Protecting your exploring baby from her own curiosity is a full-time job! Your crawling or walking baby is driven by a powerful, innate urge to explore the world: to see, taste, and experience everything that attracts her. Unfortunately, babies just aren’t very discerning when it comes to what’s safe and what’s not. They’ll drink bleach from the bottle, perch precariously on a second-story window ledge, and race unknowingly into oncoming traffic. They’ll pull the tails of strange dogs, drag down kitchen pots or tug on the cords of coffeemakers with hot liquid inside, and jab metal keys into live electric outlets.
Hundreds of thousands of babies are raced to emergency rooms every year with serious injuries sustained from accidents in and around their homes and even from playgrounds that are designed for children. Most often, these accidents arise from babies just being babies. What seems like simple exploration and play can turn tragic in only a matter of minutes when an adult is momentarily distracted by something else.
Hazards around the home
Here’s a list of hazards around the home and where they can be found:
Indoor dangers
• Fires. Children from birth to four years old account for 65 percent of deaths in house fires. Things ignite on the stove, or faulty electrical wiring and appliances start fires. More commonly, smokers fall asleep with cigarettes in their hands, setting bedding on fire, or children start fires when they play with lighters and matches.
Prevention: Install smoke alarms on all floors of your home. Have a fire evacuation plan in place and rehearse it regularly, and teach your young children how to dial 911. Store a fold-up window ladder in your children’s closet, and mark the windows of your children’s rooms using stickers from your fire department. Make sure your address is easy to see from the street.
The Baby Safety Dozen
1 .Vehicle accidents. Install and use an approved carseat.
2. Falls. Never leave your baby on a raised, unguarded surface.
3. Heatstroke. Never leave your baby in the sun or unattended in your car.
4. Drowning. Never leave your baby alone near the bathtub, a bucket of water, a child’s wading pool, a swimming pool, or near an open body of water. Never use a suctioned baby bath seat.
5. Burns. Set your water heater’s temperature control to 120° F or less, and always check the temperature of bathwater carefully.
6. Fires. Install smoke detectors and test them periodically. Install fresh batteries twice a year.
7. SIDS. Always put your baby on her back for sleeping.
8. Suffocation. Don’t let your baby sleep on couch cushions, beanbag chairs, waterbeds, or other soft or mushy surfaces, or in an adult bed without safety precautions. Never use thickly padded crib quilts. Install a carbon-monoxide detector if you have a flame-burning furnace, fireplace, or woodstove.
9. Pets. Keep dogs, cats, and other domestic animals away from your baby.
10. Choking. Don’t let your baby play with small objects, particularly coins, buttons, balloons, plastic bags, and marbles. Don’t feed your baby hot dogs, nuts, grapes, or other foods that could get captured in her throat.
11. Strangulation. Never tie a pacifier around your baby’s neck. Tie up cords from curtains, wall hangings, and blinds to keep them out of your baby’s reach. Never suspend a toy from a string tied across a crib or playpen, and remove the mobile from the crib before your baby is able to sit up. Use fitted sheets, and tuck blankets below your baby’s underarms.
12. Rescue. Learn infant first aid, CPR, and the baby Heimlich maneuver.
• Toys and toy chests. Toys send thousands of kids to emergency rooms every year. Most of the injured children are younger than two years old. Toy chests have figured in numerous baby deaths when they’ve fallen on a baby’s neck.
Prevention: Buy quality toys and inspect them for sturdiness; make sure there are no sharp corners and edges that your baby might fall on; check for pinch points or small parts that could be ingested. (See our baby toy suggestions on page 344 in 4. Gear Guide.)
• Bureaus and shelves. Simple chests with drawers and open shelves don’t look dangerous, but they crash over on top of tots who try to use the pulled-out drawers or shelves as stair steps for getting to the top—sometimes with fatal results. Drawers can also drop out, crashing on small feet and toes. Babies can also be injured when they pull television sets over on themselves as they climb.
Prevention: Fasten the chest and shelves in your child’s room to the wall by using a special safety strap, or an L-shaped bracket found in hardware stores. Install stops at the back of all drawers so they can’t be pulled out and fall. Move the television out of reach.
• Detergents and cleaners. Babies aren’t discerning about what’s safe to put in their mouths and what’s not. Bleach, cleaners, and detergents—the types of bottles and boxes you store under your sink—are dangerous! Dishwashing detergent in gels and powders can cause severe, disfiguring mouth and throat burns. This kind of accident happens most often when a tot scoops some out of the cup on the dishwasher door before the parent closes it.
Prevention: Store toxic detergents and chemicals high out of baby’s reach. Don’t have the dishwasher door open when your tot’s in the kitchen. Wipe down detergent spills and residues with paper towels and discard them safely.
• Vitamin pills and medications. Childproof caps on medicines aren’t child PROOF! They simply serve to slow children down several minutes before they get inside. Children can overdose on chewable vitamin pills if they manage to get into them. Ingesting too much iron is particularly dangerous. Acetaminophen (Tylenol®), can cause organ damage if a child accidentally eats the pills or is overdosed. Heart medicine, antidepressants, and blood pressure pills—the types of medication that a child can easily access in purses and bedside tables—can be harmful and possibly fatal.
Prevention: Bathroom sinks are easy to climb. Clear out the medicine cabinet and throw away outdated medications. Put the others in a box on a high shelf. Store mouthwash out of reach, too. Remove medications from the bedside table’s drawer. Make it a habit to store your purse out of reach. Measure liquid medications with extreme care under a bright light, and only under your physician’s advice. Keep the national poison control center’s number handy (800-222-1222).
• Hair dryers, radios, and electrical outlets. People can be electrocuted, especially in older homes without circuit breakers, when hair dryers and radios fall into sinks and bathtubs. Kids love experimenting with electrical outlets because they’re usually at child’s-eye level. They get their small, damp fingers wedged between a plug and the outlet, or they stick pins, keys, or other metal objects inside and get shocked.
Prevention: Unplug and store bathroom hair dryers and radios until you’re ready to use them. Install circuit breakers for bathroom outlets. Cover electrical outlets in the rest of the house with screw-on cases that snap shut to protect plugs from small hands. Find these at hardware stores and baby departments in retail stores. (Note: Small, plastic plug covers can be pried loose by a child and can cause suffocation when they get caught in the throat.)
• Cribs and walkers. More babies die from crib-related accidents than all other baby-product-related accidents. It’s the old heirloom cradles and hand-me-down cribs that are the most lethal. Broken hardware or crib bars, gaps between bars or mattresses and crib sides, and corner posts that capture neck holes in clothing— all can strangle and kill. Babies love to roll around in upright walkers with wheels, but these dangerous devices send about 20,000 babies to emergency rooms every year. Some of the small patients suffer serious head injuries because walkers typically tumble down staircases headfirst.
Prevention: Don’t use an old crib; instead, purchase a new, certified model. (You’ll spot the sticker on the frame.) Don’t let your baby use a walker—buy a stationary entertainer without wheels, instead. (For more about choosing safe baby products, see page 279 in 4. Gear Guide.)
Garage hazards
• Garage door opener. Children have been killed when they were captured and crushed after automatic garage doors slammed down on them. Test your automatic garage door to make certain it springs back open when it encounters any resistance, such as a brick or a carton.
Prevention: If your garage door doesn’t stop immediately and reverse, have the safety reverse repaired or replace the door.
• Gas water heater. The pilot light on water heaters can ignite and explode from gasoline or simply fumes from spilled gasoline. In a typical accident a gas can is accidentally knocked over or spilled while a lawn mower is getting filled inside the garage.
WARNING! Suctioned Baby Bathtub Seats
Since 1983, more than 125 babies have drowned in bathtub-suction-seat– related accidents, usually when the baby has been left alone or with a sibling in the bathtub, often for only a few minutes. The problem is that the seats give parents a false sense of security about their baby’s safety. A baby can drown in only a few minutes. The typical bathtub-seat drowning happens when a parent leaves the baby happily playing in the water to answer the doorbell or the telephone. The suction cups on the seat release, and the baby is plummeted face-forward into the water or slips under the seat belt to quickly drown. Avoid these seats at all costs.
Prevention: Always fasten the top of the gas container tightly, store it in a locked cabinet, and don’t pour gas in an enclosed space or near a pilot light of any kind.
• Paint thinners, antifreeze, and other chemicals. Tots will play with caustic chemicals and even drink them.
Prevention: Keep chemicals in a locked cabinet and never transfer them into soda bottles, milk jugs, or other appealing containers. Post the number of the national poison control center near the kitchen phone. If your child does ingest a toxic chemical, don’t try to make her vomit unless you’re instructed to do so. It could double the damage!
• Ladders and shelves. Toddlers love to climb and don’t understand that shelves and ladders will fall forward if they pull on them.
Prevention: Hang ladders up on hooks to keep your toddler off, and bolt shelves to the wall using L-shaped brackets.
• Tools. Tots like to imitate what their moms and dads do. They will pull down and handle drills, saws, and other dangerous tools, and may even succeed in turning them on.
Prevention: Put a safety gate on the door to your work area. Shorten cords so they are out of reach, and unplug tools and store them safely out of reach when not in use. Keep tots out of the area while you’re working.
• Backing up. Children are at risk of being rolled over by vehicles backing out of the garage or driveway.
Prevention: Always check around your car before backing out, and have an alarm installed in your car that sounds when it goes into reverse. Create a secure, fenced-in area for your child to play rather than using the garage or driveway.
Yard dangers
• Pools, tubs, and buckets. Drowning is a major killer of small children, and they can drown in only a couple of inches of water within a few minutes. Babies can drown in bathtubs, wading pools, diaper pails, and mop buckets.
Prevention: Protect an outdoor pool with a fence and a gate that locks automatically. Drain all buckets and wading pools and store them upside down. If there’s an unprotected pool or body of water nearby, teach your tot about the dangers of water and have her wear a life vest outdoors. Don’t leave uncovered mop buckets with water in them around in the house.
• Lawn mowers. Parents and grandparents alike are guilty of believing that giving a tot a joy ride on a ride-on mower is a good idea. It isn’t. Babies have been horribly injured from falls and being run over by mowers or hurt when the mowers threw up sticks and rocks. Curious tots have lost fingers and hands from reaching under the mower while it was idling and a parent’s back was turned.
Prevention: Don’t teach your tot that lawnmowers are safe and friendly. They’re not. Keep your baby safely inside while mowing is going on.
• Dogs. Dogs bite millions of people in the United States annually, and send more than 800,000 a year to emergency rooms. Most victims are children, bitten by dogs that usually live in the neighborhood. Be especially wary of nervous, wiry, small animals and guard dogs kept in kennels or behind fences, since they could attack your child or bite through the fence.
Prevention: Teach your child proper “animal manners” and warn her not to approach unfamiliar dogs, cats, or other animals or to try to corner them. Don’t buy a breed with a history of viciousness. Get rid of a pet that snaps at your child; insist that local ordinances about dogs being fenced and leashed are enforced in your neighborhood; and report any “near misses.”
• Plants. Many household plants and blossoming spring flowers can be toxic. Though most are not fatal if swallowed, they can cause burning to the mouth as well as stomach pain.
Prevention: For a more extensive list of poisonous plants, the site www.familyfirstonline.com/poison.htm offers a list of common plant dangers.
• Playgrounds. Although they appear to be great for meeting children’s play needs, most playgrounds have serious hazards, too. For example, children have sustained severe head injuries from falling from playground equipment onto noncushioned, hard surfaces, such as asphalt and compacted earth. Even a headfirst fall from just two feet can cause a serious head injury. Children’s monkey bars and climbers result in falls and broken bones. Sliding boards strangle children when the hood strings from coats entangle in hardware. Toddlers are routinely struck by swings. Sandboxes are breeding grounds for parasites thriving in animal feces.
Prevention: Always supervise your kids at play. If the surface beneath climbing structures isn’t adequately cushioned, don’t allow your children to use the equipment. Keep your child away from public sandboxes, and keep home sandboxes covered when not in use.
• Walkers and ride-on toys. Often parents make the mistake of buying a ride-on toy, tricycle, or beginner’s bicycle that’s too large in hopes that their child will grow into it. Babies’ ride-on toys don’t have brakes. They fall over when the front wheel is turned too far to one side, which only makes them more difficult to control. Children are killed when trikes roll them out into the street or when their parents back their vehicles into them. Children sustain injuries when bikes fall over or go out into the street.
Prevention: Don’t let your tot use a ride-on toy outdoors when she doesn’t have the body skills or judgment to protect herself from harm. Postpone buying a ride-on toy or trike until your toddler is at least three years old, and then teach her how to steer and stop and to always wear a helmet. Don’t use a wheeled device as a babysitter: Always stay right with your child. Before you buy a wheeled toy, make sure you have a safe riding place that isn’t near a driveway or road. (For more about choosing a stationary exerciser, see page 346 in 4. Gear Guide.)
The Baby-Safe Home
One study of babyproofing products found that they were far from fail-safe. Clever babies could figure out safety locks and other devices within a few minutes. Those findings underscore the fact that nothing can protect your baby better than your own constant supervision.
It’s important to prepare for emergencies before they strike. Learn how to administer CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) and first aid, and create a viable fire plan. These can make the difference between life and death for your baby and other members of your family. Sign up for a CPR/first-aid course today with the Red Cross, the “Y,” or your local rescue squad. “Better safe than sorry,” as our grandmothers would say!
Here is a list of babyproofing devices along with the areas in your house that you should babyproof:
• Safety gates. At the top and bottom of staircases and basement stairs.
• Electrical outlet covers. On all electrical outlets.
• Stove knob covers. On the front of the stove.
• Fireplace guard. In front of the fireplace.
• Corner guards On each corner of the coffee table.
• Double-sided rug tape. Under throw rugs to secure them.
• Cord shorteners. On kitchen appliances and drapery/window-blind cords.
• Skid-proof tub mat. In the bathtub.
• Lid lock. On toilet seat.
• Medicine cabinet lock. On front of medicine cabinet.
• Drawer and cabinet locks. On kitchen drawers, dresser drawers, and TV-stand doors.
• Lowered mattress support. On crib.
• L-shaped brackets/shelf fasteners. On backs of shelves.