At the end of next week, February 28th, all manufacturers and importers of infant and toddler play yards are required to test their play yards prior to retail to ensure that they meet new federal safety standards. This means play yards must have:

–Side rails that do not form a sharp V shape when folded, to prevent a children from strangling in the side rail. –Stronger brackets to prevent sharp-edged cracks and a side-rail collapse.
–Sturdier mattress attachments to the play yard floor, whicfh will prevent children from getting trapped or hurt.

in order to meet the safety standards. These actions taken by the CPSC are to further ensure the protection of children under “Danny’s Law” (the Danny Keysar Child Protection Safety Notification Act). This law was passed after Danny Keysar was killed in Chicago in 1998 when a previously recalled play yard collapsed. The new play yard standard is in honor of Danny and his family.

As CPSC staff makes the first move toward making play yards safer, they’ve also taken steps to make cribs, children’s bed rails, baby bath seats, baby walkers, toddler beds and infant swings safer. Stricter safety standards are also underway for bedside sleepers, bassinets, hand-held infant carriers, bassient attachments to play yards, infant slings, infant carriers and strollers.

Do you think these guidelines will help keep babies and children safer?

Plus, more from The Bump:

Our Age-by-Age Guide to Strollers

Top 10 Strollers for Baby

Best Portable Cribs and Play Yards

With Christmas right around the corner, it’s easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of shopping, baking, and wrapping the mounds of gifts you picked out for your little guy. But you definitely shouldn’t forget about baby’s safety in the midst of all the holiday craziness! From hanging childproof decorations on your tree, to making sure his gifts are age appropriate — watch to find out what else you shouldn’t overlook when getting ready for this seasons festivities with your lovable bundle of joy.

Plus, more from The Bump:

The hottest gifts for baby & toddlers!

First holiday with a newborn

Tips for traveling with baby this season

I thought our home was relatively safe. There’s no pool in the backyard, no loaded guns lying around, and our television has a V-Chip to ensure no visitors are accidentally exposed to Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.

Then Arvey Levinsohn, an Advanced Certified Professional Childproofer and owner of A & H Childproofers, paid me a visit and I suddenly found myself branded with a scarlet letter DM for DANGEROUS MOTHER. As it turns out, every single room in our condo is dripping with safety hazards, from prenatal vitamins lying in a little dish on my bedside table like an afternoon snack, to the dishtowels hanging from our stove, beckoning a curious toddler to pull them down, inevitably concussing and possibly burning herself.

Honestly, I wish I had taken a Xanax before Arvey arrived, because from the moment he entered our death trap of a home, my body was in flight-or-flight mode as I realized how much babyproofing we need to do. The first threat he spotted came at my own hands: I was encouraging Evie, almost nine months old, as she balanced herself on top of our kitchen island as Arvey got his checklist out.

“Look who’s standing like a big girl!” I cooed, bursting with maternal pride.

“Oh, good, you’re teaching her how to stand on the counter top,” he replied.

Waa waaaaah.

“But it’s not like she can climb up here unless I lift her,” I countered/asked hopefully. On the contrary. Arvey pointed out how a few open cabinets and drawer handles form an easy baby ladder. I might as well hire Rapunzel herself to stand up there and drape her locks down for Evie to scramble up.

From there, he conducted a methodical analysis of our pad, pointing out both obvious health hazards (cleaning chemicals beneath the sink) and surprising sartorial perils (keep Daddy’s ties out of reach in his closet; otherwise, she’ll try to tie one around her neck, just like she sees him do every morning.)

To his credit, Arvey conducted his safety inventory with a kind tone — he wasn’t at all snarky or judgmental. He basically acted like a human magnifying glass, opening my eyes to the various opportunities a child has to land herself in hot water. And there are tons of opportunities: according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a child is treated for an injury in the ER every four seconds. That is why my husband and I will spend our next date night getting matching “1-800-222-1222” tattoos – so the nationwide Poison Control Center phone number is always within reach.

A few other interesting tips I picked up:

1. Don’t swallow your daily medications within baby’s eyesight; doing so plants the “I want to eat what Mommy’s eating,” seed. Good thing this baby wasn’t around during Mommy’s experimental phase in her early 20s.
2. Resist the urge to perch your video monitor on top of the crib, with the wire running down and through the side. I know it sounds ludicrous, but Arvey said it’s one of the biggest mistakes he sees parents make. In an effort to snag a front seat view of their sleeping baby, however, they’re setting him up for possible strangulation. I prefer to army-crawl my way through the nursery under the cover of night, peering up through the slats like a groundhog checking to see if it’s safe to come out.
3. I may want to avoid letting Evie play with pots and pans. Why? “Because then they become her toys,” Arvey explained. “And when you’re frying bacon, she’s going to want her toy, and she’ll reach up and grab the hot pan.” Finally — a legitimate excuse for ordering in sushi or deep dish seven nights a week.
4. Keep kids away from remote controls and musical greeting cards; both contain batteries which, if swallowed, start to dissolve rapidly, leading to internal chemical burns, esophageal tears and even death. (As a writer, I’m actually a huge fan of sending paper greeting cards, so I hate to discourage people from doing so, but I must give a shout-out to Treat.com — you can send personalized photo cards for less money than they generic ones you buy at the grocery store. I’m hooked. Bonus: No batteries.)
5. No pressure gates at the tops of stairs. Too easy to trip over.
6. After clearing out your under-sink area of bleach, countertop cleaner and the like, be sure to thoroughly wipe the cabinets down with soap and water and cover the base with a plastic liner. Otherwise, if she gets into it, and she has a wet hand from sucking on it, when she touches the floor of the cabinet, her wet hand will reactivate any chemicals that previously dripped there. (You can also try sticking to non-toxic cleaners like Seventh Generation and Bon Ami, but that’s still not a license to leave cabinets unlocked.)
7. Turn your baby monitor off when you’re not home. Thieves can hack into it and listen in, and if they overhear silence (or you singsonging to your baby, “Are you excited for our weekend trip to grandma’s?”), they’ll have all the info they need to break in and leisurely steal your stuff while you road trip to your mother-in-law’s.
8. When it comes to bedside dressers, Arvey’s mantra is: “No knives, guns, whips, chains, drugs, mirrors, razors or handcuffs.” In other words, childproofing your home is where fun comes to die.

How did you babyproof your home? Would you hire someone to do it?

It’s Child Passenger Safety Week, which means it’s a really good time to double-check that your child’s car seat will keep him as safe as possible in an accident. Pretty confident it already is? Well, according to Safe Kids, nearly 73 percent of kids’ seats are improperly installed (even though 90 percent of parents say they’re ‘confident’ or ‘very confident’ theirs are correct). So it’s definitely worth an extra fifteen minutes of your time. And thankfully, our friends over at Safe Kids and the GM Foundation shared with us this handy checklist, which can nip common problems in the bud.

Want extra assurance your car seat’s installed correctly? Bring it to an inspection station, where certified child passenger safety technicians can give you hands-on help. Find one near you at SafeKids.org.

Plus, more from The Bump:

How to Buy a Car Seat

Top 10 Car Seats

Top 12 Baby Safety Products

One of my first thoughts when I became pregnant was that I would finally be able to buy a Bumbo seat, those funny little pod-like chairs for infants. I’d seen my friends use them with their babies and thought they were adorable. We started using the seat with our son, Harry, when he was about two months old. He loved sitting upright and I liked putting him in it while I did dishes and other chores. It was also wonderful when we started giving him fruit in a mesh feeder. The Bumbo was one of the most used chairs in our house for few months there!

Before Harry was born I’d heard about babies getting injured in the seats. Everything I read said the injuries happened while the babies were sitting on an elevated surface, like a table or countertop. We only used the chair on the floor and I was never concerned that he’d topple out of it. We used the Bumbo until Harry was about six months old and sitting on his own.

Earlier this summer, Bumbo International voluntarily recalled their chairs for repair and rebranded them as Bumbo Floor Seats. They were recalled because of those injuries I’d read about while pregnant. The seats are now being sold with restraint belts to help prevent any further accidents.

What this all means is, if you already have a Bumbo, to safely use it, you’ll need to get a repair kit with a strap — the company will send you one for free (details here). Even though Harry is too big for his Bumbo now, I went ahead and ordered the kit. I wanted to make sure the seat was up to safety standards in case I decide to give it to a friend or use with a future baby.

I received the repair kit within a week of ordering it and went to work on the seat right away. The strap was incredibly easy to install and the kit included everything I needed except for a pen (to mark where to put the strap anchors). It took me less than 10 minutes to set up the Bumbo’s safety restraints. I also affixed the new, more detailed safety warning on the seat.

I put Harry in the chair to give the new straps a test drive. Since he’s so big now it was hard to gauge exactly how effective they are. To me, it seems like the adjustable straps will do a good job at keeping babies in the seats, but I think they might also give parents a false sense of security and Bumbo chairs will still be placed on elevated surfaces. If you’re looking to get your baby off the floor while you work around the house, try a high chair (some recline for very young babies), swing or the Fisher Price Rock n’ Play.

Remember, accidents do happen so don’t ever use a Bumbo on an elevated surface and always keep a watchful eye on your baby while using it.

What do you think about the Bumbo recall and the new Bumbo floor seat safety restraints?

Those little laundry detergent capsules may make throwing in a load of laundry a lot less messy (no powder or liquid spills!) but it’s important for parents to be aware that, to a child, they look like candy — when really, they’re poison.

The American Association of Poison Control Centers reports that there’s been a recent rise in the amount of phone calls they’ve gotten of children ingesting highly concentrated “single dose packs” of laundry detergent. If swallowed kids can become extremely sick and may need to be hospitalized. Other kids get eye irritation from getting the detergent in their eyes. Vomiting, wheezing, gasping for air and drowsiness are all symptoms reported in kids who’ve suffered effects from contact or ingestion of the capsules.

“The rapid onset of significant symptoms is pretty scary,” said Dr. Michael Beuhler, medical director of the Carolinas Poison Center, in a statement. “Other laundry detergents cause only mild stomach upset or even no symptoms at all. Although we aren’t certain what in the product is making the children sick, we urge all parents and caregivers to make sure laundry detergent packs are not accessible to young kids.”

The American Association of Poison Control Centers recommends always keeping detergents locked up and out of the reach of children and following the specific disposal instructions on the label. If you think a child has been exposed to a laundry detergent packet, call your local poison center at 1-800-222-1222 immediately.

Do you use detergent capsules? How do you make sure your child doesn’t get into them?

Plus, more from The Bump:

Baby Safety 101

What Baby’s Playing With That Isn’t Safe

Preventing Medical Emergencies

You may want to check that toy you just bought for baby. Button batteries, those smaller than a coin, have become a huge threat to children’s health.

In a new study from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, it was reported that 40,000 children were treated in emergency rooms for ingesting the tiny batteries between 1997 and 2012. The report also noted an increase in treatments for ingesting the batteries, going from 1,900 in 1998 to 4,800 in 2010. The increase of treatments coincides with the increase in products using these types of batteries, which include toys, flashlights, remote controls, watches, hearing aids and light-up jewelry.

Due to its size, the button battery poses a bigger threat than its AA counterparts — a child is more likely to choke on it. According to the report, when children swallow batteries, serious burns can occur in less than two hours and fatal bleeding can happen after two weeks, the report said. Unfortunately, unless parents see the swallowing, these cases can be overlooked.

“Unless you have seen the child swallow the battery it’s very hard to diagnose and you have to have an x-ray to see the battery,” Dr. Amanda Porro, a pediatrician at Miami Children’s Hospital, said in an interview with HealthDay.

To keep children safe, the CDC and  CPSC are urging the electronics industry and battery manufacturers to develop warnings and industry standards to prevent serious injuries and deaths from button batteries. They also encourage parents to keep all battery operated products away from young children.

Do you check your kid’s toys and other things he plays with (like the remote) for small batteries?

Plus more from The Bump:

What Baby’s Playing With That Isn’t Safe

Baby First Aid Essentials

Emergency Info Checklist