4 Ways to Make Your Garage Safer for Toddlers

If you have toddlers in your family, you know how accident-prone they can be. While they’re mobile and curious, they often lack enough self-control and understanding to be able to make safe decisions. Therefore, the responsibility for keeping them safe falls on you. Out of all the rooms in your home, your garage can be one of the most dangerous.

Even though your garage is probably not one of the areas in your home where you allow your toddlers to play unsupervised, it’s still important to make safety provisions in your garage to keep your toddlers protected. To understand how to best protect your young children in your garage, here are four tips for ways to improve your garage’s safety.

Outlet Covers

While you’re likely quite diligent about using outlet covers in the main part of your home, you may have some gaps when it comes to outlets in your garage. In many cases, though, garages have even more outlets than a typical room in a home to allow plenty of space for different tools and other gear to be plugged-in. Therefore, it’s important to carefully look around your garage and find these forgotten outlets to ensure they receive the outlet-cover treatment, too.

Working Sensors

If your toddler runs under your garage door while it’s closing, you want to be sure that the garage door will stop and reverse directions thanks to its sensors. Therefore, it’s important that you use a trusted garage door installation and repair company to take care of your sensors and the rest of your garage door components if you ever encounter a problem. This will ensure all the safety systems work together so that they can stop a tragedy before it strikes.

Locks on Toolboxes

Tools, though useful for work, can be quite dangerous in the hands of a toddler. That’s why you want to be sure that all of your tools are behind the locked doors of a toolbox or tool cabinet.

Even though it takes a little extra time to access your tools when you need them, it’s more than worth the effort when you consider the consequences of not securing your tools. Taking this step has the added benefit of making your tools harder to steal if your garage is ever burglarized.

Dry Floors

As your toddlers are learning to walk, you want to take extra measures to ensure that the surfaces they walk on are as safe as possible. When it comes to your garage, then, you want to make sure that your floors are dry at all times.

Wet concrete or epoxy floors become almost as slick as ice, making it extremely likely that your toddler will slip and fall. In addition, these wet floors can be a hazard to almost anyone who walks through your garage, so it’s important to clean up any liquid spills as quickly as possible.

Close Supervision

While these efforts are a good start to help protect your toddler while they’re in your garage, the best protection you can offer is by closely supervising your children wherever they are. Staying close to your toddlers and watching what they’re doing will ensure that you can stop them before they do something that could hurt them. This will provide the extra peace-of-mind you need in a world that seems full of danger.

Brooke Chaplan is a freelance writer and blogger. She lives and works out of her home in Los Lunas, New Mexico. She loves the outdoors and spends most of her time hiking, biking, and gardening. For more information, contact Brooke via Facebook at facebook.com/brooke.chaplan or Twitter @BrookeChaplan