Erin Brinser still has nightmares about her 2-year-old son, who was severely burned in a horrific household accident early this year.
They've flashed in and out of Erin Brinser's mind since January, after Bradley scooted past her undetected through the living room and into the kitchen of the family's Whiteville, Tenn., home. It's there he spied a yellow bottle of lighter fluid sitting atop the refrigerator."He got the bottle down and squirted it into our toaster oven and somehow turned the oven on," she says. Seconds later, "he looked like a fireball."
Each year, Le Bonheur Children's Medical Center in Memphis sees 12,000 injured children, many of them from preventable household mishaps like the Brinsers'.
Increasingly, parents are being encouraged to make it harder for children to earn bumps, tumbles and breaks - and more serious injuries - in their own homes. From the selection of furniture to the "baby-proofing" of knobs and switches, parents can obsess over making their house safer for infants and children.
But with the sad benefit of hindsight, parents like Erin Brinser, whose son has since healed, say it's better to go to extremes than to overestimate a child's discretion.
"What you think is good or good enough," she says, "isn't always."
On a corner lot in a suburban development outside Memphis, a model home has been fashioned completely with children in mind. Conceived by Le Bonheur and the Mid-South Safe Kids Coalition, the 3,250-square-foot, four-bedroom "SafeKids Show Home" is purportedly the first house in the region to be child-proof from the start.
But even parents not in the market for a new house, or who find its more than $350,000 price tag prohibitive, may gain ideas from the homes' built-in features. Spreading awareness is the main point anyhow, according to its developers.
"You walk into a lot of houses and . . . there's nothing that looks adult or friendly," said Jeff Blackledge of Archimania, the firm that designed the Safe Home. Parents "have all these contraptions" and "have all the doors tied" to keep children from opening them, he says.
By contrast, the Safe Kids Home shows safety can be incorporated "in a more pleasing manner," he says, "to show people you can have a nice home even in the years when your kids are rambunctious, getting into everything."
The show home's built-in features include:
- Cabinetry with rounded corners.
- Child-resistant, latched appliances.
- Lockable storage areas.
- A cushioned bathtub with a non-skid surface.
- Anti-scald protection on faucets and showers.
- Recessed pull-out gating at the top and bottom of a staircase.
The home's pool is ringed by four-sided fencing standing 5 feet, with vertical bars 23/8 inches apart. It has an alarm system, battery-operated pool cover, rounded corners, an outdoor telephone and emergency equipment nearby.
Out front, even the home's picket fence was planned with rounded, well-sanded pickets and covered with nonleaded paint, according to builders' guidelines. Hand rails along the porch stairs are set at both child and adult heights, with the stairs topped with safety treads.
The Cordova show home is also notable for what it leaves out: No sliding glass doors, no balcony, no diving board for the pool - all common trouble points for young children.
"We tried to develop a house plan that would enhance the notion of a family and, with that, enhance the notion of safety," Blackledge says. "The kids and the parents would all be on the second floor, so there's a good connection (between them). Rather than using baby gates in stairs, we looked at . . . something that was esthetically pleasing. Door stops (that are one-piece instead of with detachable tops) at the baseboards, recessed lights, putting in tamper-proof sockets - they're just good, clean, common-sense ideas."
Yet it's a kind of common sense rarely factored into blueprints, according to Todd Walker, an Archi-mania partner.
"What Jeff and I are trying to develop is something that could educate people beyond the Safe House," says Walker.