Michael Frogel: Okay, supervision is perhaps the most important thing in bringing up children and preventing them from getting hurt. Just a couple of examples.
If you are bathing an infant and the phone rings; it's an important phone call, you go to the phone, you leave the infant, seven months old; they have just learnt how to sit. The infant is sitting when you left them in the bathtub. The call just said, everything is good, it's okay. You get stuck on the phone, you keep talking, oh, it will be okay, it will be okay, we are sitting there, everything is alright. The two year old is nearby, they can hear him or the five year old is nearby.
God forbid, these things happen, you come back in, the child is laying in a pool of water; it could be one inch of water, two inches of water, and they have drowned. Okay?
If you get to them soon enough, within the first few minutes, they could be resuscitated. If you don't get to them soon enough, the worst outcome could happen, from simply going to answer the telephone. If you go to the door, and it's your friend, you start having a discussion, you are talking, you forget about the little one in the bathtub, you can't do that.
Don't go answer the phone, don't go answer the doorbell. Send someone else to do it. If you have to do it, do it in two seconds, and that's it. It's simple, but these tragedies happen all the time, they are in the news, they are every single day.
Cooking on a hot stove, or whatever it might be, children can get over to it, a two year old, put their hand up and pull down, God forbid, a pot of hot soup on themselves. They get second or third degree burns and wind up in a burn unit, which we will hear about more later.
If you microwave a bottle in a microwave, you may not realize it but it could get extremely hot; the liquid, not the bottle itself, and you have to be very careful to know about that.
Candles, Hanukkah candles, there's lot of problems with that; we will hear more about that as far as burns go.
Preventing falls. People take an infant seat, they carry it out of the car, they leave it on top of a high table, the baby is eight, nine months old, starts to rock. You went into the other room, they fall off. The seat is very heavy. I have seen hundreds of cases like this, they land on their heads. It's going to be a problem, because you shouldn't have left the baby alone on the seat on top of something high. You need to leave them on the floor, take them out of the seat and be careful.
Maybe I shouldn't ask, but how many of you have baby walkers? Don't even answer.
We shouldn't use baby walkers if you have any stairs in the house, because babies have been known to walk more than they could you would think, and go over the stairs and fall and get hurt.
Baby swings can even be dangerous. If you have another sibling who is five or six year old, they just like to swing it very hard. The baby is here, and the swing hits them in the neck. Such things have happen. If you don't supervise, it's a problem.
Trampolines. I don't like trampolines. Children jump on trampolines, bounce off them and fall onto the ground, they get a serious injury; fractures, head injuries, and things like that.
The American Academy of Pediatrics says not to use walkers at all, to be extremely careful with swings, and doesn't recommend trampolines.
Lately there has been a lot of cases of children; two years old, 18 months old, three years old, climbing up; and it doesn't have to be a television, it could be a bookcase, it could be something heavy, and they pull it down on themselves.
Bookcases should be made so that they stay onto the wall. It's good for earthquake prevention; people that live in earthquake areas know about this, but you can buy things that just kind of make it steady so it doesn't fall, but heavy objects can fall on children.
So you need to supervise all the time. Supervision means really being there. It doesn't mean being three rooms away when little ones are playing, because they can climb up, they can do things, they don't know right from wrong necessarily, they are exploring the world, and these things happen, and it becomes a significant problem
Window guards. If you live in apartment, high up at all, you need to have guards on your windows. Using during the summer we have, call them skydivers. They wind up going out the window. What a child couldn't do yesterday, assume that he can do today. If a baby couldn't rollover this morning, and you put him on the dressing table, that will be the day he will rollover and fall on the floor, because you leave them unattended. Child couldn't walk yesterday, today he may start walking and get into trouble. So you have to mentally know where the children are at.
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