The baby safety gates are a must have products nowadays. These help in protecting your babies from falling or toppling and other accidents by guarding an area of the house or the place. Place these gates near an area you want to be restricted for the baby. This blocks the access to those dangerous areas. There are many varieties of gates available in the market. Some are perfect for blocking stairs or falls while some block nothing but stand in the middle of the room. The choice making is difficult but important. Keep these points in view before buying one safety gate:
Buy a New or Nearly New Baby Safety Gate
Here, we do not want to say brand new or firsthand gate. What we mean is take the new models. Older models, which had V-shaped spaces at the top, were always blamed for trapping the babies. They were recalled from the market. Other styled old gates have some different hazards associated with them. One popular style was providing toe hold, which was hazardous for industrious babies as they could easily climb and fall off them. So, getting a new (made not before 5 years) will be a wise option.
Pressure Mounted Baby Safety Gates
These are the most common types of safety gates, the pressure mounted ones. In this style, you open the gate enough wide so that it just fits the doorway and then you have to lock it so that the pressure rubbers embrace the walls or the door frames. This is an inexpensive type of gate and is portable. These are not bolted to anything and hence must not be used near the stair tops as it might have a walk through gate (meant for the adults to pass through), which can be pushed open by a heavier and stronger baby.
Hardware Mounted Baby Safety Gates
These are the non-portable safety gates which cannot be pushed open by your babies however hard they try, with any new trick they might have invented. These gates are fixed by screws onto the walls and hence are stronger than the earlier type of gate. This ensures permanent hardware on your wall or doorframe.
Check for Toe-Holds
Be a baby yourself. Check for the spaces in the gates and wonder whether you, as a baby, could have climbed on it and fell off?? Any such safety gate is not good for your baby that allows climbing on the spaces and falling off. If the gate has vertical spaces, then it is fine but only if there are no horizontal pieces between the extreme rails.
Ease of Use
Try to check whether you can operate the safety gate with ease before buying. Sometimes, your hands may be full and you still need to get around the gate, then the gate must be easy enough to let you pass and block the babies at the same time. In case of pressure mounted safety gates, you have to make sure that you can easily install it firmly at the walls or the door frames. It must stay put and not slide around.