VERY steep stairs! Safety?

[jaabaar]

Hi,

Dont know if I am posting this in the right place.

We have a small terraced house. VERY steep stairs leeds up to the two bedrooms. No landing, just a small square at the top and from there it leads to two bedrooms, ours and baby's.

I know you can put a gate on top (somehow as it is even awkward to put that).

Howeve when she will start being able to use stairs I am so worried that she will just tumble down! Is there anything I can do about it???

I know silly question as probably there isnt much....

Thanks anyway for any opinions which I much value.

Grip stips on the stairs if they're wood. Also no socks when going up & down. A banister at child height for going down & when going up do the hands on step infront method

Teach your child right from the start to go down backwards on her tummy - or alternatively, sitting down and bum shuffling forward and down.

Ds did the latter. We tried to teach him to go on his tummy, but he preferred the seated method and when we watched him, we could see that he was naturally very cautious as he did so we let him get on with it.

We did barricade the stairs until we were confident about him though (from 11 months, when he started crawling, to about 14 months) and never had stair gates.

However, ds didn't learn to walk until about 17 months (he was cruising at 12 months), and he learnt to climb up/down stairs at 13 months, so by the time he was walking he was well used to stairs.

You just have to teach her good ways of doing it - going up on hands & knees or hands & feet (depending on the size of the steps and the size of the child!), coming down either the reverse of that, or (what I preferred as a child) sitting and facing forward and going down one step at a time - feet two steps below bum, move bum down one step, repeat!

An extra handrail about halfway to the main one will also help when she gets a bit bigger an wants to walk up and down them.

Oh, and carpet on the bottom hall if you can, because the chances are there will be a slip at some stage, so it's a softer landing than lino or tiles.

Ohhh very good ideas! Really had NO clue about different methods of climbing stairs.
THanks a lot!

You can get stair gates which are like roller blinds and take up much less room than rigid ones. I'm a childminder and use them on the stairs and the kitchen. you can open them with one hand which surprised me. Well worth it.

We live in an old labourer's cottage. Steep stairs that curve round at the bottom into the kitchen (with a door at the bottom so you'd hit a wall and then the door as you tumbled iyswim). Just a square at the top with 3 bedrooms off it.

We had a stairgate because if dd wandered out of our room at night and took even a step in the wrong direction that would have been it. Otherwise we taught her how to use the stairs and let her practice. It was the only way.

She's 3. Never had a problem yet.

We're doing without stairgates at the moment - dd started trying to climb them when she was about 11 months (before walking!) and with somer help, and keeping an eye on her, has learned to come down backwards. Ours are steep - Victorian terrace - so we were nervous but tbh I hated having a gate on - drove me nuts. I'm not completely confident about her ability to manage them yet (she's 13m now) but she's definitely getting there. I've got a little brass bell that she can't resist ringing, so I put it on the second step - if I hear it ring I know she's on her way up and I go with her!

Our stairs sound like yours op. We just supervised until she was steady. She is 18 months now and I'm perfectly happy to leave her to it. She has been going up no problem for absolutely ages, down unsupervised is pretty recent. She bumps down on her bum now but has never gone down backwards, she used to insist on going down forwards like a grown up .

Your stairs sound like the ones in our old house, had a gate at the bottom but couldn't get one for the top, we did the bum bumping. I used to bum bump when I was very pregnant when we first moved in