Halloween Safety Tips for Parents
October 31 is one of the best days to be a kid. Through the years, research has been done, and facts about safety have been gathered. Most parents already instruct their children not to eat candy from uncertain sources without letting mom or dad check it. Other important safety tips follow, along with one alarming statistic.
Warning!
On Halloween, children are more than twice as likely to be struck and killed by a car than on any of the other 364 days of the year, according to research. The most popular hours for going trick-or-treating are between 5:30 pm and 9:30 pm. All drivers should be especially careful to watch for children during those hours on Halloween. Here are a few more driver safety tips for All Hallow’s Eve:
- Carefully and slowly enter and exit alleys and driveways.
- Watch for kids walking on curbs, medians, and streets.
- Starting at twilight, keep a careful watch for children dressed in dark clothing.
- Consider discouraging young, inexperienced motorists from driving on the night of October 31.
Halloween Safety Tips
Since being struck by a vehicle is such a heightened danger at Halloween, many safety tips relate to making sure children are visible. Check out the following safety tips for Halloween below:
- Provide your children with flashlights or glow sticks to carry, to increase their visibility and help them see better in the dark.
- Use reflective stickers or reflective tape on bags, buckets, and costumes.
- Children are more prone to getting injured in an accident if they can’t see well. Instead of your child wearing a mask, perhaps makeup or non-toxic face paint would work.
- Another way to help prevent trips and falls is to ensure that your child’s costume is the correct size. If you have tiny ones, you can get a Halloween baby onesie and get your baby in on the costume fun.
- Children’s costumes should be fire-resistant, from the costumes to the accessories to the wigs.
- For safety’s sake, it is recommended that children under the age of 12 always have adult supervision on Halloween night.
- Remind children mature enough to go out with friends that they should stay in groups and in areas that have good lighting.
Candy Check and Control
Before taking the kids trick-or-treating, try to get them full with a good meal, to minimize the amount of candy they eat. Remind them that any candy they eat while out trick-or-treating should first be approved by a parent or guardian. Parents should go through kids’ candy after the trick-or-treating is over with. Throw away any treat that looks as though it has been opened. If candy has a loose wrapper, toss it. If your children collected a LOT of candy, here are some tips for preventing cavities and stomach aches with too much indulgence:
- Don’t store the candy in the kids’ bedrooms. Keep it somewhere out of reach, to dole out at your discretion or let them go through under your supervision.
- Unless there are health issues, consider allowing your children to enjoy more than the usual amount of indulgence in candy on Halloween night. Let them know at bedtime how the remaining goodies will be handled.
A final safety tip is to remove Halloween makeup before the kids go to bed. Otherwise, they may end up with eye and/or skin irritation. Oh, and it may be a really good idea to remind them to brush their teeth, too.
