This article offers a few good reasons to use cabinet locks and safety straps when baby proofing your home, and includes tips and instructions for doing so.
The obvious benefit is that cabinet locks and safety latches help prevent death and severe injury. It is nothing unusual for infants and toddlers to tumble, fall, and roll everywhere, often resulting in plenty of cuts, scrapes, and bruises. These are the sorts of boo boos that parents can deal with. On the other side of the spectrum, thousands of infants and toddlers get hurt every year by innocently exploring the world around them. Death and severe injury to our children is not so easy to cope with. Cabinet locks eliminate some of that worry because they minimize contact with harmful items and substances, like sharp objects and cleaning products.
Grouping all of your household chemicals in their own special cupboards may even help you to get your house more organized. For example, you will want to be sure that all of your cleaning products go in one locked cupboard, such as the one under your kitchen sink. You might group other appliances like your blender, mixer, or toaster in another locked spot.
Safety straps also make parenting a little less worrisome. Some children are natural born climbers. It seems that the moment they stand up, they are climbing stairs, furniture, and pulling out drawers only to reach for the dangerous items on the counter. This presents many hazards. Climbing means the obvious potential falls and injuries, but it can cause heavy furniture to tip over on a child and cause severe injury or death. Safety straps are easy and inexpensive to install. Simply fasten them to the wall and the item of furniture and they should adequately hold up to 150 pounds of weight""preventing large furniture, such as a heavy dresser, to fall onto a child.
Not only do these items benefit you and your baby in the safety aspect, but they also allow him to do what he does best: explore the environment in which he lives. Babies need to explore. They need to see, touch, and even taste things in order to learn about and understand where they live. In fact, a baby that is allowed to learn this way is more mentally stimulated than a child who is not. They are inquisitive and love to learn""which is a quality that we should all hope for our children to have. We can allow them a little more freedom to explore if we know our bases are covered.
Of course, using these items may not keep your child perfectly safe. There are always hazards no matter how careful you are. We would go insane if we spent the next 18 years or more worrying constantly about the safety of our children. Installing these devices is at least one active step which we can take to keep them just a little bit safer. It is one step closer to peace of mind for parents.
