The Parenting Journal

Drowning is the leading cause of unintentional injury death in children ages 1–4 (CDC). Not car accidents. Not falls. Water. And most of those deaths happen in home water, in bathtubs and backyard pools and five-gallon buckets left out after...

Every 15 seconds, someone in the U.S. calls a poison center about an exposure. America’s Poison Centers logged nearly 2.1 million human poison exposures in 2024, the equivalent of one case every 15 seconds. A significant portion of those calls...

Children under 4 die from choking on ordinary household objects. Not toys marketed to older kids. Not obvious hazards. Ordinary things: a grape, a coin, a button battery from the TV remote. The tragedy is that most of these objects...

The battery in a greeting card. The one loose in your junk drawer. The CR2032 that fell out of the kitchen scale and rolled under the refrigerator. These are not minor household hazards. For a child under six, a single...

America’s Poison Centers logged nearly 2.1 million human poison exposures in 2024. A meaningful share of those calls involve a toddler and a product that looked interesting enough to grab.Laundry detergent pods are near the top of that list. In...

The air in a freshly painted room smells like progress. It also contains chemicals your baby will breathe for weeks.That smell is VOCs, volatile organic compounds, releasing from the paint film as it cures. For adults spending a few hours...

Most parents think about drowning when they picture bathroom danger. The burn risk is quieter, easier to overlook, and almost entirely preventable.Scalding from hot tap water is one of the leading causes of unintentional burn injuries in young children, and...

The nursery thermometer I bought for my older daughter sat on the dresser for the first three weeks of her life. I thought I was doing fine by feel. Then a pediatric nurse asked me at a well visit what...

Small apartments concentrate hazards. Everything is closer together: the kitchen is steps from where your baby plays, the bathroom door is always in view, and the single bookcase in the corner holds everything from your router to a heavy vase....