DIYbanter - View Single Post - Keeping a toddler out of drawers and cabinets

Smarty

wrote:

clipped

No one can ALWAYS watch what they do. It's a nice dream,tho.

I would argue that...I'm a parent and a grand-parent, so I speak from
experience. Living in Florida, I read about every other week of
another toddler drowning in a swimming pool and often in the care of
someone other than the parent or when there is a gathering and the
parents are distracted.

My husband and I had three grandsons for an extended vacation when
they were quite small...2,3 and 5. We were sitting on the patio with
the children nearby. I went inside to check on dinner and probably
wasn't inside more than two or three minutes. In that time, the two
year old went out back to the seawall...I found him lying on his
tummy, looking into the water from the edge of the seawall, as we
often did to watch the critters. He could have fallen off a dock or
wandered into the street. Hubby wasn't accustomed to watching little
ones or just not cautious.

Two is old enough to open a door and go into the street or be taken,
get into a medicine cabinet or a purse to get medicines...only takes
moments. Grandparents, I think, might be less aware of hazards to
little ones because the hazards are the grandparents' "normal".

As the original poster, I want to simply say that I entirely agree with
the idea of adult vigilance and supervision.

My own belief is that this is a home repair forum, and that an obvious
answer such as "Supervise the kid", sterilize the parents, use a BB
gun, and all of the other wise-guy comments are people who need to show
off, and make what are entirely stupid and irrelevant remarks.

Those people who come to this forum and try to offer useful helpful are
to be commended and thanked for their generous offerings of expertise
and time.

Those who think they have some earth-shattering and valuable comment to
offer such as "forget the cabinets and get a BB gun" are sick people
who inflict their perverse and counter-productive crap on the rest of
us.

I, for one, am so disgusted with the childish, self-serving commentary
that entirely and deliberately ignores the purpose of this forum and
the sincere attempt some people are making to connect to others with
more experience.

Telling someone to go and Google misses the point, since the benefit of
actual expertise and experience is what others are usually seeking.

As the reply suggesting Google correctly indicates, the number of
Google choices from doing a search is enormous. The purpose of asking a
question here is not to find an enormous variety of choices, but rather
to find the relatively few very good choices only discovered through
actual experience. This and other newsgroups attract legitimate experts
whose advise I highly respect. Learning from other newsgroup members is
what makes this such a powerful method of research.

I have helped many hundreds of people with tons of questions on this
and several other forums and newsgroups over my retirement years, and
genuinely enjoy helping others. I learned a lot in 35+ years of
engineering, and also a lot in 35+ years of home improvements DIY.

I deeply respect those who come here to help others. And I hold in
great contempt those who pervert and disgrace these groups with
wise-guy comments, for no other reason than to show-off how clever they
can be.

Someone suggesting a BB gun and slingshot to supervise a child just
makes me sick.

And those who seek to hijack these threads by starting outrageous
dialogs on gun control, religion, and all the other un-related topics,
are a disgrace to the very causes and crusades they represent.

End of rant....................