Making Your Home Safe
....and your life easier!
Sensory-seeking SEN children can be tornadoes in indoor spaces. Their way of playing can look like pure destruction from an outsider's perspective. Keeping our home clean, tidy and safe is a daily battle, but I have a little experience under my belt now. I want to share some of the steps I've taken, and items I have bought, to make our home a safer, calmer space. I hope this post can be useful for parents/carers who are at the start of the neurodiversity pathway.
Locks on both sides of every door. Baby gates are cumbersome and it's only a matter of time before a little one figures out how to open them or climb over. I decided just to buy some inexpensive hook and eye locks for the doors, and installed them high out of reach (link to which ones I purchased below).
Having a child running in and out of rooms may not seem like such a big deal, but it really starts to eat into your time and patience. One minute they're sat eating in the kitchen, the next minute they are bolting towards the sofa wearing bolognese as warpaint. Or you finally manage to get them upstairs to their bedroom to get dressed, and whilst you're pulling clothes out of the drawers, they're out of the room and back down the stairs. This gets old very fast and having the doors locked is a very simple solution to protect your sanity. It is also, of course, a lot safer.
Baby locks on kitchen units, cleaning cupboard, fridge and freezer. This may not be necessary for all SEN children, but as Gully is obsessed with food, he will try to access the kitchen regularly. If he gets his hands on packages, he will burst them or bite them, turning the food inside to crumbs. He has also been known to smash jars to get what's inside, very dangerous. The cleaning cupboard needs a lock for obvious reasons. I have these ones:
RE cleaning cupboards, I mostly buy plant-based, non-toxic cleaning products. Even when there is a lock on the cupboard, products can be left laying around after being used. We're carers but we're also human, and human error occurs. Non toxic products reduce the risk of something awful happening if your child does get hold of them. When I need to use things like oven cleaner, drain unblocker, etc, they are never used when Gully is in the house. I carry out these tasks when he is at school and the product bottles go straight to the outdoor bin.
Lots of old towels! Water play is something many sensory seeking kids enjoy, Gully has a splash in the bath every evening. He enjoys spitting water over the edge of the bath, flicking it around, playing with bubbles and creating waves. I put towels down on the bathroom floor and let him play. As these towels are purely used for the floor, I wash them on the rapid cycle to save on time and electricity. They don't need to be clean-clean. I have two storage baskets in the utility cupboard, one is for the towels we use on our body, the other for the floor towels.
Plastic bins/laundry bins for wet towels and clothes. You can't always get things straight into the washing machine, so I found plastic laundry bins specifically for wet items very useful.
Front/back door handle locks (link below). We don't need these in our current house as we have security chains, but in our old house I had handle locks on the inside handles of the exterior doors. These were bought after Gully ran outside and into the road whilst I was putting away some shopping. I had absentmindedly left the front door unlocked when I came in with the bags (there's that human error).
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