It’s playground safety week and Local 5 wanted to find out what parents do to not only to keep their kids safe on the playground, but at home as well.
Kristin Polarek is a NICU nurse and spends a fair share of her time talking to other parents about safety.
She says the number one cause of sudden infant death is sleeping with your infant.
“You shouldn’t be co-sleeping, you can put a baby in a bassinet right next to you or there’s different containers that you can attach to the bed where the baby will be in a safe spot,” says Polarek.
But the list of accidental deaths for children is a long one.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for children less than 1 year of age, two thirds of injury deaths were caused by suffocation, usually by cords found around households.
“Some of the blinds that have the cords hanging down, you want to avoid keeping furniture right up to the window where kids can climb on that and then get entangled in those cords,” says Willow Stewart with the Center for Childhood Safety.
“We try to keep all the cords from the blinds up so they can’t play with those and get tangled,” says parent Rose Vandenpals.
If you’re looking to child-proof your home you’ll have to do some ground work.
“Get on your hands and knees and crawl around the house, then you see those cords that are a hazard,” says Stewart. “You see those electrical outlets that you might not see when you’re standing up, they aren’t eye level with you, so if you get down on their level you’ll see a lot of those hazards.”
“Read the brochure that you get from the hospital when you bring your baby home,” says Vandenpals. “There’s a lot of good information in there. We took the classes before birth, they go through a lot of those different ideas.”
To register for the Center for Childhood Safety’s Safety Town summer camp, follow this link: https://www.centerforchildhoodsafety.org/safety-town
