Making Your Home Fun and Safe for Your Kids
Every parent wants to keep their children safe. At the same time though, you don’t want to have them walk around in plastic bubble wrap either. There’s a balance you have to strike between keeping your kids safe and allowing them to have fun. And that can start in your home décor.
Open-concept kitchen and living room
Besides being the interior design trend nowadays, there’s a practical element to open concept as well for young families. The kitchen and living room are often the centre of family activities. By combining them together into one open-concept room, you’d encourage more interaction with your kids. Plus, you’d have an easier time keeping an eye on them from the kitchen.
Soft flooring
Falling down is part of kids’ everyday lives and you don’t need to over-react to it. What you can do though to minimize risk of injuries is to install soft flooring throughout most of the house. Avoid tile or stone floors. Instead, go with cork, vinyl, or even carpet. Carpet is the last option on this list because it’s harder to maintain. It depends on how prone your kids are to spilling things. If you really like carpet though, install it in the bedrooms and the kids’ play zones.
Spread-out play zones
Rather than relegating your kids to one room to play in, consider setting up multiple play zones throughout the house. Play variety is important to early childhood development and different play environments help them adapt more readily to new situations. Your kids will also get to explore the whole house without being too tempted by “forbidden areas”.
Safe lighting
When possible, try to light up every room with more wall- or ceiling-mounted lights. That way, there won’t be as many freestanding lamps to bump into and cause accidents. If you do need freestanding lamps, get ones with non-fragile stands and LED bulbs that won’t break so easily.
Plush furniture
Shop for plush furniture with soft curves. This will cut down on the number of sharp corners or edges getting in the way of kids running around. For example, you can use a comfy oversized ottoman as a coffee table and poufs as seating options for kids. Poufs are easy for kids to move around and they add texture variety to a room.
Feel free to go bold with the upholstery fabrics, too, as they’ll be fun for the kids and will make your home’s interior design pop. Choose bright colours with complementary accent borders or patterns. And if you go for whimsical or geometric patterns, they’d be perfect for masking stains that are bound to happen now and then.
Window seats
Build a few window seats throughout the house. They can be part of the spread-out play zones where your kids can hang out or use as reading nooks. Window seats can be practical as well if you take the time to design them the right way.
Fun roller shades and motorized blinds
Don’t just stick with plain neutral roller shades – colours and motifs are fuel for kids’ imaginations! If they have a theme going in their rooms, get custom roller shades to match it. Also, add safety to the mix by turning them into motorized blinds so that there aren’t any hazardous cords hanging around.
Start with these ideas so that you’re all set to let your kids be kids!
