If you have a garage, your garage door is a crucial component of the safety and utility of the space. As convenient as garage doors are, however, they can also be a safety risk to children if the doors are improperly used.
As a parent concerned with your child’s safety, therefore, it’s important that you do all you can to maintain the safety of your garage door for your children, even as your garage door itself protects your family from the risk of unwanted visitors. To help in this endeavor, here are four ways to improve your garage door safety with your children.
Talk About It
If your children are old enough to understand right from wrong, a good first step in garage door safety is to explain to them, in child-friendly terms, the risks of playing with a garage door. Creating this connection with your children at a young age can go a long way toward garage door accident prevention. To make sure your points are remembered, it’s a good idea to talk to your children while near the garage door so they can better understand its different components.
Test It
As much as you can talk to your children about garage door safety, there will still be cases where children will want to see for themselves just what a garage door does. Understanding this, all garage door manufacturers incorporate safety devices into the doors to help prevent serious injury. For these devices to be effective, however, they must be working properly. Therefore, it’s important that you test the safety devices, including the emergency stops, electronic eyes, and other components, on a regular basis.
Maintain It
Another crucial aspect of the safety of a garage door is that it’s able to stop when the system sends it a signal to stop. If a door is poorly maintained, however, it may not be able to do this. That’s why it’s a good idea to utilize garage door services on an annual basis to maintain and inspect all the components of your garage door. This will allow your garage door to operate as expected in an emergency, preventing or reducing the severity of an injury.
Remove Access
If your children are too young to understand safety instructions or if they’re a little rambunctious, it’s important that you remove access to your garage to protect against garage door injuries. By using a lock on the garage access door or by using a safety gate in the vicinity of the garage, you’ll be able to protect your children from ever coming close to an injury. Just be sure that adults can quickly access the garage in case you need to evacuate your home for some reason.
Teach Them Well
As your children grow and can be trusted with using the garage door, it’s important that you let them practice as often as possible. After all, the best way to use something safely is to be comfortable with its proper operation. With this knowledge in hand, your children will be able to make wise choices that protect them, both now and in the future.