5 Ways To Help Guarantee Your Kids Are Safe Outside

Every parent wants to make sure they’ve done everything possible to ensure their child’s security. But children’s ideas of fun unfortunately don’t always match up with parental safety ideals. With their limitless curiosity and seemingly unending energy levels, this can sometimes lead to more dangerous situations, especially when the outdoors in concerned.

Children love to play outside and it is a wonderful place for them to learn and grow, testing their own abilities and limitations all while having an unbelievably fun time. However, it is equally important to make sure you, as a parent, have taken the proper measures to ensure that your child is always protected. Here are five tips to help guarantee your kids are always safe outside.

1. Make Sure All Appliances and Electronic Equipment are Locked Away

Of course, proper yard care requires a certain number of tools, but when it comes to children it is essential that your favorite weed wacker and brand new gas grill are kept far out of their reach. By making sure they can’t get their hands on this equipment you will help ensure they aren’t able to easily hurt themselves with it by a quick flip of a switch.

A toolshed is a great way to keep your more dangerous tools out of your children’s reach. With the ability to lock everything inside of one secure location, you can rest assured knowing that your children will have absolutely no access that set of dangers no matter how ingenious they might be.

2. Get Rid of Dangerous Tree Limbs

Trees are not only a beautiful addition to your landscape, but they also provide a great resting place in the shade after a long day of play. However, proper tree maintenance is key when you have young children playing in your yard especially if climbing has become a habit. Trees are a living thing, and so rotting and dead limbs are a common occurrence. Because of this, it is extremely important for any parent to keep a close eye on the state of their tree limbs and to take the proper measure to remove them when they are no longer in top condition and become a hazard to your children.

One way to guarantee that your trees are always in the best of health is to hire a specialist, such as Centaur Tree Surgeons in Oxford or any local tree surgeon in your area, that will use their knowledge and skills to provide you with continuous pristine landscaping.

3. Turn Yard Cleanup Into a Fun Game

By turning yard-work into a fun, family-friendly game not only will you be able to get all those leaves raked and weeds pulled, you’ll also be able to spend quality time with your children and teach them what’s safe to play with and what’s not. Invent “out-of-bounds” areas so that your kids know where is safe for them to be and where only parents are allowed to go. Promoting children to learn safety in a fun and secure way gives you a much higher probability of them retaining this information and acting upon it.

Some ways you can turn outdoor work into fun is by taking advantage of your child’s competitive side and turn the raking into a race. Does your child show an interest in flowers? Block them off a space in the bed and turn it into their garden. Let them choose the types of plants that go in there and teach them responsibility by letting them care for it, but make sure they understand what tools they are allowed to use alone and what must be used with a parent.

4. Always Keep Children in Sight

The most important factor in your children playing safely outside is constant parental supervision. Keeping yourself on watch means that your child is much less likely to end up in harm’s way. However, just because your kids have time to play all day outside doesn’t necessarily mean you do. But, how can you keep an eye on things if you need to be back in the house?

One easy way to do this is by replacing those old curtains with new, easy to use blinds. Blinds allow you to have 100% visual contact with your children through your windows, as there will be absolutely no blockage as there is with curtains. Also, even if they aren’t raised, you are still able to have some view of your children through the blind slot. If you’re house has sufficient windows facing your yard, this is a great way to make sure your children are playing safe even when you’re not there. Check out some affordable blinds here.

Another way to do this is to take advantage of those new smartphone home sharing systems. Nowadays almost everyone has a smartphone anyway, so why not turn it into your new safety friend. Download a monitoring app and leave one phone outside recording your children while the other you take inside with you. While this is certainly not complete supervision, it is an easy way to help make sure you’re keeping an eye on things whilst taking care of what you need to.

5. Give Your Children Whistles

Let’s be honest, even the most devoted parent has to turn their backs for a second here and there. Unfortunately, this is often when some sort of dangerous situation creeps up. Because of this, making sure your children know when to call for help is essential, and providing them with the tools to be able to quickly alert you to this danger is even more important. By giving your children whistles that allow them to signal to you that something is wrong teaches them responsibility while also giving you a second mode of protection.

Teach your children when it’s an appropriate time to blow the whistle and praise them when they’ve done this correctly. Make sure they understand that whenever they feel uncomfortable or unsafe that blowing the whistle means you’ll come immediately to their side. While we can only hope that it’s never used, it’s always better to be prepared.

No parent wants to see their child hurt or scared, but while the outdoors might be an ideal play spot for the growth of the child it also comes with its own set of dangers. By taking these tips into consideration you’ll be helping to make sure your child is safe in every possible situation.