Reasons to use safety gates in your home

As a parent, there’s no greater fear than hearing a thumping noise coming from the other room. While most of the time, these noises end up being from a little horsing around, sometimes they are more serious. Taking precautions can help alleviate stress and worry for a parent. So here are some reasons to use safety gates in your home to boost security for your kids.

Reasons to Use Safety Gates in your Home

Why use child safety gates? Okay the answer to this might seem really REALLY obvious:

Stairway safety – Obviously. There’s just NO way a baby isn’t going to attempt to go down a set of stairs, given the chance (and you know how fast those little ones move!). I’d also advise one for the bottom of the stairs, because it doesn’t take much for a crawling baby to go up several steps and put themselves in danger.

TIP: At the top of stairs, use hardware-mounted gates. At the bottom of stairs, it’s okay to use pressure-mounted gates.

However, there’s some other great reasons you might want to get some hardware mounted gates or pressure mounted safety gates in your house for your children:

Protect children from pets – It’s wise to have pet-free areas for the baby to crawl around – free from affectionate (or not so) pets, and all that dander and hair. Especially when bringing a new baby home, pets might need space to acclimate gradually to a new baby.

Overnight safety – We STILL lock the top of the stair gate at night, because our toddler is  in a twin bed, and what if he got up at night and wandered. Even in the mornings, he wakes up and runs into our bedroom… but what if he ran downstairs and got hurt!?

Travel safety – Visiting family or staying in hotel rooms means your baby is in rooms that have not been child-proofed. You can quickly child-proof one room or small area and then gate it with portable pressure-mounted gates to create a safe space.

Non-child-proofed rooms – Maybe you have rooms you haven’t childproofed yet, like an office, craft room or laundry area. Sometimes these rooms/areas don’t have doors that close, so a gate is a great idea for limiting access to potential dangers.

Safe play boundaries – Use gates to create safe play space for your child to play freely without you constantly jumping up to rescue them from some unsafe object or pull them back from that tempting doorway.

Picking out a quality safety gate

When picking a gate (such as the one pictured above, sent at no charge for our review), your main choices are hardware-mounted gates (affiliate link) or pressure-mounted. KidCo sells both kinds. At the tops of stairs, always use  securely and permanently screwed into the doorjam for safety. Even if your stairway has a baluster, you can get a kit from KidCo to mount the gate safely.

Our KidCo gate also has a “directional stop” to keep the gate from swinging out over the stairs. It can only swing in towards the hallway. AND there’s no bottom bar across the floor, so there’s nothing to trip over!

I like the quick release hardware that lets me open and close the gate with one hand!

We’re happy with our KidCo gate and plan to get more for additional coverage in our home!

Why  a KidCo gate versus other brands (including “look-alikes”)?

• Manufactured with precision, robotic welding and form fitting
• Meet and exceed US Child Safety Standards
• Top quality raw materials: thicker, virgin steel, furniture grade hardwood, reinforced resins, certified non-toxic (no lead) paint
• KidCo’s commitment to quality – engineers follow world-wide safety standards when researching and designing products.

Do you have other ways you use gates to help protect your children? Please share in the comments below!