To wonder if people were telling me the truth when they said, 'Oh, we haven't baby-proofed, we've just trained them'

[MainlyMaynie]

Several people have said this to me. They claim they haven't bothered baby-proofing and have just left their houses the same way. Apparently they have just taught their children not to touch. Their houses look the same, full of giant glass vases etc. But can this possibly true? I am spending all day moving DS away from objects, saying 'not for DS' and giving him a toy. All I have taught him is that there is a very funny game of going for a forbidden object, giggling and waiting for Mummy to catch up. If he thinks I'm not catching him, he actually pauses, turns round to look at me while laughing and then races off again when he thinks I'm chasing fast enough. I am tempted to turn my house into an undecorated category a prison cell.

Depends on the child. DD was utterly fine with easily movable things lik boxes of tools, books etc.

Shame that the only two things that she wanted to do were to pull the cats' tails and sit with the dog - the dog at least learnt quickly to stay in another room for the duration, but its a bit hard to babyproof a cat . . .

My DD is one of the compliant ones. No means No for her: reverse psychology is NEVER going to work on this one

She also does risk-assessing, but it's only reading this thread that's made me realise she does it. She asks to be carried down the stairs as often as she walks down with help. She is very careful about stepping out of the house (big front step). Strangely though, she doesn't think twice about throwing herself off the sofa and shouting 'fall down' through shrieks of laughter

Stranded - why are socket covers dangerous? What have I missed?

Our house is just not baby-proofable. It's too big, and there are too many things you would have had to change. So we had no choice but to 'train' them.

Although tbh, most of what we were training for the first year was our reflexes....

I have a very adventurous and curious DS. We babyproofed to the extent of putting stairgates up and a baby lock on the kitchen cupboard with cleaning stuff in.

The rest is just common sense in my view - no hot drinks in easy reach, pans to the back of the stove, dangerous tools/chemicals locked away etc. We don't have ornaments and my view is that if we leave it in reach, he is going to play with it, so anything that we don't want touched should be out of reach (still trying to get DH to remember this sometimes).

The stairgates (actually on the stairs) don't get used during the day anymore, since DS learned to squiggle under it at 2.6 (now 3.2). The one on the kitchen gets used if I am upstairs doing something and DS is downstairs playing. We use the gate at the top of the stairs only during the night, just as a precaution in case he wanders out of his room and turns the wrong way (he generally is still half asleep if he gets out of his be in the middle of the night).

DS2 is due shortly and we will be employing the same principles.

There are still lots of people on here who do think the reason the rest of us bother to babyproof our houses is because we are too lazy or stupid to train our children

It reminds me of that bloke who said that people think that authoritarian parents = well behaved children, when in fact well behaved children = authoritarian parents. As a primary school teacher I SO expected my child to do as he was told, it was just a matter of being firm and it worked on all those children I taught. So when DS arrived I was particularly taken aback to find that telling him NO was just an invitation to try, try and try again.

I would say that I think the above only applies to very little children, once they reach a certain age most ARE trainable.

I met someone who didn't move the ornaments - he taught his children by rapping their fingers with a ruler .

I never baby proofed. I did train my almost 4 year old and am in the process of training my just gone 1 year old. Its what works for me. No stair gate, oven lock etc etc

It's entirely down to your child how much baby proofing you need to do. We have friends whose baby will quite happily play quietly with their toys and not get up to any mischief. While another friend has a child who will take every opportunity to climb the furniture, open cupboards, pull things off tables and cause mayhem.

DD is closer to the mayhem end of the scale so we have gates (lots of them on a four storey 19th century cottage), locks on some cupboards and ornaments on low tables.

Actually, I should add that my mum delights in telling me about when I was a baby, they thought they had the baby-control thing perfected. I did exactly what I was told, always (just like DD now I suppose). They were both primary school teachers, and thought they were marvellously accomplished parents.

Then my brother came along, for whom 'no' was an open invitation to go ahead and do as he pleased

We are lucky to have a compliant child in DD. I am under no illusion that future babies will be this easy. I expect that if we have another baby, we will get completely the opposite

I didn't baby-proof.

No training of children - just luck and not having any stuff I particularly mind being broken. Did have one or two incidents which ended up costing us (coins in the DVD player, cd drive of computer broken).

God knows how ds2 survived his early years. He's got asd and is obsessed with electrical stuff. He used to walk around the house trailing handfuls of leads and extension cords, plugging stuff in/out (coming back to me now: 'I'm plugging it in. I'm plugging it out. Repeat ad nauseum).

Always had everything I valued six feet off the floor until DD was five.

When DS came along I did the same thing but strangely he just isn't interested in things which are clearly not his. Still child-proof to an extent though.

It used to amaze me back in the day when I'd go to our local residents club / family bar. People let just-toddling babies wander around among low-tables with lit cigarettes in ashtrays and pint glasses and would just have to say the occasional, "no-oooo...." and it worked

i am having to move stuff now as roly poly six month old son likes to bash the floor with anything he finds. his poor toys are going to toy heaven soon i think.

I suppose it depends on the personality of the child and whether you want to be able to pop to the loo and not worry about your child and your stuff. ds and dd are/were quite creative. never leave anything in sight, even high up.

I'd seen the stats on the chief causes of serious injuries and deaths in toddlers so we did have stairgates (we have a townhouse, with tiny landings, so would have had them anyway, tbh). Cupboard lock on the under-sink cupboard with all the bleach in.

Breakable/precious stuff out of reach is just common sense, surely - if it'd upset you if it got broken, don't leave it hanging around near a curious child.

Despite all this, we still had the hideous moment when I turned round from the washing up to check on ds, who was playing happily in the cupboard with the tupperware, only to see some blue grains on his lips - flipping rat poison! I didn't even know we had any rat poison. Turned out stupid stupid dh had spotted some under the fridge when we moved in, when ds was seven months, and idiotically decided oh, I know where I'll put that, in the back of a cupboard behind some big stuff we don't use very often so my wife doesn't realise it's there...

It turned out fine, but I'm sure I got a few grey hairs that day.

ds is a mega-fiddler, btw, always has been and still is now. He can't walk past anything without picking it up and touching it. I've said 'look with your EYES not with your hands!' so often over the years I'll probably still be repeating it in my grave.

Shit edam!! That would have had me in hysterics I hope DH got a good going-over for that one!

Socket covers in the UK are dangerous because they already have an inbuilt safety mechanism - the covers over-ride the safety mechanism.
This is not the case in other countries, only the UK (and possibly other countries with 3 pin plugs where the third one is for the earth terminal, but not Australia, that's for sure - we will have to get socket covers here)

Yes, I was seriously angry with dh over that one. Neither big nor clever. Thank Christ no harm was done.

I didn't baby proof anything except to put a key lock on the medicine drawer and the cleaning products out of reach. Figure better for him to learn no and why than just have that option taken away. Different things work for different children though.

We didn't baby proof apart from a stairgate at the top of the stairs in case he fell down them. DS broke a photoframe and has wrecked a couple of DVDs, but that's about it. You can't baby proof other people's houses when you visit them, so I thought it was important to just distract him, or try and teach him no. Luckily for me, he responded. He's worse now, though, as an almost 3 year old as he pushes every boundary going.

Oh I tell a lie, we had a fireguard, too.

I have a gate on the kitchen door because there are too many chemicals in cupboards/ sharp objects/ etc around for me to keep track of at all times. My husband is awesome but is on the forgetful side when it comes to leaving things lying about, including the bread knife. It's just easier to keep the room shut. :)

We didn't block the stairs, and we didn't change anything else in the house.

Thanks Thumb. I didn't realise that

We've only got them in her room - hers is the only one with nothing plugged in. I'll remove them in the morning.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/1438572-to-remind-you-that-SOCKET-COVERS-ARE-DANGEROUS - here you are Stetsons - there is a bloke on there who really knows what's what and some useful links :)

We never baby-proofed. DD learned early - by a stern look and sharp "No!" - not to open or touch things. But she's generally always been a compliant child so it was pure luck on our part. If she'd been different we would have babyproofed alot more.

ITA, it depends on the kid. Some parents think it is because of their superior parenting skills. They stop thinking that if they have another child that is a tearaway an inquisitive/busy child.

We had to bolt furniture to the walls in DS' room because he could scale anything (6ft wardrobe for instance) in the time it took me to go to the toilet. Course that might have been because of my crap parenting skills, but I like to think it is because he has always been incredibly active and that does him well as a teen who is great at sports.

not really baby proofed DD is 2, never used stairgates as staircase too wide and we looked into it but by then she had learned to climb stairs ok so we left them, live in old house so when a door is shut she can not open it, so door to study always shut and bathroom living room and Kitchen open

have fireguard for main room but not fastened as will not drill into centuries old wood.

never used plug covers ( completely unnecessary in Uk anyway) or cupboard/ freezer locks, do believe in saying no over and over until it works and it does

precious antiques have been moved but you can not move everything, she went through a 2 week phase of pulling books off shelves but you can not move 750 books to higher shelf after me repeatedly taking them off her and replacing them she got bored does not touch them now

not really into baby proofing certianly not the padded corners of furniture type as it just makes life difficult when you visit