Safety

I love questions from readers! Sparks me to write another post by giving me a starting point.

My dear friend writes:

I saw this http://blogs.wsj.com/juggle/2011/04/19/keeping-up-with-kid-safety-advice/ and thought of my favorite sane young mother. What's a sane young or prospective mom to do about all the changing baby safety guidance? Inquiring readers want to know ;)

The link (for those who don't click it) is an article lamenting the constantly changing, ever-stricter, I-can't-believe-you'd-put-your-child-in-harms-way-the-way-everybody-did-one-year-[decade, generation, day, etc.]-ago-you-monster world of keeping our children safe.

SAFETY! Safety. safety.

Never has one parenting topic been, at once, both so completely important and so completely full of rubbish.

I have a philosophy on baby safety, and it's one that requires constant reassessment and reassigning of boundaries. That is to say, you couldn't turn it into a list of bullets and hand it out at a pediatrician's appointment. Well, you could, but it would be vague. Something like this:

• Parents ought to be attentive to their children.
• Household safety should be custom-fitted for the specific child we wish to protect. If you know your child well, you'll know where the greatest risks lie.
  
• The MOST important part of keeping your children safe is simply paying attention.
• Parents should be aware of risks and should prioritize, mortal peril at one end, a few tender tears at the other.
• You should not stifle your child's exploration of this world and development of mobility unnecessarily.
• You should set limits and boundaries to keep your child safe. Limits and boundaries are part of being an effective parent anyway, so look at it as good practice.
  

It is not black and white. You have to weigh your risks and draw your lines, and we are all going to draw them somewhat differently. In my circle of upper-middle-class, highly-educated, suburban, first-timer mom friends (do we have an acronym yet?), I am probably the most liberal in my willingness to adapt or ignore current recommendations from the pediatricians. In other settings, it might be different. Mine is a particularly paranoid community.

First, let me start with things I am VERY mindful about safety-wise, the mortal peril and serious injury threats:

• No open electrical sockets -- Elsie loves little crevices like that
• Any window she can lean on is locked -- like the one behind her changing table. If I have to open it, I open the top part that she can't reach.
• I never, ever leave Elsie in the bath -- when you see your baby slip in the bath that first time, when you see her big, surprised eyes staring up at you from under a couple inches of water, you'll never leave her in the bath either, it's terrifying how quickly it can happen. No harm done if you're there to scoop her up right away, your worst nightmare if you're not. Pool safety is equally important. Pools kill more kids than guns every year.
  
• In dangerous situations, we watch her and shadow her closely -- Near cars, near the tops of stairs, etc.
• We don't let pot handles or knives hang over the edge of the counter where she might reach them
• We avoided chocking hazard foods until she had teeth -- and keep an eye out for anything that might pose a choking hazard in her environment
  
• We say "No!" to other hazards that come up -- like chewing on electrical wires, wandering off of the sidewalk, and opening cupboards that contain hazards

We also follow many of the current recommendations simply because they fit. For instance:

• Wearable blankets -- Elsie tosses and turns a great deal. I'm not afraid of the hazards of a blanket or a quilt for her at this point, but the zip-up blankets are the only ones that keep her warm all night long
• Rear-facing car seat -- She's a petite girl and doesn't seem to mind crowded legs. It's shown to be safer. I'm keeping her rear facing until it becomes impractical.
• As an infant, she slept on her back -- She COULD sleep on her back, so we put her to sleep on her back. There is statistically significant data to say it reduces chance of SIDS, so we did it. And she got a flat, bald head for a little while, but it bounced back. If she had been colicy, and sleeping on her tummy was the only way she'd sleep at all... that would have been another story. But back-sleeping fit, so we did it.
  

There's also a lot of current recommendation that doesn't fit. A whole lot.

I do not believe in the idea of baby-proofing my home. First of all, inherent in the term "baby-proof" is a false sense of security. You could have every drawer padlocked and every chair chained to the table and every doorway gated fast, and ever corner padded and you would still be at high risk (in my opinion) of a serious accident if you weren't paying attention. There's no such thing as baby-proof. Second of all, a kid's got to learn about risks and limits. I feel that baby-proofing is basically trying to take away all situations in which you'd have to step in and set limits for your child. I don't think that's healthy for the parent or the baby. Rules can be as effective as gates. They just take more energy on the part of the parent, but it's worth the investment. Firm and clear limits help keep a child safe in a wide variety of situations, not just your kitchen.



Here are some ways in which we do not adhere to current recommendations:

• Gates -- That's not to say that I think baby gates are silly. They're a great, great tool. We don't happen to use one, but in a different house, or with a different child, we would. It's just the layout of our house and the temperament of our child. We don't need them. Our only gate protects the rugs so that Elsie doesn't pee on them during nakey-bum time.
• Latches -- We don't use them, but I know some babies for whom we absolutely would have to. Maybe someday we will. For now, a hair elastic around the handles slows her down enough that I have time to swoop in, remove her, and say, "No. Not for Elsie!
• Blankets -- We may use wearable blankets every night, but we use them for some naps, and at daycare, Elsie gets blankets, and has since she was an infant.
• Crib -- Oh, this one's going to make me sound like a terrible mother with all the recent press. We have a drop-side crib. Just like every other crib that was in use for several decades of babies before it was outlawed. I tighten the bolts on it every couple of months, but I have not yet drilled its drop-side into place. I just don't think it is a threat to my particular child. She's not a climber.
  
• Crib bumper -- Elsie never got herself so stuffed into her bumper that I feared for her breathing. But she did get her limbs stuck uncomfortably between the slats. After extricating her several times in the early months, the bumpers went back on.
• Mobile -- I understand that this could be a hazard, so maybe I will raise it higher, but again, Elsie is not the girl who has to strip everything she can touch out of boredom. She's really very happy to sit and babble to herself in the morning.
  
• Appliance locks -- I need to get into my refrigerator one-handed enough to make this one ridiculous and impractical. Same for utensil drawers, dish washer, and oven. Watch your kid when you're cooking. You don't have to have your eye on her every moment, but just make sure you have a sense of where she is. If you have the kind of kid who gets into trouble fast, think playpen for cooking times.
  
• Doorknob Covers -- Again, depends on your kid. Depends on your house. We don't need this yet.
  
• Padding
  

Padding corners is one that I actually feel strongly against. My Grandmama once said, as Elsie learned how to crawl and walk, "I wish the world were made out of rubber for babies." Elsie took a tumble off of our front step last week, her first real fall. As I saw her perfect little head hit asphalt in the slow-motion of a terrible moment, I wished it was made out of rubber instead. But if the world were made out of rubber, then babies would never bump their heads, and if that world turned into a hard, sharp world for an older child, she would never have learned to navigate it safely. So Elsie got an egg on her head, we both got an adrenaline rush, and I got to make the ashamed call to the pedi to ask if we had to come in (we did not) -- but, most importantly we both learned something about limits.

Mortal peril vs. tender tears. A fall can be either. I fell off my bike when I was 8, and I have a scar on my knee from it. No big deal. My first boyfriend took a spill mountain biking when he was 15. He broke his neck and has been quadriplegic ever since. There's a lot of luck involved -- statistics, if you're less fatalistic. So you do your very best to protect against the worst falls, and you steel yourself for some of the smaller, but still scary and painful stumbles, because the freedom that lets kids fall is what builds strong, coordinated, healthy kids. A kid who trips and scrapes her knee is a kid who is experiencing the world to its fullest.

Then, to a certain extent, you just swallow hard and pray that your child is a lucky child.

I don't mean to make people who are more safety-conscious sound like crazy people. Everyone wants to protect your baby, and that's a wonderful thing. That, in itself, makes the world safer for children. It's just that you can't baby-proof the world. And if you could, would you really want to? I don't think it's irresponsible to say, "no."