The Parenting Journal

Renting an apartment with a baby or toddler is a specific kind of puzzle. You’re trying to protect a small human who has no concept of danger, in a space you don’t own, using methods your landlord will permit. The...

Renting with a baby is a particular kind of puzzle. You need every safety measure a homeowner would install, but you’re working under a lease that says you can’t put a screw in the wall without permission. The good news:...

Most parents use "baby proofing" and "childproofing" as if they mean the same thing. They don’t. And the gap between them is where a lot of kids get hurt. Both terms describe making your home safer for children. But they...

The weeks before your due date feel like the last quiet stretch you’ll have for years. You’re tired, your back aches, and the nursery still isn’t finished. But this window, roughly weeks 28 through 36, is the best time you’ll...

The pool is quiet. That’s the problem. Most parents picture a drowning child as one who splashes, screams, and waves. The reality is almost the opposite: a child slipping under the surface makes almost no sound, and the whole thing...

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...