How safety-conscious are you today when watching over visiting grandkids? 

How often do you check your home for hazards? Are you skilled at water safety if you sometimes take the grandchildren swimming or boating? Is your first aid training up to date?  

Seniors must make their homes safe for kids who visit, even if they only come now and then, and especially if there is a swimming pool, even if it’s a pint-sized wading pool.  

The Consumer Product Safety Commission, or CPSC, offers a guide to child-proofing your home and more advice is available from the American Red Cross. The Red Cross offers online courses in babysitting, first aid and water safety. The courses don’t cost much and taking them will help you be a safety-first grandparent.  

Safety-proofing your home  

A first step in safety-proofing your house is covering all electric outlets with plastic covers that keep young fingers out of sockets. There should be locks on every drawer and cabinet that contains hazardous items – from knives to medicines to household chemicals.  

Seniors often take lots of medications, and because we take them frequently, it can be easy to overlook how we store them.  

The CPSC recommends various types of locks for keeping dangerous objects out of reach. It suggests a latch that locks automatically when a medicine drawer or cabinet is closed.  

The keep-safe rule also applies to household, lawn and garden chemicals. Keep them locked up.  

The CPSC warns that no cabinet lock is foolproof as a “savvy toddler may be able to break them.” As a further safety measure, keep hazardous stuff on high shelves, well beyond toddler reach.  

Most times we don’t think twice about the cords that dangle from window shades. Yet the CPSC warns that “window blinds cords pose a significant strangulation risk.” To childproof your window treatments, it suggests retractable cords, or no cords at all.   

Tall pieces of furniture can tip over and cause injury. Yanking too hard on a stuck drawer can bring a tall dresser down on a child – or an adult. Bookcases, refrigerators and other tall pieces can tip over and injure or kill. Anchor all tall pieces of furniture to the wall, something you should already be doing in earthquake-prone Washington.   

Water safety 

Water safety is also a crucial element of making homes safe for kids. The Red Cross warns, “a child or weak swimmer can drown in the time it takes to reply to a text, check a fishing line or apply sunscreen.” Obviously, the risk is greater if there is a pool in your backyard. But toddlers can drown in a bathtub, a wading pool or even a bucket of water. Never leave anything water-filled unattended.   

Make sure there is a barrier between your house and backyard pools, hot tubs and the like. Pools, even wading pools, should be surrounded by a high, non-climbable fence. Doors leading from your house to the water should be kept locked and the keys stored out of sight.

Younger kids should be required to wear life jackets whenever they are near water.

Even if there is no water around, keep doors leading outdoors locked so toddlers don’t wander away. Keep window wells covered so young kids don’t tumble in.  

Most important, says the Red Cross, is to “ensure every member of your family learns to swim so they at least achieve skills of water competency, able to enter the water, get a breath, stay afloat, change positions, swim a distance then get out of the water safely.” The Red Cross offers learn-to-swim courses at facilities all over the country.   

You may have taken a course in first aid or CPR when you were younger but how sharp are your skills today? The Red Cross offers a wide variety of classes that would be useful to anyone who watches over kids. Those include courses like first aid, CPR, advanced child care training, baby first aid, etc.  

To learn more about these and other courses, go to redcross.org/take-a-class.  

There’s no way to make a home 100% risk free. As the CPSC notes, “We can’t keep our kids covered in bubble wrap, safe from all harm. But by combining a little planning, some child locks, and a lot of common sense we can prevent a whole lot of injuries and accidents.” 

Gordon Williams is a volunteer with the American Red Cross Northwest Region Communications Team.