Why most baby proofing advice falls short
Most baby proofing advice looks helpful. Much of it is incomplete, impractical, or written to sell something, and a parent reading it has no way to tell which. This post is about how to tell.
Three pieces of advice you will read everywhere
Put a toilet lock on every toilet
We recommend one, on the toilet in the bathroom where the baby bathes, or the bathroom that adjoins the nursery. Every other bathroom is one the baby should not be in at all, and a door solves that better than a lock on the tank.
The reason is not what you think. Under current toilet standards the water is too low for drowning to be the realistic concern. The concern is a child dropping things in and flushing, which produces a plumbing bill, or playing in the bowl, which produces nothing good. In our experience there are two kinds of children. One is fascinated by the flush, will stand and watch the water go around, and will flush a toilet forty times if allowed. That child needs a toilet lock. The other is frightened of the noise, runs from a flushing toilet, and may not voluntarily flush one until age nine. Roughly half of our clients use the lock we install and half do not. So we install one, in the bathroom that matters, because it is easier to add than to subtract. If your child turns out to be the first kind, we add more. That is rarely needed. What we do find, in homes where someone put a lock on every toilet, is broken toilet locks in the guest bathrooms, because guests do not know how they work and force them.
Cushion every hard edge
We do not raise children in padded rooms. The floor is hard. The walls are hard. A cushion on a drywall corner means the child hits the wall a foot to the left instead, at the same speed, and the result is the same bump. We separate injuries from ouchies. An injury is a low, sharp corner a falling child can lacerate a face on or take an eye to; that gets cushioning. So does the coffee table, because it sits in the middle of the room where children learn to walk and it sees more action than any other piece of furniture in the house. Every edge of every dresser does not.
Gate off the whole room
Configurable gates that span a room, and hearth gates that fence off a fireplace, are recommended constantly. We rarely install either. A baby wants to be where the parent is, so a room-spanning gate produces a crying child standing at the gate. It is also the first gate a child defeats, usually around eighteen to twenty-four months, by dragging a cushion over and climbing. We have written a whole post on why we do not love hearth gates. Other baby proofers like both products because they are easy to install and expensive.
Who is giving the advice
Real expertise in baby proofing is uncommon, and the reason is simple: the only way to get it is to make a great many homes safe and see what happens afterward. That is how you learn which products hold up, which installation methods work on which walls and posts, and how the same recommendation plays out differently in a rowhouse, a split-level, and a rental.
A car seat certification or a CPR card is a fine thing to have. It is close to useless as a qualification for baby proofing a house. And a person whose credential is that they baby proofed their own home and their child is fine is telling you about one house, one child, and one set of circumstances. That does not transfer.
We have worked in thousands of homes, [CONFIRM: roughly a thousand in the past year alone], and it changed our advice. We used to recommend more, the way most baby proofers still do. Experience narrowed it. We stopped installing toilet locks everywhere. We stopped selling hearth gates and room-spanning gates. We stopped selling oven and appliance locks, which are effective in theory and useless in practice: every one on the market attaches with adhesive, appliances get hot or sweat, and the adhesive lets go. Our recommendations are now a short list of things we know work, because we have watched them work in more homes than we can count.
A test you can apply to any advice
How many families have paid this person to make their home safe?
It is not a perfect rule. It is a useful one. Someone who has been paid to solve the problem, repeatedly, has specific product solutions they know work and specific reasons for the ones they rejected. Everyone else is guessing, and many of them are guessing with an affiliate link attached.
Which brings us to reviews. Be suspicious of any product review written by someone who bought the item on Amazon; we have written about why. Be equally suspicious of the roundups on parenting websites, which are often built from the same reviews. The only publications we consider legitimate for baby proofing products are Wirecutter and Consumer Reports, because they actually test what they recommend. They still lack what we have, which is the experience of installing those products in thousands of real homes, but they are far better than anything else you will find.
What we want you to do differently
Be a little more suspicious. When you read that you need a lock on every toilet, a cushion on every corner, and a gate across the living room, ask who is saying it and how many homes they have stood in. Then read why the product, not the hazard, is where parents actually get stuck, and when it is worth hiring someone rather than working through it alone.
Families in Washington, DC, suburban Maryland, and Northern Virginia can schedule an in-home consultation. Families everywhere can book a Virtual Safety Session.