6 Toddler-Safety Improvements for Your Household

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Welcoming children into your family is a wonderful thing, but it does take some adjustment to get used to. Don’t worry, because we’re certain you’re about to make a fantastic parent. If you’re about to become a grandparent, well, odds are you’re already quite familiar with how to raise children, and now it’s your time to give the advice.

No matter what, welcoming new little people into your household does require some preparation. We know all the conventional measures – a baby crib or cot, a mobile, door-catchers to prevent your cat from jumping in the crib with your child at night, non-toxic cleaning solutions, and many other considerations help out.

But babies, thank heavens, for the first eighteen months they tend to be easy to manage, thanks to their inability to move anywhere with pace. That all changes when the toddler period comes in, as children learn to walk before the approximate age of eighteen months. 

Now, you have a ball of curiosity and fun that will quite happily toddle or run anywhere he or she can, and this added freedom means your house becomes that much more dangerous. This is why it’s important to make some toddler safety improvements to your household, especially if you’re a parent, but also if you’re a grandparent welcoming your loved ones into your home on a regular basis.

With that in mind, please consider some of the following advice:

1. Cover Sharper Corners

It’s important to remember that while a toddler is probably not going to sprint around your house, they can still pick up some speed. This means any corners within the household can be quite harmful to them if you’re not careful.

Luckily, there’s a simple fix – foam corner covers on the sharp ends of coffee tables, dining tables, welsh dressers, or any other furnishing you think should be protected can be a good idea. While this doesn’t turn your home into a bumper-car funhouse where you can run into anything and everything without injury, it will heavily reduce the chance of injuries. Just makes sure the foam corners are properly fitted, and your curious toddler hasn’t pulled them off.

2.  Cupboard & Draw Catches

Toddlers will explore anything they can, and you can’t realistically be expected to never use your bottom drawers or cupboards ever again because of that. Of course, there are essential changes you need to make such as ensuring the cleaning products are stored higher than below the sink this time, because you can never 100% guarantee your toddler won’t find and open them.

Thankfully, internal catches can make this process much harder to deal with. If you press down on the catch within the drawer, then it will open as normal, but your toddler is unlikely to have the refined motor control and strength to do so themselves, and their attempts will make a great deal of noise; giving you fair warning.

3. Safety Gates Are Your Friend

Even if you live in a one-story apartment, bungalow, or smaller house, safety gates can be helpful. Sure, they’re conventionally used to block access to the bottom and top of a staircase, which is obviously helpful to prevent your toddler from trying to climb.

That said, you can also use them elsewhere. You may just use them to block off the dining area where you may have a pre-laid table with glasses and other crockery or cutlery stored. Perhaps you need to keep your home office utterly free from the wandering hands of a toddler, and so you’ll place one there, too.

Safety gates tend to use easy-screw mechanics that allow you to stabilize them against a door arch without actually causing damage to the fixtures themselves. This means you can easily pick them up and place them anywhere with a door separating the spaces.

4. Protect Power Sockets

Depending on the country you live in, power sockets may be more or less dangerous. For example, British plug sockets won’t be “live” until the top catch is unlocked which is why they use that three-pronged plug connection to improve safety. 

That said, it doesn’t take too much for a toddler to insert a pencil into a hole they find interesting, and we all know that toddlers can quite easily have wet hands for a variety of reasons. In other words, sockets should just be considered dangerous as a matter of course, the same way you might treat a completely unloaded firearm as loaded no matter what, just so you never forgo your correct handling and approach to safety.

There’s an easy solution here – simply use a power socket cover to completely protect the power socket hole. These have mini-catches inside that take a little dexterity to remove. You can also use power plug protection shields to make sockets you need to use a little more protected and hard to access. You’ll find that a household can never be 100% safe at all times, even for an able-bodied adult, but there’s real worth in minimizing risk at every level.

5. Garden Care & Tree Trimming

For any toddler, the garden is a magical place, and if you’re lucky enough to have one on your property then it’s important to make sure your toddler can explore it, under observation, as safely as possible.

Garden care is more than just locking the gates and ensuring your fences are properly maintained, though that’s a good start. First, it’s important to make sure your garden path or steps are in good condition, and to always help your toddler up and down them (or just simply carry them), if there’s a chance they might be hurt.

One less-spoken-of consideration to keep in mind is that of tree trimming or outright tree removal. A weakened, perhaps even rotting tree can give off spores or potentially spread infections to the rest of your plant life. But as you can imagine, a weakened or dead tree also has branches that can fall, and that in itself can be dangerous for your toddler, or for anyone who walks under that space.

Once your toddler grows into a small child, well, we all know how they love climbing trees. That’s why sometimes, tree trimming isn’t good enough, you need to outright remove damaged trees and unroot the stump completely. This also has the side benefit of cleaning up your garden and perhaps attending to gardening issues you’ve hoped to resolve for a while.

6. Window Catches & Furniture Orientation

It’s good to look at your home through the eyes of a toddler. So for example, let’s say you have a spare room on the second floor of the house. Because it’s a smaller room, you might have a bed laying across the wall, perhaps under the window.

For a teen or adult, this might not cause that much of a problem, because even with the window fully open you’re unlikely to climb out. Toddlers don’t have that reasoning capacity, and so this possibility of climbing up and out, if in front of them, might appeal to their explorer’s curiosity.

That’s why it’s good to add window catches and to get out of the habit of leaving some windows open for ventilation during the day. However, you can also reorient your furniture so that even if you’re not observing them, they have nowhere to climb on, out, or onto.

This takes a little bit of work to get right, but you’ll be thankful for your effort thinking through how to re-orient your space. For example, if you place your coffee table against a wall in your living room as opposed to the center, the chances of your toddler falling into it (remember they have less stability than you and I), are much reduced.

With this advice, you’re sure to toddler-proof your house, as you work on house-proofing your toddler.