Safety Mistakes Parents Make

Most parents assume they will have plenty of time before having to tackle this task, but in reality your child may become mobile long before you are ready for him to be. Authors Lisa Carter and Lori Marques of the book Child Safety Made Easy and website Paranoid Sisters, suggest you "get on your hands and knees and crawl around your house" looking for potential hazards that need to be corrected.

The National Safe Kids Campaign says that "a few easy, relatively inexpensive steps—locking household cleaning materials in a cabinet out of reach, installing carbon monoxide detectors and smoke alarms, blocking stairways with baby gates—can greatly reduce your child's risk of injury in the home."