Is baby-proofing your home a waste of time?

It’s part and parcel of parenthood. The very second your little ones are on the move, it’s time to babyproof your house. Cue putting locks on the kitchen cupboards, gates on the stairs and soft protectors on all the corners.

But while for many parents, making your home as accident-less as possible is an absolute must, others believe baby-proofing is a complete waste of time.

Take Abby Plested for example. The 23-year-old blogger for Honey We Are More has two children under five but won’t be taking extreme measures to ensure her home is an accident-free zone.

“Don’t baby proof. Let them learn and they won’t do it again,” she told Stuff.co.nz.

“Sure there is a place and a need to baby proof some parts of your home however, I think you can get over the top with it,” Abby went on to explain to Daily Mail Australia.

“I have never put baby gates up in my home or stairs because I think it’s important for the baby to learn boundaries without these. Yes it means you have to watch your baby more but you are most likely doing that anyway,” she continued.

Abby believes that once children do have a bump or mishap in the home, they are less likely to do it again.

“For example I have cactus in my house and Houston touched it once and he will never go near them again. Trust me,” she explains.

Abby isn’t the only one who doesn’t believe in taking extensive steps to ensure your home is baby-safe. A quick scoot round the forums of parenting site Mumsnet reveals several discussions about the pros and cons of babyproofing.

In one post entitled “AIBU (Am I Being Unreasonable – for those not up to speed on forum lingo) to do no babyproofing whatsoever?” the poster explains that she doesn’t want to live in a house that resembles Fort Knox.

“I am planning to leave everything as it is and over time teach DS how to negotiate his way through our home,” she wrote.

And many users were quick to offer reassurances that her idea to skip the babyproofing stage wasn’t unreasonable.

“I didn’t really baby-proof. I was sensible obviously and didn’t leave dangerous things lying around, but I didn’t use all the cupboard door things etc,” one parent wrote.

“We didn’t do anything apart from common sense stuff like moving cleaning products and keeping toilet lid down. Despite the scaremongering, DD never tried poking fingers in a plug socket and showed little interest in the inside of cupboards. We had a couple of trapped fingers and a banged head occasionally but she soon learned to shut a door carefully and manoeuvre herself more observantly,” another parent agreed.

One thing that most parents, including Abby, seem to be in agreement over is the need to secure big pieces of furniture to the wall to stop them falling over.

According to safety site Anchor It one child dies every two weeks when a TV or furniture falls onto him or her, while every thirty minutes an injured child is admitted to A&E because of tipped furniture or a falling TV.

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