Childproofing your home
Written by: Cally Worden
Cheap Ways to Childproof Your Home
Young children have an amazing interest in the world around them. The most mundane things can stimulate the fascination of your little ones in ways that as adults we would never contemplate. Such a desire to discover new things can easily get children into sticky situations, and provides endless opportunities to get hurt. Childproofing your home is a necessary part of raising kids and provides great peace of mind.
Retailers know this, of course, and have been delighted to flood the market with “essential” (and often costly) items to help you along the way. There are, however, many free and cheap ways to childproof your home. The following tips will help to keep your children safe, and your blood pressure steady, without busting the bank:
Protect your stove
Stoves can be protected very simply from little pyromaniacs by removing the knobs and keeping them in a bowl on the worktop for use when you need them. My son loves to twist the cooker knobs and removing them just takes away the temptation.
Reduce your plug sockets
Instead of investing in countless covers for your plug sockets, wherever possible move a piece of weighty furniture in front of them. A perfect deterrent for little fingers.
Protect your loo roll
Toddlers think they are the Andrex puppy, and unravelling a loo roll is enormous fun (actually it is, have you ever tried it??!). To protect your paper from those cheeky little hands, installing it so that you have to pull the paper up to unravel it can often be enough to thwart them. Putting it up out of reach is an alternative, or surf online to find a homemade-loo-roll cover that you can easily make yourself.
Use distractions
If you want to keep you children away from certain places in the house, such as the fireplace, create a space in the same room AWAY from the danger-zone, and make it so child-friendly your kids will naturally gravitate there.
Get creative to protect your cot
If your toddler starts gnawing the cot bars to alleviate teething pain, getting old, clean swaddling clothes and blankets and tying them tightly around the bars is a free alternative to buying expensive cot protection rails.
Block cupboards off on the cheap
Rolling up an old magazine and wedging it across two handles of your kitchen cupboards is a great alternative to costly cupboard locking devices. It also recycles your papers for a while, so you can feel green and virtuous too! Locking door handles together with strong elastic bands is an equally effective alternative.
Homemade corner bumpers
Packing foam and tape is a useful way to provide protection from sharp corners on coffee tables and other low level furniture.
Roll transparent sticky back plastic onto low level windows
This will prevent any non-shatterproof glass from showering your children with shards in the event of a breakage.
Tape down cables
An inexpensive roll of packing tape is usually strong enough to tape down cables any that run along the floor, and prevent your baby or toddler yanking them.
Ultimately, the best childproofing method is parental supervision, but we all know that you simply cannot keep your eyes on them every second of the day. The above tips are not all foolproof, but they do buy you a good degree of protection, for a limited outlay.
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