Children's Safety

Summer usually means a lot of time spent outdoors—at the beach, by the pool, playing sports, or enjoying the outdoors—which invariably brings up the need for adequate sun protection. While the only sure-fire way for you and your family to avoid the sun's damaging rays is by covering up with shirts and hats and hanging out in the shade, that may not always be an option, so we need to resort to using sunscreen. What would summer be, after all, without the ritual of slathering up the children with gobs of UV-blocking goo?

While many sunscreens promise a lot to the consumer (especially those with SPF 50+ ratings), do they really deliver the protection the advertise? Fortunately, the Environmental Working Group's 2010 Sunscreen Guide is available to help sort the good sunscreens from those that won't help much.

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Over the past few weeks we've noticed that our 4-year-old seems to have outgrown her car seat. She still fits it, but the straps are getting tighter and harder to adjust, and as a fairly tall kid she's looking a little silly in the car seat.

We've been using Britax Marathon car seats for both children. They're expensive, but we definitely got our money's worth out of them, and they can be used for kids up to 65 pounds. They're also easy to install, which is a big plus, given that it's estimated that 80–90% of all car seats are improperly installed, which definitely has an impact on their ability to a child safe in a collision.

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Guest article by Lars Bergholdt, owner CradleRock Safety

“I have bought this toilet lock, but it doesn’t seem to fit!” – is a quite common remark from the first time parent, during our more than 400 in-home child safety consultations every year. We are very fortunate to meet so many parents that seriously want to keep their children safe at home, but at the same time have experienced many troubles finding not only products that fit, but also figuring out what exactly needs to be childproofed!

Before even buying a safety product it’s important to identify and prioritize the most important and common areas of safety concerns. There are some great organizations such as www.safekids.org, that collect nationwide accident information from emergency rooms and other sources and then compile all the numbers into detailed statistics. All of this information gives us a good idea of the types of accidents that occur, where they happen and the children’s ages at the time of these accidents.
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