Top Ten Child Injury Safety Tips
- Use child safety car seats and booster seats properly. Car accidents remain the tip killer of Oregon children and a big cause for more severe injuries are children riding in cars without being properly secured. Use booster seats for kids under 4’9” (It’s now the law.) and child safety seats for others. Make sure belts and seats fit properly.
- Reduce suffocation risk. Remove pillows, comforters and quilts that are too soft. Do not lay babies on their face in the crib. As many as 900 babies per year, whose deaths are attributed to SIDS, may have suffocated. Also, having others sleeping with infants can cause accidental suffocation if one rolls over onto the child.
- Avoid strangulation by making sure the spaces between crib slats and bunk bed railings are smaller than your baby’s head.
- Place the crib where pictures cannot fall in, babies cannot reach electrical outlets, and babies cannot topple out of a window.
- Place child safety gates atop stairways or other places where you don’t want your baby to be. Close doors to unused rooms.
- Keep pet food, medicine, bug killers, and weed killers out of reach.
- Cut off drawstrings from sweatshirts and jackets. They can cause strangulation on playground equipment.
- Consider window guards or locks to keep children from falling through screens.
- When visiting other homes (Grandma’s, for example), check around for any safety hazards.
- Get on your hands and knees, crawl around your house, and find the other things you’ve missed.
