Finally, after 9 long months of swimming around the womb, your baby is sleeping peacefully in your arms. It’s time to bundle them up and take them home for the very first time. Up until that point though, you probably haven’t considered how hazardous your house could be to your littlest family member.
It’s about time to brush up on your baby safety knowledge.
The good news is that for the first couple of months you have a bit of breathing space to get your mind around childproofing your home. It’s really only necessary to invest your time into your baby’s safety once they are mobile and able to manoeuvre themselves into places you’d never think of, like the cleaning cupboard. We know a tile cleaning, dish washing cocktail will taste disgusting, but they don’t and they’ll mix it up faster than we can make ourselves a martini.
Safety is a state of mind
Eleanore Everet once said that “Safety is not a gadget, but a state of mind” – she couldn’t have said it more perfectly. No matter what gadgets are purchased (and paid a fortune for), they will be of no real use to the baby if the overall outlook of the parent is not about making sure that the baby is safe at all times.
Basically it’s about more than just buying a plug socket cover. It’s about making sure it’s plugged in to the empty sockets. It’s about not leaving the baby alone to find a leaver to pull that cover off. Thinking of and preventing potential problems before they become real problems.
There are many practical ways that you can up your baby safety game that involve lists of things to do around your home, but let’s focus on getting our state of mind in the right space.
Here are 5 tips that will help you keep your baby safe
- children under 1 drown in a bath
- children between 1 - 4 drown in swimming pools
- children between 5 – 8 drown in natural water.
And it’s happened where children have drowned in a shallow bowl of water on the kitchen floor. Can’t stress it enough - Be vigilant with water safety, never letting them out of your sight – especially in the bath!
It is illegal not to strap a child under the age of 3 into a car seat. This law is not because they want to add another 20 minutes to how long it already takes to leave the house, but because this is another one of the reasons that children are killed before their time.
There’s an old Proverb that goes, “Better a thousand times careful, than once dead”. You never know when you’ll be in an accident, so rather be overprepared than underprepared.
Let’s wrap it up
There’s no need to live your life in constant fear of the worst happening. Once you have changed your outlook on making your baby and their safety your first priority, it will become second nature. Then you can sit back and enjoy the rest of the adventures of parenting!
