When your little tykes get big enough to crawl, climb, and walk around, you’re going to have to start worrying about a whole new level of dangerous things they can get into, especially in the kitchen.  Just the thought of a toddler rooting through the trash, getting stuck in the fridge, or opening a drawer full of knives is enough to send any parent into panic mode.  Luckily, you’re not the first parent to face these trials and tribulations in the course of child-rearing, so there are plenty of solutions out there for the concerned adult that would like to make the kitchen a safe place for the little ones.  Here are just a few tips to help you do so.

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Gates

Baby gates won’t keep your kids out forever, but they’ll work well enough during the stage where anything and everything must be sampled to see if it’s food, or when every door, drawer, and unseen surface that is just within reach (the stovetop, for example) represents an adventure waiting to be discovered.  So until your children are old enough to understand (and heed) you when you warn them that something is dangerous, your best bet to preserve their ongoing health and safety is to keep them far away from the many trouble zones represented in the kitchen.

Height

Your main advantage over your kids, at least when they’re young, is that you have access to overhead spaces that are beyond the grasp of their tiny fingers.  However, you should be aware that some kids are climbers, so although it’s a good idea to put harmful items in the higher cabinets, you may want to secure them against entry, as well.

Latches

While you can certainly keep some hazardous items out of reach in the kitchen, it behooves you to put latches on all doors and drawers (including the fridge), and there are a couple of reasons.  First of all, you can’t possibly store everything out of reach (unless you are okay with the idea of foregoing half of the usable storage space in your kitchen).  This means that potentially hazardous items (cleaning solvents, sharp utensils, and heavy pots and pans, for example) could be on the lower level.  And where would you put the trash?  Since you’ll have to store some items within easy reach of your children, simply secure them with child-proof latches.

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Locks

Kids are like little velociraptors, constantly testing the defenses.  So eventually they’re going to figure out how even sophisticated latching systems release.  You’d hope by this point they’d be smart enough not to drink the dish soap or pull an iron skillet down on their heads, but since you can’t really be sure of that, you may want to switch to locks on the doors, at least for cabinets that contain the most potentially hazardous items.

Alarms

Okay, so this might seem like overkill, but if your kids are persistent, some kind of closed-circuit alarm system could be necessary to ensure that they’re not breaking and entering in your kitchen cabinets.  If you’re really paranoid (say you have older kids that get left home alone on occasion, and you’re worried about the well-stocked liquor cabinet) you can even get an alarm system that alerts your smart phone when it goes off.  It doesn’t take a specialist in loss control management to know that kids are going to try to get into things they’re not supposed to when your back is turned, so you need to protect them from themselves by any and all means available.

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 It wasn’t until last night, I truly appreciated the security and protection (and the sense of fortification) a wireless alarm provides. After watching a late night horror flick at home with my wife and kids, I decided to check upon my burglar intrusion alarm only to find that it wasn’t working. On normal days, it wouldn’t bother me and I would just go to sleep and see what I can do the very next day but after watching a sociopathic serial killer for 2 hours, I simply became paranoid!

Wireless Alarms; it all began with the advent of wireless technology which taught the world how to disgracefully hate anything that comes with a wire. The very first wireless alarm that man has ever known could have been man himself. Imagine ape man coming across a big bear and trying to signal his peers using his crude ‘ooga ooga’ language! But the electronic wireless alarms became emerging in the early 1900s. To be very exact, the first Electro-mechanical system was devised by Edwin Holmes in 1852 where he used a gong to warn when the alarm was tipped. The ‘tipping point’ was a wire which when disturbed caused an attached solenoid to get activated which subsequently caused it to strike the gong. 150 years later, no burglar is dumb enough to step on a tripping ‘wire’ so we had to move on! Wireless alarms gained popularity in the 1930s when remote controlling devices started to mature. This might seem too early but we have clear evidence of such sort used in the 2 world wars. The initial transmission medium of these alarms was electromagnetic hence they had limited operations, range and functionality. Later in the 1950s, with the advent of the transistor, things started to mature for the wireless alarm at a rapid pace.

For a Wireless Alarm to work it requires a trigger. This trigger is applicable only in a specific ‘range’ of the alarm and once activated, it sends a signal through the ‘wireless medium’ to a circuit which in turn takes an action. This action can be anything; a phone call to your cell phone, crazy ringing, a call to the police or maybe play a nice Backstreet Boy’s song to annihilate the burglar completely. This is the basic working on which each and every alarm works. Now the wireless medium can be any. Your wireless sensing device could be sending signals via infra red, or it might be feeding a photovoltaic receiver (very old concept) or it might have a microwave field or ultrasonic field around it and detects any intrusions if that field is disturbed (which results in a Dopler Shift). The possibilities are endless and that is why we have a plethora of wireless alarms these days that range from glass break alarms to motion detecting alarms. The problem doesn’t finish here because it is man who has created these devices so ‘man’ got smarter before these devices got smarter. Due to this reason burglars and criminals come with an improved skill set! He isn’t going to trip on a wire to let you know he is in the house! To tackle this precarious situation companies are equipping their systems with fool proof advancement. It is more like a cat and mouse game where the cat needs to grow on longer claws to catch the sneaky mouse.

Never the less, there are countless advantages to having a burglar alarm installed at your home. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy or very high-tech. Simple motion detectors don’t cost much. So much so, if you do a little bit of research, you can make one of your own using a webcam and a computer!  My parting words would be to ‘play smart to outsmart’ and in the end stay safe.

Russell Hudson is an interior decorator and trainee burglar alarm fitter with a passion for non-horror movies, originally from the United Kingdom now living in Sacramento, California.

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