Maybe you just want to have an upgrade in your livingroom, kitchen, dining room, wherever, and you want it to look nice and cosy. But if you have kids (especially toddlers and preschoolers), then you know they can be little terrors on interiors. Well, that, and kids have this special talent for finding the one object in a room that’s breakable, pointy, or sentimental. It’s almost impressive, like a sixth sense. And sure, baby gates and outlet covers help, but once kids are walking, climbing, and just trying to have fun (even babies). While it’s far from ideal to have daycare look to your home, what’s the best thing you can do to strike a balance here?

Go Ahead and Identify the Breakable Zones First

Okay, start with the spots where breakage actually happens. What could actually go wrong here? Like, do you have a coffee table with corners? Do you have any low shelves? Do you have a glass cabinet that’s somehow at toddler shoulder height, and anything placed on a wobbly surface?  Well, hopefully you don’t, but this is something that should be addressed here. But yeah, it’s less about removing every breakable thing and more about moving the most fragile items out of the “kid path.”

Swap Fragile Materials for Safer Ones 

Which is the whole point of child-proofing your home, anyway, and this does go with what the above was saying, too. If something is regularly bumped, touched, or climbed near, it’s worth choosing materials that can handle impact better. Actually, glass comes up a lot here, because glass shelves, table toppers, and greenhouse panes can be beautiful, but standard glass isn’t forgiving. But you probably knew that. So, what are the high-touch areas of your home? So it might help to make replacements for high-touch areas, like looking into Toughened Glass Direct, they’re an example here, but they focus on made-to-measure toughened glass for smaller home and DIY projects. If you have a greenhouse, for example, it could be smart to switch it out, maybe even the glass on the glass table too, or a glass display case even, but you get the idea.

Just Make Storage Work Harder 

Something else to think about here is the fact that clutter makes kid-proofing harder. When surfaces are covered in decor, candles, little trays, and random objects, it creates more things to grab, knock, and throw. So yeah, the simplest fix is just giving items a real home. Sure, they look like it, but again, it’s clutter, and kids and clutter don’t go well together. You just need to remove that temptation, remove that clutter, basically, put stuff in storage, and try to make it inaccessible to your kids. 

Rework the Layout 

So, what’s the point of doing this? If there’s any risky areas, you’ll want to change the layout so the kids aren’t around that. So, what’s the flow? If there’s something narrow or breakable in the flow, well, it needs to be moved, or at least the whole layout should change.