Having kids at home can be a fun and exciting journey. There are so many moments of love and tenderness that you might even get lost in your kid or kids. However, as adults, it is our responsibility to ensure a safe and secure environment for our kids to grow up. Infants, toddlers, and young children are still in early stages where they might not remember or understand instructions to not touch or not do something.

From the time children start crawling and walking without support, till they turn five years old, they cannot be trusted to stay safe on their own.

You slowly need to teach them safe habits and dangers of not listening to you. Letting children know which practices are safe and which are not is very important. The best way to communicate with children is to show them pictures and diagrams in a logical way. A helpful drawing or an explainer video with animated characters can also help children understand safety concepts faster and better.

Let us look at ways that you can safe proof your home for your kids.

Electrical sockets:

Little children have a habit of crawling towards electric outlets and sticking their fingers into the cavities. Doing this can cause shocks. Use protective coverings and guards to cover all electrical sockets up to 3 feet from the floor to ensure your children stay safe.

Household disinfectants and cleaning equipment:

Store all liquids, soaps, and cleaning material in overhead compartments or shelves. Cleaning equipment contains chemicals that are incredibly harmful if consumed. Infants and toddlers do not understand the difference between washing liquid and juices. They might try to drink down the compounds. You can also put child locks on cabinets near the floors.

Kitchen equipment:

Equipment like hot ovens, water bottles, kitchen knives, cheese graters and so on should be kept out of reach of children. Ensure you have protective covers for all your knives and drawers that house pointed sharp objects. Even your kitchen scissors should have blade protectors on them.

Bathrooms:

Even safety razors, shaving creams and foams, hand washes, gels, body creams, and so on should be kept away in closed containers or shelves. Toddlers and small kids might harm or cut themselves by mistake. Keep an anti-slip mat in your bathroom and shower area to prevent children from slipping and hurting their heads.

Store medicines:

All medication, including children’s drugs, should be kept away from kids and children. Kids do not understand the importance of dosage instructions. They can easily overdose on cough syrup if not taken under the supervision of an adult. Ensure all syrup bottles have child-proof caps that are difficult to open.

Safety gates:

Install as many safety gates as possible throughout your home. Safety gates help provide a secure environment for children to roam around. Install safety gates at entrances that lead to attics, staircases, basements, gardens, backyards, and kitchens. Installing a safety door or gate at the opening of your toolshed is a proper precaution against unwary toddlers.

Secure the furniture:

Secure lightweight furniture to the floors or walls to prevent it from toppling over. Once toddlers learn to walk and run, they invariably run into large objects that may fall over. Sometimes children also like to climb the furniture around the house. While the objects may break or fall over, protecting your child should be your utmost priority. Anchoring all the movable furniture down helps protect your child.

Gates and fences:

If you have a house with a small garden that leads on to the main road, install fencing and gates. Children start playing outside from an early age. Fences keep stray dogs and cats out while keeping your child inside. Additionally, there are cars and bikes on the roads. Keeping your children from wandering outside will help prevent accidents.

Store glassware and cutlery:

Store glassware and cutlery out of reach of your children. These objects can break and shatter easily. Children are known to be clumsy and will not understand the dangers of broken pieces of glass. To avoid the bleeding and crying, store all your cutlery, crockery, and glassware away from children and lock with child-proof locks.

Cover edges and pointy corners:

Children are at very awkward heights. They tend to get injured by corners of tables, chairs, and electronic appliances. Use child-friendly edge covers that are made of a hard, rubberized material to protect your children. If you are unsure of the rubber, use foam to cover sharp corners of tables and chairs and other furniture.

Raising children well is extremely important. With hectic schedules, work, schools, and allied classes to take care of, keeping your child healthy every day can be a challenge. There is a lot to do in too short a time, and there isn’t enough time or energy to concentrate on everything at once. The most significant concern for parents today is providing a healthy lifestyle for their children.

Maintaining a healthy lifestyle and keeping your children fit has a host of benefits. Some of them are preventing severe health issues, keeping their immunity high, avoiding flu and colds on a regular basis, keeping asthma and breathing issues at bay, and so on. Children tend to mirror the adults around them. If you adopt a healthy living pattern, your children will also follow suit. Setting a good example is the best way to encourage health and fitness in your kids. With the help from Dr Lauren Jones from www.doctor-4-u.co.uk, we’ve identified some tried and tested tips to keep your child healthy in the long term.

Put them to sleep

Yes, that right! Put your kids to sleep at a set time each night and wake them up every morning at the same time. This will help establish their metabolism, assist with any mood swings, irritation and tantrums, growing aches, and any stress issues they might face. Kids need minimum 8 hours of restful and undisturbed sleep daily. Many children avoid going to bed at a set time because they feel they are being pressured. The trick here would be to emphasise how sleep helps them grow bigger and better. Reasoning with children helps better than forcing them. This will promote their physical, mental, and cognitive development. Oli from thefablab.co.uk agreed “It’s essential for kids growth and overall health to get a good sleep, while they may have a lot of energy kids actually need more sleep than adults.”

Healthy eating

It isn’t always possible to plan your meals and lunch boxes. At such times, make an educated guess about which foods will cause the least amount of harm to the body. Take your children grocery shopping with you and let them help you pick out foods by reading the ingredients and labels. If you make a game of it and involve them, the excitement to eat certain foods will remain. Let them know the advantages of eating certain foods like oranges, grains, lean meats, carbohydrates, and so on with the help of useful examples. Eating a particular diet will help with stronger bones, or shinier hair, or strength to run faster, and so on.

Exercise daily

If you want your children to get some form of exercise daily, they must see you do it too. If you plan on starting yoga, teach it to your kids and make it a daily family event. Same is the case with soccer, sports, or running. If your kids need to improve their alertness and concentration, enroll them in music, dance, or defense classes to encourage motor coordination and better focus. Regular exercise helps create stronger muscle groups, denser bones, alleviates stress, and increases immunity. This helps your children grow up to be stronger and smarter adults.

Wash hands regularly

Kids hate doing this. We hated it too. Seasonal flu, germs, diseases, dirt, grime, and dust can all reside on the hands. Dirty and unclean hands spread illnesses amongst kids faster than we can blink. Like with eating healthy food, make washing hands a game. You can make a song for your kids to sing while washing hands that speaks about all the dirt and germs going away or you can tell them it is a germ hunt or something similar to make washing their hands enjoyable. Ensure your kids wash their hands for a minimum of 15 to 20 seconds with soap or antiseptic hand wash. Buy fruity smelling soaps or containers with animated characters on them so that your children will want to use these soaps to clean their hands daily.

Teach healthy habits

Many children miss school days due to some form of illness or the other. The best way to improve child health is to inculcate daily healthy habits. One of them, as discussed earlier would be hand washing. Teach them to cough and sneeze appropriately into a handkerchief or tissue paper and how to correctly throw the tissue away. Many times, viruses spread through unhealthy contact with other children in playgrounds or running and playing. Explain to your children why they must never rub their eyes without washing their hands first. Encourage your kids to avoid sharing water bottles, cups, and spoons with friends and other children since bacteria and viruses are easily transferred through saliva.