Danger lurks at home

Anyone with small children, or who has spent a lot of time around them, will know how quickly they can can go from a position of relative safety to being at risk.

It's almost as if they have a magnetism that draws them towards potentially dangerous situations. How speedily they can move when the opportunity arises. Simply turn your head or get distracted for a moment and, hey presto, your little treasure is gone from sight, perilously close to a significant drop or the busy roadside.

There will be parents nodding as they recall situations where, but for sheer luck or divine intervention, things could have gone horribly awry.

So it is quite scary to consider the potential dangers lurking in your own home, the place where your children should be at their safest.

As reported yesterday, Safekids NZ says that on average 22 Kiwi kids are admitted to hospitals every day with unintentional injuries or accidents. For those aged up to 4 years, most of these happened at home.

The organisation has launched a home safety campaign targeting common items with a hidden danger, lithium batteries.

With any number of toys, gadgets and appliances powered by lithium batteries, the risk is real. The danger is that a toddler could ingest or inhale a battery from mini-remote controls, a singing greeting card, watch or kitchen/bathroom scales and suffer burns.

It's another thing to add to the list of potential harms that your child may encounter in the home, alongside matches, medicines, sprays and poisons, toys or other items with small, loose parts.

While I would never suggest wrapping kids in cottonwool, this is different.

And, with this relatively new danger that has arisen, an old message still applies, to be vigilant of the many dangers that exist. As Safekids suggests, get down to your child's level to check around for hard-to-see dangers.

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