Tips to Keep Kids Safe Around Medicine #SafeKids

As parents, we do our best to keep our children safe. But are we doing enough to protect them from accidental medicine poisoning?

Every minute of every day, a poison control center receives a call about a potential medicine poisoning of a child age five and under. And more than 67,000 times each year a young child goes to the emergency room for medicine poisoning. That’s one child every eight minutes. I don’t know about you, but I find this information to be alarming. I would feel awful if one of my 3-year-old twins became one of those statistics.

I am thankful that I have never had a serious medical poisoning in my family, although we have had a couple of close calls. One time my twin girls got into my vitamins, but they didn’t like the taste and spit them out right away. Another time my son stuck his fingers in dishwasher detergent and then put them in his mouth. I called the Poison Control Center right away and they were great about giving me advice on what to do. Thankfully, he didn’t ingest enough to get sick, but the experience was very scary! Now I am usually really good about putting everything out of reach, but I will admit that I have left medicines on the counter for later use. I won’t be doing that anymore!

Keeping medicines stored up and away from children isn’t enough. We need to be proactive about not only making sure that we give our children the proper dosages, but also that caregivers understand how to store and give medicine. It’s also important to make sure that products we don’t think are medicines, such as eye drops, gummy vitamins, and diaper rash cream are stored out of reach of our children. It only takes a few seconds for them to get into medicine that could make them very sick.

Tips to Keep Kids Safe Around Medicine

Store Medicines Safely

• Put medicines up and away and out of sight.
• Consider places where kids get into medicine.
• Consider products you might not think about as medicines.
• Be alert to visitors’ medicine.
• Close your medicine tightly after every use.
• Even if you are tempted to keep it handy, put medicine out
  of reach after every use.

Give Medicines Safely

• Use the dosing device that comes with the medicine.
• Read the label and know what’s in the medication.
• Communicate with caregivers.

Get Rid of Medicines Safely

• Clean out your medicine cabinet.
• Put the Poison Control Center number into your home and cell phones: 1-800-222-1222.

You can watch this video to learn more:

Have you ever had an experience with medicine poisoning in your family? What precautionary steps are you taking to keep your kids safe?

I wrote this review while participating in a campaign for Mom Central Consulting on behalf of Safe Kids Worldwide and I received a promotional item to thank me for my participation.