Childproofing your home is a very time consuming process. Not only do you have to figure out what safety gear you need, but you have to narrow down the myriad of choices for everything from baby gates to cabinet locks and outlet covers, buy the items and then figure out how to install them.
By the time you’ve finished making your home foolproof (and hopefully babyproof), you’ve wasted a lot of precious (especially if you’re a working parent) time that could have been spent with your little one.
Plus, you also may have wasted money if you bought the wrong safety items for your home or you installed gear incorrectly and have to deal with even more unplanned purchases. That’s why today’s hint is to consider hiring a childproofer to do the childproofing for you. Paying for professional help with childproofing is many parents’ little time saving secret.
Soon before my daughter started crawling, we hired “The Childproofer” (whose name has been handed down in hushed tones from one friend to another in our circle of friends) to come by our home one afternoon and childproof it for us. He walked through our place, pointing out how we could rearrange furniture to make it more crawl friendly and went through the various childproofing product options we could consider, most of which he had in his truck.
A few hours (and about $800) later and voilà, our house was pretty much ready for an inquisitive crawler, complete with installed gates and window wedges.
While professional childproofers can be pricey ($500 to $1,500, according to one article), they have a lot of experience so can do the job a lot faster than you likely can, as a BabyCenter article points out. This means that by hiring a professional, you’ve gained hours of weekend time that you can now spend playing with your child rather than plugging in outlet covers.
You can find a childproofer at the site of the International Association for Child Safety, and Angie’s List has some helpful questions to ask before hiring a pro.
What are your childproofing tips for other parents?
[…] can’t take credit for this clever idea – a childproofer who recently came to our home suggested the trick to us when I mentioned that we were worried about the flue but didn’t want to […]