<\/p>\nI apologize for introducing a potentially grim topic, but can we talk child safety here for a bit? And I’m thinking particularly about “one-strike” hazards. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
p{color:gray}. Photo: Lucy explores the vacuum cleaner.<\/p>\n
What I mean by a one-strike hazard is any safety problem which doesn’t give you even one free pass, but which presents immediate danger to life or limb without warning. Car accidents fall into this category: you don’t say to yourself, “Well, let’s leave her unbuckled and see how she does if we have a little fender bender” (especially since it might not be merely a fender bender). You buckle her in every time in readiness for that first time. Likewise, everyone knows to preemptively cover open electrical sockets, which is why you can buy socket guards in any grocery store. The door left open at the top of our basement stairs is a third example. These are all hazards we have to think about _before_ there’s a first incident.<\/p>\n
But of course, not all safety concerns are like this. There are a bunch of cookbooks on a shelf in our kitchen that Lucy loves to pull out one by one, just for the joy of the noise they make hitting the floor, apparently. Is this a safety concern, in that she could get a boo-boo from dropping the wrong book in the wrong way? Sure. And might it get to be such a repeated problem that we’d have to move all the books to an inaccessible location. Yes. But this hardly seems like a one-strike hazard, so the benefits of her free exploration seem to outweigh the risk of giving her a couple chances to get a bump or bruise. (We’re so thankful that Lucy’s bloodshed has so far been limited to “one nail-clipping incident”:\/news\/2006\/the-lucy-files-month-4-day-5\/, and she’s never taken a tumble that had her crying for more than a minute.)<\/p>\n
Anyway — now that we’ve got this high-mobility device with poor on-board safety software (a.k.a., Lucy) bopping around the house, what are the one-strike hazards we should be preemptively guarding against? Here’s the beginnings of a list, but please chime in with ones you’ve seen in your own (or others’) homes:<\/p>\n
* open electrical wall sockets
\n* crib mattresses that are “too high”:\/news\/2007\/crib-corn\/
\n* open staircases
\n* stovetop pots within reach
\n* unusually heavy, topple-able objects within reach<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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