Home safety is essential when living in a home with young children, pets, and lots of hazards to consider. When your child reaches that mobile age where she begins to ramble all around the house, you know you have changes to make. Everything in your home, whether practical or ornamental, must be examined for the safety of your child.

Home Safety: How to Create a Safe and Beautiful Home

Many parents see this as the beginning of the end of a stylish home. But the fact is that nothing could be further from the truth. Smart home safety is not incompatible with a trendy, beautifully-decorated home. In fact, some of the things you can do to help keep your child safe can actually enhance the look of your home. Others may need to be changed temporarily but can go back to the old look as the child grows.

We know the basic things that we need to do to keep our children safe. We must make sure they can’t open doors that they don’t need to open, ensure that dangerous products like cleaners and medication are inaccessible, and watch out for special hazards like slip hazards, electrical devices, and space heaters. This goes for the whole house, but in particular for the child’s room.

Safe Kids gives great Child’s Room Safety for your Home and Family.

So let’s go through those major areas and look at how we can mitigate these dangers without making the house look like a fortress.

Creating a Safe Home around Common Hazards

Toddlers tend to keep a steady supply of bruises and bumps on their bodies. That’s just part of learning to maintain their balance and watch their footing. But there are always hazards that can make things worse.

Staircases are a notorious hazard. When a child is still too small to use steps unassisted, they can be blocked off. Everybody knows that, but most people assume that it must be done with ugly, chunky plastic gates. Fortunately, that’s not the case. Many stores sell gates made of real wood that can match your existing color scheme. We love these creative baby gate ideas on Houzz.

Floors can be trouble as well. Many people love having hardwood and ceramic tile in the home, but these surfaces are notoriously slippery and unforgivingly hard. Some well-placed, well-secured area rugs, runners, and scatter rugs can eliminate the most likely slip-and-fall areas. And when your little one is big enough to perambulate more safely, the rugs can be put away and your beautiful floor is still there.

Smart Safety for Storage

When your child is still in the crib, it’s not a problem to have your household cleaners or medications in any particular location. Once the child is walking instead of crawling, though, there are two hands freed up for exploration, and sometimes that exploration can lead to poisoning.

We store things in locations that are convenient for us, but a point comes where we must think of the child first. Rather than fortify the cabinet under the sink just so that we can keep the kitchen cleaner there, why not put safe items like paper products in that location and relocate the hazardous products to a higher place?

The same goes for things like medication. Sometimes we keep required daily medication right out in the open to make sure we remember it, and those daily pill organizers are very easy for toddlers to open. The smart thing to do is to get those meds into a higher cabinet, out of sight and out of reach, and use some other reminder to trigger the daily dose. Perhaps you can leave a cup on the counter where the medicine once stood.

Ensure your Home is Safe with Technological Safety Ideas

What’s better than never taking your eyes off your child? Taking your eyes off your child without missing what he’s doing. There are lots of technological options to help us keep an eye on our kids when they aren’t within sight.

The pool is the first place many people think of. Floating alarms sound an audible alert if something disturbs the water’s surface. Of course, the pool should be locked up when there’s no adult supervision around, but a backup is great.

Video surveillance can help as well. You can sit in one room cooking or be watching TV while your child plays in another room, with your eyes able to check your smartphone periodically to make sure everything is okay.

Any parent will always put their child’s safety ahead of stylish clothes, vehicles, or furnishings. It’s why we spend Saturday nights watching animated movies instead of out enjoying drinks with friends.

But there’s a middle ground where we can do both. Our homes can look great, function normally, and still be safe for our kids. It just takes a little planning.

For more safety tips on Stagetecture, look through our home safety archives.