Babyproofing grandparents' house: the sweep to do before they arrive, room by room

Why this house is different

This page is written for the hosts - the grandparents - rather than for the parents packing a bag. If you are the visiting parent looking for things to bring, the portable kit is on best babyproofing products for grandparents and the travel version is on best travel babyproofing kit. What follows is the sweep of the house itself.

A grandparent's house is not an un-babyproofed house. It is a house that was babyproofed to a 1980s standard, then un-babyproofed over three decades as the children left, and then furnished for two adults who do not crawl. The result is a very specific hazard profile, and it is not the one the checklists are written for.

The hazards are at a different height. In a house with a toddler in it, dangerous things migrate upward over time. In a house without one, they stay exactly where they are convenient for an adult: reading glasses on the side table, the sewing box on the bottom shelf, the remote with the coin cell battery in the chair-side pocket, the dog's bowl on the floor.

The furniture is older and heavier. Dressers and bookcases that predate the current tip-over standard were never designed with a climbing child in mind, they usually came without anchoring hardware in the box, and the drawers are the sort a two-year-old can open and stand on. The CPSC's own tip-over work is blunt about which age band dies from this.

Nobody in the house has the reflexes. This matters more than any product. The adults who live here have not shut a bathroom door behind them in twenty years and do not instinctively notice that the basement door is ajar. That gap is closed by routine, not by latches, which is the argument for removing hazards outright rather than covering them. A cover you forget to close is not a safety device.

Start with the medicine, not the outlets

If you only do one thing on this page, do this one. When Safe Kids Worldwide reviewed emergency-room records for its 2016 report on medicine in the home, the medicine a child had got into belonged to a grandparent 48 percent of the time - against 38 percent for a parent - in the subset of records where the owner could be identified at all, which was about a quarter of them. Read that caveat and the figure is still the single most distinctive fact about this house, and it is not about carelessness. It is about the way adult medication is stored when there are no children around: a weekly pill organizer on the kitchen counter where you will see it at breakfast, a bottle in a handbag, a tube of cream on the nightstand, a daily blister pack beside the coffee machine.

Weekly pill organizers are the worst of it. They are designed to be easy to open - that is the entire point of them - and they look exactly like a toy with beads in it. A child does not need to defeat a childproof cap, because the pills are no longer in one.

The fix is not a cabinet latch. It is a single lockable container that everything goes into, sited above counter height, with the habit attached: the organizer gets filled, used and put straight back in the box. Include the things people forget - the vitamin gummies, which taste like candy because they are candy; the inhaler; the iron tablets, which are one of the most dangerous things in any house for a small child; and the nicotine pouches or lozenges if anyone in the house uses them. The ranked lock boxes are on best medicine lock boxes.

Then do the same sweep for the other liquids an adult-only house leaves out: the drain cleaner under the kitchen sink that is forty years old and has no child-resistant closure left on it, the windshield de-icer in the hall cupboard, and the handbag on the floor by the door, which is a container of pills, mints, hand sanitizer and coins at exactly toddler height.

The two-hour pass before they arrive

This is the version to do when the visit is on Sunday and it is Friday night. It costs nothing, and for an occasional visit it does more than any amount of hardware.

Two additions that people miss on this pass. The first is houseplants: a surprising number of common indoor plants are toxic if chewed, and the ones that have been in the corner for twenty years are at exactly grabbing height. Move them for the weekend. The second is the chairs. A dining chair pushed against a counter, a footstool, a pile of magazines - these are the ladder that gets a child to everything you just moved up high, and the single most useful thing you can do before a visit is push the furniture away from the counters.

The ordered, whole-house version of this sweep - injury severity first, cheapest first within that - is on the babyproofing checklist.

Room by room, at eighteen inches

The kitchen. One cabinet matters: the one under the sink. That is where the dishwasher tablets, the bleach and the drain cleaner live in nearly every house, and it is at floor level with a door a one-year-old can swing. Lock that one properly. The pan cupboard does not need a latch. Move the kettle's cord to the back of the counter, turn pan handles inward, and move the bin - a kitchen bin is a poisoning, choking and cut hazard in one container, and a lid is not a lock. The full kitchen pass is on babyproofing the kitchen.

The living room. This is where the glass-topped coffee table lives, and the sharp stone hearth, and the floor lamp with the heavy shade that tips when pulled. Corner protectors help on a table edge, but for a weekend visit, moving the table out of the room entirely is better and free. Check the television: an older flat screen on a sideboard is one of the classic tip-over arrangements, and the sideboard it sits on is probably not anchored either. Details on babyproofing the living room.

The bathroom. The simplest answer in this house is a closed door, because the bathroom is a drowning, poisoning and scald risk in one small room and none of it needs to be available to a visiting child. If the door cannot stay shut, the toilet gets a lock and the medicine cabinet gets emptied into the lock box. Razors, cotton buds and the box of denture tablets all come down off the sink surround.

The spare bedroom the child sleeps in. Look at it as a room rather than as a bedroom. The sewing basket, the pin cushion, the box of loose change on the dresser, the nightstand drawer with the reading glasses and the ointment, the cord on the window blind - all of it is at the wrong height. Blind cords in particular are a strangulation hazard with a federal standard behind them now, and an older house is full of the pre-standard kind: blind cord safety covers the fifteen-minute fix.

The garage, the basement and the yard shed. Not childproofed, not worth childproofing, and the right answer is a door the child cannot open. These rooms are the densest concentration of poisons in any house - antifreeze, paint stripper, slug pellets, fuel - and in a house where nobody has had to think about it, they are on open shelving. How to childproof the garage has the detail if the door cannot simply be locked.

The staircase question

This is the one place where we will not tell you the cheap option is fine.

If the grandchild is mobile and the house has stairs, the top of the flight needs a hardware-mounted gate screwed into the wall. Not a pressure gate, not a folding screen, not a chair across the landing. A pressure-mounted gate has a bar across the threshold that is itself a trip hazard at the top of a flight, and it is held in place by friction against two walls - which is why the whole category of gate carries a warning against top-of-stairs use. The reasoning in full is on pressure-mounted vs hardware-mounted baby gates.

We know what the objection is: four screw holes in a wall in a house that is not being remodeled. It is a fair objection and the answer is that the holes fill with a dab of filler and a touch of paint in ten minutes, and that there is no other product that does this job. If the staircase has a banister post rather than a wall on one side, a clamp-on adapter means the gate screws into the adapter instead of the woodwork - see baby gates for banisters.

Two other staircase things in an older house. The gaps between the spindles are often wider than the four inches modern code allows, which is a separate product and a separate problem - best banister guards and railing nets ranks the guards that close them. And the stair carpet: a loose edge or a worn tread is a hazard for the grandparent carrying the child, which is its own category of stair injury and a more likely one than the child falling alone.

The four things worth installing properly

Everything above is free. These four are the purchases that earn their place in a house that is not going to be permanently childproofed, chosen because each one addresses a hazard that tidying cannot fix.

What is deliberately not on that list: a houseful of cabinet latches, corner guards on every table, and a bag of plug inserts. In a house with no resident toddler, latches go unused and un-reset, and the inserts end up in a dish on the hall table. Buy the four things that work without supervision and do the rest by moving objects.

Occasional visit vs every Tuesday

The right amount of work depends entirely on frequency, and it is worth being honest about which house you are.

A few times a year. Do the medicine box permanently and the two-hour pass each time. Borrow or buy a pressure gate for a doorway to make a safe room, and keep the child out of the rooms with the stairs and the hazards rather than trying to make every room safe. A single safe room plus a closed door beats a half-measure everywhere.

Every week, for a day at a time. This is a different house and it should be treated as a childproofed one: the hardware gate goes in, the under-sink cabinet gets locked, the self-closing outlet covers go in the rooms the child uses, the bookcase and the dresser in the spare room get anchored into studs, and the glass coffee table gets replaced or retired. Anchoring is the one people skip and it is the one with fatalities attached - best furniture anchors covers the hardware, and do you really need to anchor furniture answers the objection.

Full-time care. Then this is a home with a toddler in it, and the right page is not this one - the babyproofing checklist is the whole job in order, and the stage pages tell you what changes at one and two.

Having the conversation

The practical obstacle here is rarely the products. It is that the request lands as a judgment on how somebody raised their own children, and that is the conversation that makes a parent put up with an un-gated staircase rather than ask twice.

Three things make it easier. Lead with the medicine, because it is a fact about storage rather than a comment on anyone's parenting, and because the statistic does the arguing for you. Offer to do the work and bring the hardware, which turns it from a demand into a visit. And frame the permanent items as the ones that let the child be in the house more, not less - a gate at the top of the stairs is what makes it possible to put the grandchild down.

Also worth saying out loud: the standards genuinely changed. Dressers sold today have to meet a federal tip-over rule that did not exist when this furniture was bought, blind cords have a federal standard that post-dates most blinds in an older house, and outlets in new construction have had tamper-resistant shutters since the 2008 code cycle. Nobody did anything wrong. The house is just older than the rules.