The Parenting Journal

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...

Drowning is the leading cause of unintentional injury death in children ages 1–4 (CDC). Not falls. Not traffic accidents. Water. And in most of those cases, the child was last seen inside the house. A fence changes that math. But...

Every child deserves a home that keeps them safe. For autistic children, that bar is higher, and the work is more specific. Standard baby proofing assumes a child who responds to danger the way most children do: flinching from sharp...

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...

The first time I traveled solo with both kids, I spent forty minutes in a rental car parking lot trying to remember whether the LATCH anchors in that particular Chevy Traverse were in the seat bight or on the seatback....

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....

Every room in your house contains something that could seriously harm your baby. In a specific, fixable, room-by-room way that most parents don’t fully map until something goes wrong. I learned this the hard way when my younger daughter emptied...

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...