Babyproofing by room and by stage: start where the kid is, not where the catalog is

What to do first

Read the babyproofing checklist, which is the whole house in one list, ordered by the injury data rather than by room: furniture anchors and the TV, then the top of the stairs, then the water (bath, toilet, pool), then poisons, then outlets and cords, then windows and blind cords, then the fireplace, then the corners and doors. Every row links to the page that ranks the product. If the baby is not moving yet, the second read is when to start babyproofing, which puts each job on a timeline; the drilling jobs belong to the months before crawling. If the baby is already crawling, skip to babyproofing for a crawling baby and do it tonight in the checklist's order.

How this section divides

The five hazard hubs each cover one product category. This section covers everything that cuts across them, in four kinds of page. Stage guides: 6 months and crawling, each listing what a child of that age can actually reach. Room guides: the bathroom, the living room, the garage and the pool, plus the kitchen, which lives in its own hub. Situation guides: the apartment or rental, where the deposit is the constraint. And the cross-category rankings: best babyproofing products, which re-scores every hub winner on one weighting; best babyproofing kits, with the honest inventory of each box; best removable pool fences and pool fence vs alarm vs net, because drowning is the leading cause of death for children one to four and the CPSC counts about 376 pool and spa drownings a year under 15; and the two gift lists, gifts for new parents and gifts under $50.

What the whole job costs

Less than most people expect, if the money goes where the injuries are. At the makers' list prices on the day we checked: an anchor kit per dresser at $10 to $15, a hardware stair gate at $70 to $80, a certified doorway gate at about $51, a 12-lock magnetic set at about $30, a sliding outlet plate or a bag of 36 inserts for under $10, corner guards at $10, a window guard at $90 to $115 per window that needs one, and a pool fence section at about $116 per 12 feet. A three-bedroom house with stairs and no pool is a few hundred dollars at list; the pool adds more than the rest combined. The kits are the cheapest entry and the most misleading one, because no kit includes the anchor or the gate, which are the two products with deaths behind them. Where a product on this site has no maker price on file, we say so rather than guess; Amazon sets its own price and the buttons show it.

The common mistake

Babyproofing by room instead of by hazard. The room approach starts in the nursery, which is the safest room in the house, and gets to the dresser in the living room and the stairs a month later. The hazard approach starts with tip-overs, stairs and water because that is where the CPSC's death counts are, and gets to the corner guards last. The second mistake is waiting for the first crawl to start: the jobs that need a drill are far easier with a baby who cannot yet move, which is the whole argument of the 6-month guide. The third is treating a kit as the job. The fourth, for renters, is assuming that no-drill means nothing can be done, when nearly everything can. And the fifth is skipping the pool because the child is "never out there alone"; the CPSC's drowning data is about children who were never out there alone, either, until they were. If you want a professional, the IAFCS keeps a directory of certified childproofers, and a good one will tell you the same order this page does.