Child Safety – Close Call Comment Contest
Child safety is a prominent concern among responsible parents worldwide. Whether you have an infant, toddler or teenager, there are a variety of safety precautions parents can take in order to protect their children from others and themselves.
Some parents begin this process before their first child is even born; others implement precautionary measures according to the child’s age. Either way, it is important that you are creating an environment for kids to learn, grow and explore safely.
Here are a few resources available to parents relating to child safety measures:
Family Education – Child Safety
National Center for Missing & Exploited Children – Child Safety
Meriter – Children’s Health – Safety Measures
Keep Kids Healthy – Childproofing the House
There are many more resources out there to assist parents in keeping their kids safe.
What measures have you taken in your home to keep your child safe? Have you ever had a close call with a child getting hurt or entering into a dangerous situation?
Close Call Comment Contest:
1. Tell how old your child(ren) is/are without using any names.
2. List any precautionary measures that you have put in place to protect your child(ren).
3. Share a close call that your child had with an injury or dangerous encounter, as well as what you learned from that situation.
I always find that I learn best from real-life examples, and nothing is more powerful than a personal story about an important topic/issue. Please take a minute to leave a comment.
Two random commenters will receive a new Schick Quattro as a small way of saying thanks for sharing your “close call” with the rest of us. You can get an extra chance to win by Subscribing to My Feed – just leave a comment letting me know you subscribed. The Contest will run through Sunday, August 10, 2008, at 12:00 midnight, however you can still share your “close calls” and tips after that date (comments will remain open).
Thanks for participating!
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Apparently I need to write more about this topic.
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Comment by Jeff @ DaddysToolbox on 8 August 2008:
Our 23 month old daughter scared us two weeks ago when she had a tsp of peanut butter from one of those dipable PB and sticks snacks. We had given her a little lick of PB the week before knowing that there are no nut allergies in our family and our pediatrician said we could start to try some PB every now and then.
What a Close Call!
Well what a scare this produced. We now found out that she has a nut allergy and we have to carry 2 Epi-Pens with us at all times in the event she accidentally eats something with nuts and starts to swell up and not breathe. Oh freakin’ scary is that?? And the doctor said, ‘There WILL BE a next time and a 3rd, 4th, 5th time…’.
You can visit my blog to read the full story and a few other PB posts, Our Peanut Scare
Jeff @ DaddysToolboxs latest discovery was..If Your Child Has a Peanut Allergy Read This
Comment by SciFi Dad on 8 August 2008:
My child is three years old.
We have gates at the top of each set of stairs (although in recent months the only one that gets closed is the upstairs one at night since she is old enough now to use stairs responsibly).
We also have cabinet locks and electrical outlet covers commonly found in most homes with a young child.
As for our close call? It’s probably a little more extreme than most people’s, but I’ll give the brief version here (the extended version is available in an old post: http://talesfromthedadside.blogspot.com/2006/03/tws-laid-up-dad.html).
It was 4am and my daughter (then 13 months) had called out for milk. My wife had not been getting much sleep lately, so I went and got my daughter and started carrying her down the stairs. I was probably still half asleep or at the very least groggy, because I missed the top step after our landing and fell down the stairs. I cradled my daughter in my arms as best as I could, and in the process did nothing to protect myself. She was fine; startled, but still signing for milk. I, on the other hand, had dislocated my foot and broken my fibula in two.
Comment by tom on 8 August 2008:
I posted about this once. My three-year-old was “helping” me fix the toilet in the upstairs bathroom, and was playing with some long-nosed pliers. Just after I’d flooded the floor with water, I heard him ask “how do these cut?” and turned around to see him start to clamp the plier’s cutters down on an electrical cord.
I stopped him but only microseconds before disaster.
The lesson: if you’re going to let your kids play with tools, don’t give them cutters, keep your eyes on them constantly, and don’t be around electrical cords that are plugged into the wall.
toms latest discovery was..Tales of the Trip, part 2: No Rest for the Weary
Comment by Hip_M0M on 8 August 2008:
I can think of many “close calls” but the one that was probably the scariest was one that I wrote about on my blog last year right after it happened…I’m not proud of the situation at all but I felt as though letting people know about the mistake I made might help them avoid similar ones:
http://happyhealthyhip.blogspot.com/2007/09/ouch-and-oh-no.html
Comment by MPS on 8 August 2008:
At work so I’ll have to keep this short.
At around 3 yrs, my son nearly choked on a grape. Yes, it’s possible.
I did something like a Heimlich on him and it popped out, thank G-D. Scared the living crap outta me.
Lesson learned: cut grapes in half until the kids are old enough to swallow them whole.
Also, an unsecured computer table once fell on top of our kid. This was some cheap-ass piece of crap we bought at IKEA I think. He was leaning on the keyboard tray and the whole thing toppled over on him.
Lesson learned: don’t buy cheap-ass furniture from IKEA, and if you must, bolt it to the wall.
Comment by Carolyn Bahm on 8 August 2008:
My oldest child is 18, but this happened when she was not quite 2. I was taking a break from blowing bubbles with her to change her diaper. I set the bubbles down beside us on the sofa and turned to reach the wipes and a diaper from the nearby diaper bag. When I turned back around, she had somehow opened the giant bottle of bubbles and upended it into her mouth, nose, and eyes and was dark red in the face, not breathing. I’d taken a CPR class, so I did everything I could think of but was frantic — holding her upside down so the fluid would drain out, flipping her off and doing blows to the back, etc. It seemed like forever before she took a shuddering breath.
Lesson learned — don’t put anything near babies if you don’t want it going in their eyes, noses, or mouths.
Comment by Lin on 8 August 2008:
My then- 14 yr old teenage son chose to break the rules about no involvement in “chat rooms”. He began “chatting” with someone my son thought was another 14 yr old boy claiming to live in the next town over. They secretly played internet games online together while everyone else was asleep, and over a period of a couple weeks, my son became very secretive and sneaky. I’d catch him on the computer in the middle of the night, having managed to discover how to bypass the lock-down passcode. Red flags were flying in my mind (since he had been molested by a church minister while in church at a young age), and being a divorced mother of six I was very concerned. Readers Digest version is that I installed computer monitoring software on the computer and discovered with the help of the police that this so-called teen was a registered sex offender trying to get to my son.
Lesson learned? Computer savvy teens can easily bypass parental controls, so parents had better be prepared for who is lurking out there to get to their kids. Children bloggers? I shake my head in fear for who is talking to those kid-bloggers.