The Parenting Journal

Most standard baby gates top out at 32 inches wide. The average doorway in a home built after 1990 runs 32–36 inches. That math barely works, and it falls apart the moment you’re trying to close off a hallway opening,...

Every year, the CPSC receives reports of thousands of injuries to children under five involving furniture and cabinet hardware. Most happen in kitchens and bathrooms. Most are preventable. And most parents don’t realize the cabinet lock they installed three months...

The coffee table corner caught my older daughter at 22 months, right at eyebrow level. One second she was cruising the furniture, the next she was bleeding through a cloth I was pressing to her face on the way to...

Every parent has a "how did they get in there?" moment. Mine came when my younger daughter, at about 18 months, somehow opened the cabinet under the bathroom sink and had a bottle of liquid soap halfway unscrewed before I...

Every renter who has ever stood in a hardware store holding a drill, reading the lease clause about "no permanent alterations," knows exactly the problem. You need to lock the cabinets. You cannot put holes in the walls. These two...

Every new parent learns the same lesson the same way: tiny nails are surprisingly sharp, and a sleeping baby’s face is the first casualty. Before my older daughter was three weeks old, she had scratched her own cheek badly enough...