Don't Forget Your Window Blinds When Child Proofing Your Home

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(This post was sponsored by Window Covering Safety Council as part of an Influencer Activation for Influence Central and all opinions expressed in my post are my own. Read my full disclosure here.)

Today I'm teaming up with The Window Covering Safety Council to help bring awareness to an important safety issue for our young children. 

When you started having kids and started childproofing your home, did you change your window coverings to cordless ones? If not, you aren’t alone! According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, one of the top 5 hidden hazards in American homes is corded window coverings. Crazy huh?!?

OK, to be honest, when I went through to make my home safer and more child-friendly, I didn’t think about my corded blinds either. I think the extent of what my husband and I did in the childproofing arena was buying these nifty magnetic child locks for all my cabinets to keep the kids out of our cleaning supplies and other potentially dangerous items we keep under our sinks. Oh, and I moved my more breakable items out of reach of little hands.

Anyways, I didn’t think about my corded blinds at first. Then, my kids started standing, walking and climbing, and all of a sudden my window cords became irresistible to those tiny curious hands. If I didn’t remember to hook the cords out of reach atop the blinds, my kids would invariably find their way over to my windows and start yanking on them. This was frustrating, and a bit concerning, but at the time there wasn’t much I could do because I lived in an apartment and wasn’t allowed to change the blinds. 

Both my parents and my husband’s parents had corded blinds and whenever we came to visit they, too, learned to put those cords out of reach. Until the day they forgot, and my son started yanking on the window blinds’ cord at my mother-in-law’s house, and somehow managed to pull the blinds down on top of himself.

When we got the blinds off of my son, he was all wrapped up in the cords and screaming his head off. Thankfully he wasn’t badly hurt, just really frightened. But this incident caused my mother-in-law to replace all her blinds with cordless blinds,  to make her home safer for all of her young grandchildren. It also convinced me that I needed to do the same thing. I know we got off easy that day, and sadly there are many parents who aren’t so lucky

This is why October has been declared National Window Covering Safety Month! If you haven’t checked your window coverings for exposed or dangling cords, please do so! Better yet, if you have corded window coverings and young children, I would highly recommend replacing them altogether with cordless window coverings. The peace of mind is well worth the cost.

If you need to replace your blinds (which, if you have corded blinds and young kids, I highly recommend doing), it is now easier to do so than ever. Apparently there is a new safety standard in the US which requires all stock products to either be cordless or have inaccessible cords.

You can also keep your eyes out for window coverings marked with the Best for Kids™ certification label.  These coverings have all gone through extensive third-party testing, and are really the BEST to use in your home if you have young kids.

So, whether you have young children still living at home, or have young children visit your home often, please make sure that whatever window covering you have is cordless.. It’s better to spend the time and money to make your home safer for your young ones than to become a statistic.