Tips for Baby-Proofing Your Home: What to Childproof (and What to Leave Alone). What to baby proof and what to leave out. You don’t want to make everything indestructible. Not sure what to baby proof and what to skip? Here’s a Babywise mom’s honest take on real safety measures vs. over-childproofing — plus a room-by-room safety checklist.
When it comes time to baby proof your house, I recommend you not go overboard. You do not need to baby proof every single thing.
Of course it’s wise to do what’s necessary for your children’s safety. Put outlet covers on your outlets, move household cleaners out of reach, secure bookcases to the wall if needed, add a gate for the stairs — that kind of thing.
It’s also wise to remove or move anything you’d be devastated to lose. If you have heirloom china out from your great-grandmother, it’s probably smart to put it somewhere safe until you know your child will obey you and leave it alone.
But once you have things truly safe and your valuables moved out of the way, there’s very little else you need to do. You don’t need to lock up every cupboard and drawer. You don’t need to move everything out of your child’s reach. You don’t need bare shelves and tables. Doing that removes learning opportunities for your child. It’s okay to have items within reach that are still off-limits. In fact, I’d say it’s not just okay — it’s a good idea.
Post Contents
- What to Baby Proof
- What Not to Baby Proof
- Why You Shouldn’t Baby Proof Everything
- Baby Proofing as a Babywise Mom
- Room-by-Room Baby Safety Checklist
- FAQ
What to Baby Proof
On Becoming Baby Wise, Book Two (affiliate link) talks about baby-proofing starting on page 97: “Parents need to be concerned with important safety issues.” You need to make your child’s environment safe — but exactly what that looks like depends on your particular child.
Let me illustrate with my own two oldest kids. Brayden (age 3 at the time of writing) was never a climber, and he was also a very obedient baby. Kaitlyn (14 months) was just as obedient, but she was a climber through and through.
With Brayden, I never needed to anchor a bookcase to the wall, because he’d never even considered climbing one, much less tried it. Kaitlyn went through a stage of wanting to climb absolutely everything, so anchoring bookshelves became a real safety need for her.
The same went for electrical outlets. Brayden never once tried to stick anything into an outlet. When he was a baby, we covered all of them anyway, and after we moved to a larger house when he was 13 months old, we didn’t even have enough outlet covers for every outlet — and it never worried us. I knew Kaitlyn would be different, so we covered every single outlet for her. At 9 months old, she was already trying to stick things into outlets and pry the covers off.
The takeaway: evaluate your safety needs based on the actual child in front of you, and re-evaluate with each new child. Real safety is always worth the effort.
What Not to Baby Proof
As Babywise II points out, there’s an “illegitimate” side to baby-proofing — rearranging your entire living room so your child is never put in a position where a boundary applies (pages 97–98). Some of your items genuinely are dangerous. Remove those. Some are irreplaceable. Remove those too. But don’t clear out everything your child could possibly touch.
Keeping some off-limits items within reach is actually a great teaching opportunity. Think about it: you’ll often visit other homes — relatives, friends, acquaintances — and they shouldn’t have to redecorate for your visit. Your child needs to learn that “off-limits” applies wherever you go, not just at home.
You also want to be forward-thinking. Learning to not touch things as an older baby and young toddler helps develop the ability to have self-control. This pays dividends as your little one gets older.
Why You Shouldn’t Baby Proof Everything
This is your chance to start setting boundaries in your home. Babywise II puts it bluntly: “Future behavioral problems that result from the lack of boundary-setting are usually more serious than those engendered by the opposite extreme — overly strict discipline” (page 98). That’s not a license to be overly strict, either — as Childwise discusses, the goal is always finding the right balance. But if you have to lean one direction, don’t lean toward too much leniency. You can always grant freedoms easily. Taking them away later is always the harder road.
“A child raised with immediate self-gratification early in life is less prepared to handle the conflict that boundaries create later on — and usually the child’s parents are too” (page 98). If you follow Babywise principles consistently, you likely won’t need to rearrange or redecorate much at all. I haven’t. I didn’t change a single thing about how our house was decorated when Kaitlyn joined the family.
Does that mean she’s never touched something she shouldn’t? Of course not. There were a handful of items she found seriously tempting. But with consistency, she stopped going after them. Brayden had his one tempting item too — something he always wanted to touch, and I regularly had to tell him no. I left it right where it was. He got so good at obeying my voice that when we visited friends, they were shocked that my 12-month-old would stop himself the instant I told him to. I never had to physically remove him or hold him back. He did it himself.
That skill extended beyond homes. When we were at the park, if he wanted to climb something as a 13 month old that wasn’t safe for him, I would just call to him to not do that and he would listen.
Baby Proofing as a Babywise Mom
As a Babywise mom, you’ll likely need fewer “safety” measures overall — but don’t read that as permission to skip safety in the name of teaching. Safety always comes first. Save the teaching moments for your books and decorations. I’m talking about real safety here.
Locking up every single cupboard in the house isn’t a matter of safety — it’s a matter of convenience for the parent. Fewer messes, less conflict. But then what happens the day your 13-month-old throws a fit because she wants that cupboard open? Do you open it for her? And what happens when your 20-month-old figures out how to open it herself and has a joyful afternoon spreading the contents across the kitchen floor? Do you think a 20-month-old is easier to teach self-restraint than a 10-month-old? If you think so, you haven’t met many 20-month-olds. It might be easier to teach a 20-month-old the alphabet — but not this.
Real safety means things that can genuinely harm your child. Do what’s needed there, full stop. You’ll likely find your Babywise baby getting into less mischief overall, simply because she has structure and things to do. She isn’t left to entertain herself all day and go looking for trouble. Your routine keeps you aware of where she is and what she’s doing.
I’d also recommend teaching your child not to do certain things even once they’re technically “safe.” Take the outlet situation with Kaitlyn again — after three attempts to get into it, she never tried again, because I consistently told her no (and no, she didn’t stop everything else in three tried — but this one, she did). The outlets might not be a problem at my house anymore, but what about grandma’s house? What about church?
Climbing the bookcase might be safer once it’s anchored, but is it acceptable behavior? No. I can’t guarantee every bookcase she’ll encounter over the next six months — the ones she’ll still desperately want to climb — will be anchored. And what if she climbs it and then falls off it? So even a “safer” version of the item stays a “no.” Making something safer for your baby doesn’t automatically make it acceptable.
You can also put safety features up most of the time and take them down for practice sessions. A friend of mine kept a baby gate at the bottom of the stairs for her son, but she’d occasionally take it down for supervised practice teaching him not to go up the stairs on his own. She always put it back up any time she couldn’t give him her full attention — and eventually, she didn’t need the gate at all anymore.
I know this sounds like more work than just baby-proofing everything in sight, and honestly, it is. But the effort you put in now pays off in how much more you get to enjoy your children as they get older. It’s well worth it.
Room-by-Room Baby Safety Checklist
I want to add in some thoughts from Tracy Hogg, author of Secrets of the Baby Whisperer, because her list of real dangers to prevent lines up closely with how I approach this. She removed dangerous chemicals and blocked off certain doorways for her own girls, while still making sure they learned to respect her belongings — and she specifically cautions against childproofing so heavily that you strip away your child’s learning opportunities. Here’s what to prioritize:
- Poisoning — Move dangerous chemicals up and out of reach entirely, rather than just locking them away. Kids learn to crack “child-proof” latches faster than you’d expect, which is actually more reason to train your child rather than rely on locks alone. It’s not worth the risk of leaving anything dangerous down low. In my house, everything like that lives up high.
- Airborne pollutants — Check your home for radon, install smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, and don’t smoke indoors.
- Strangling hazards — Keep blind cords and electrical wires out of reach. I wrap mine around the cord holders you screw into the wall.
- Electric shock — Cover your outlets, and keep light bulbs in every lamp socket.
- Drowning — Never leave your baby alone in the tub, even for a moment.
- Burns and scalding — Use stove knob guards if your knobs are within reach (mine happen to be on top of the stove, out of reach already), and set your water heater to 120 degrees.
- Falls and stairs — Add gates wherever they’re genuinely needed.
- Crib safety — Make sure your crib itself meets current safety standards. Tracy Hogg isn’t a fan of crib bumpers, though I have used them with my own kids — more on that below.
FAQ
When should I stop using crib bumpers?
There’s no single right answer here, and you’ll see a lot of conflicting opinions online and in parenting books. With my son, I didn’t start using crib bumpers until he was about 7 months old, then kept using them until he moved out of the crib around 20–21 months. With my daughter, she had bumpers from birth until about 12 months old. Honestly, I don’t have a perfectly logical reason for the difference — I stopped with my daughter mainly because washing and re-straightening the bumpers was such a hassle that I didn’t want to deal with it again. Bumpers have never been something I personally stressed over, but given how many differing opinions are out there, my honest advice is: do what feels right and safest for your baby.
Do I need to baby proof differently for each child?
Yes — and this is worth planning for even before baby number two arrives. What one child never touches, another may be drawn to immediately. Evaluate safety needs based on the individual child’s personality and mobility, not just what worked (or didn’t) with a sibling.
Is it bad to leave off-limits items within my child’s reach?
Not at all, as long as the item isn’t a genuine safety hazard. Leaving a few off-limits-but-safe items accessible actually gives your child practice with obedience and self-restraint — skills that come in handy the moment you’re in someone else’s home that hasn’t been childproofed for your visit.
>>>Read: How to Childproof Your Electrical Outlets
Related Posts:
- Child-Proofing vs. House-Proofing
- How To Child-Proof Your Space for Independent Playtime
- What Safety Certifications for Kids’ Products Mean
Reader Comments:
- mommytoisabella said…
We totally agree with what is stated in Babywise 11 about this issue of Babyproofing and it has gone well for us. Isabella has learned what is off limits to touch.
TheBabywiseMom said…
Thanks mommytoisabella!
Reader Questions:
- Emily_Colorado said…
First of all, thanks SO much for an amazing blog! Before I had my LO I thought BW would be super easy – baby would just do what I wanted her to do! Oopsy! Forgot she was going to be human! After a terrible ordeal with GERD and frustrations with “pattern” scheduling I’m finally getting somewhere with my almost 4 month old – because of you! Bless you for all of your work! I felt so encouraged when I first saw your site! You and your blog are an answer to prayer! Quick question: When did you stop using your crib bumpers? I see differing stuff on the internet and in books.Thank you!
TheBabywiseMom said…
thanks Emily! I think we all thought it would be easy before the baby came along…then we all had that reality check. With my son, I didn’t start using crib bumpers until he was 7 months old then continued using them until he moved out of his crib (around 20-21 months old).With my daughter, she had bumpers from birth until about 12ish months old.The thing is, I have no real logical reasoning for what I did. The reason I stopped with my daughter is that I washed the bumpers at that age and they were such a pain to get straightened out again we didn’t want her to get them dirty again! Bumpers have never been something I worried about, but there are a lot of varying opinions out there. My thought is do what you think and feel is best for your baby.
This post first appeared on this blog in July 2008
