Holiday Safety

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This area explores various aspects of holiday safety for kids. Keeping your family safe during the holidays starts with knowing what the dangers are. This page will outline the common hazards regarding the primary holidays:

Holiday safety for kids

1. If hosting guests, ask people if they have any medication with them when they arrive at your house. If so, collect it right then and there and store it in a locked cabinet so that it isn’t accessible to children.

2. If some of your guests are smokers, have them give up their lighters or Zippos and store them in the same place as the medications (or in another area inaccessible to children).

3. Be on the lookout for signs that a child is playing with fire, such as burnt matches underneath the bed or charred material in dark places such as closets.

4. When visiting a relative, always ask if there is a gun in the house, and if so, how it is secured. Accidental shootings involving children spike around this time of the year, as kids stumble upon a relative’s gun that their parents didn’t know was in the house. This might also be a good time to go over gun safety with your kids.

5. Knives, scissors, box-cutters, and other sharp tools tend to get a lot of use during the holidays as people wrap presents or open packaging. So store these cutting tools in a safe place and be mindful about where you set them down, especially if you have toddlers in the house. (Children this age love to pick up things and walk around with them, which combined with their clumsiness can equate to disaster.) Be sure to teach older kids the proper way to carry a sharp object, (carefully with the point down), and keep kid-friendly scissors around so that kids can help under adult supervision.

6. Program poison control (1-800-222-1222) into your cell phone so that you have it handy in an emergency.

7. Keep an eye out for infants and toddlers chewing on Christmas light wires.

8. Do your best to keep toys for different age groups separated. If hosting kids of all ages from several different families, try to set aside a separate playroom for infants and toddlers, and keep it free from older kids and their age-inappropriate toys.

9. Do your part to prevent drunk driving by making sure that nobody from your family gets on the road when intoxicated.

10. Make sure your kids buckle up and use their car seats when riding with relatives.

11. Above all, don’t let supervision slide during the holidays. Ensure that someone is in charge of monitoring kids at all times. When relatives are over, kids have a tendency to get lost amongst the commotion, and this is when accidents happen. You should also train older kids to know what safety hazards to watch out for with our book What Bigger Kids Can Do, designed for elementary school-aged kids.

Child accidents over the holidays

Preoccupied parents = lax supervision. Add this combination to things like children spending time in other houses, many different age groups interacting together, restless kids crammed indoors, and brand new toys (many of which can be dangerous to younger kids), and you end up with an increase in child accidents over the winter holidays.

Drunk driving during the holidays

Over the winter holidays, 2-3X more people die in alcohol-related vehicle crashes than during comparable time periods the rest of the year, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. And about 40% of traffic fatalities during winter holidays involve an impaired driver, compared with 28% for other deaths in December. New Years eve gets the most attention for drunk driving, but other times around the holidays can be just as dangerous. (Note that the aforementioned statistic excludes most drunk driving that occurs on New Years, since these accidents tend to take place after midnight and are tallied in January statistics.) In addition to drinking during holiday celebrations, you also get increased drinking from those who are depressed, downbeat or distraught around this time of the year.

Holiday home burglary risks

Home burglary risks increase during the holidays, as thieves take advantage of the fact that many families will be out of town. So keep your eyes peeled for suspicious behavior, and if leaving town, let your trusted neighbors know and ask them to do the same.

Other resources for family safety during the holidays