Babies grow quickly and they soon learn to crawl and walk. This is the time you need to have child safety gates in place. You need them as part of your overall child safety proofing. You know that not all of the areas of your home are completely safe for baby and if you have steps, they really need to have child safety gates at the top and bottom of the stairs.

You need peace of mind at the time your baby begins to crawl so you need to keep your baby as safe as possible using a safety gate. There are two major types of child safety gates, differing only in how they are mounted. There are pressure-mounted gates and hardware-mounted gates. Which one you choose depends on the area to be protected.

Look at the following points when buying a child safety gate:

• Look for Safety certification. You need to look or ASTM/JMPA certification for your child safety gate. It is present on the outside of the package so you know that the item has been inspected as safe. Don’t just go by the manufacturer’s name.

• Sizing. Use a ruler or measuring tape to measure the distance between the hard surfaces. Don’t rely on what seems like the right height for a gate because you need to remember that your baby will become upright and taller before you know it. Choose the taller one from the beginning.

• Bar Spacing. Many models have vertical slats and you should make sure the slats are no further apart than 2 ½ to 3 inches apart as any greater can trap a child’s head between the slats. The baby could strangle if he gets caught in too wide of slats.

• Opening with Ease. Most of the hardware mounted variety of child safety gates open easily with just one hand. Pressure mounted gates can be practically impossible to open so you have to climb over them. This can be dangerous, especially if you have a baby in tow. Having a gate opening feature will add to the price of the item but it is well worth it when it come to getting from room to room in your house with ease.

• Watch out for second-hand gates. If a gate was made before 1985, it might not be safe. It might be of the accordion variety which is unsafe because the triangle shaped holes on the gate can easily trap your baby’s head in it.

Pressure-mounted baby gates are simpler to install than hardware-mounted gates but can fall down when pressure is applied to them. Hardware-mounted gates are sturdier and should be used at the tops of stairs and when you really don’t want baby to get through the gate. It takes about a half an hour to install a permanent hardware mounted gate but it may be worth the extra time because they enhance the safety of the doorway.

Happy shopping!

For the newbie parents out there, here’s a tip on diaper changing: use a liner on top of your changing pad/cover for those inevitable messy situations.  It will help you avoid having to wash your changing pad cover 5 times per day.  We had 2 changing pad covers (terry cloth) with our son and 3 with our daughter and let me tell you if you don’t have a liner you will be doing laundry twice a day!  We used PeeWees Disposable Multi-Use Pads and found them to be thin enough to put on top of a changing pad, easy enough to take with us when we were traveling, and very cost effective.  They were so useful that you might even want to check out the 3-pak because you’ll probably need them for at least the first 6 months of baby’s life. 

Aruni
Founder, Babble Soft

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These tips are based on our experiences, as well as those of our friends and readers.  Please always consult with your doctor before implementing any tip that might impact the health of your baby.  If you have a tip you’d like to submit please send an email to blogger(at)babblesoft(dot)com.  Please check the ‘baby tips’ or ‘baby advice’ categories to make sure your tip (in some form or fashion) hasn’t already been posted.  If it has been, feel free to comment on that post and support the tip.  We also welcome respectful challenges to the tips because ‘everything is relative!’  We will, of course, give anyone who submits a tip we publish credit and a link back to their site!