck in and have fun while you do it.
Children are not children forever, and if they are going to hurt themselves then you need to be ready for it by eliminating as many dangers as you possibly can. Take the time to get be vigilant and you minimise the risks for the whole family. It’s good for the anxiety to take control, so grab it with both hands!
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