3 Crucial Tips for Laundry Room Safety

This is a sponsored campaign in collaboration with Tide® and Gain® and Latina Bloggers Connect. However, all opinions expressed are my own.

Inspired by National Poison Prevention Week (3/15-3/20) I want to discuss laundry room safety. Don’t you DARE click away, this is important and often overlooked stuff that is crucial to the safety of our children.

The truth is that since becoming a mother laundry is my life or at least that’s what it feels like. Sometimes in the delirium of the constant laundry-ness that is my life, I fancy myself a sort of good witch of ropa sucia and channel my inner Shakespeare as I load the washer and chant, “Double, double soiled piles of clothing rubble; washer turn and detergent bubble.” It’s perfect because the laundry room is where the magic in my home happens.

No, for reals it truly is a magical place like no other! That’s where through the magic of modern machinery and the wizardry of pods and potions I transform the ever accumulating piles of dirty clothes that come my way into re-wearable wonders. It’s a powerful, phenomenal thing, but let’s remember that with great power comes great responsibility and in this case, as a parent, my responsibility is to keep my kids safe from the awesome products that make my life easier like Tide Pods and Gain Flings  because they demand the same kinds of precautions that all household cleaning products require.

No need to freak out though, it’s not that hard to make the laundry room a safer place. Here are my tips for laundry room safety.

1. Safety Talk. Have “the talk” with your kids. Children are curious by nature and they should be because that’s how they learn. They will see you handling cleaning products and some of the products are really cool looking and they will want to touch them or play with them. Talk to them about why they shouldn’t. Seriously, I think too often parents forget how influential they are in their children’s lives. I tell my kids why they shouldn’t handle cleaning supplies. I warn them about what can happen and how they can get hurt. My kids are young, they are 6 and 3-years-old and I can tell you they are listening.
2. Arriba y Lejos or Up, Up and Away. Okay, so you’ve talked to your kids about how they shouldn’t play with the cleaning supplies in the laundry room. Great, but it doesn’t end there. Make it easy for them to mind you by storing all laundry room cleaning products arriba y lejos, so that they are out of reach. If possible keep them out of sight too. You can also do things like attach latches to doors to childproof them.
3. Be Prepared. Hopefully, you will never need to use it, but always have the number to poison control (1-800-222-1222) and your pediatrician handy just in case. Program it into your phone and have it written down somewhere close by as well.

For a visual reminder of why it is particularly important to keep laundry pods out of reach of toddlers, press play!

Follow @Tide and @GainLatino on Twitter for more useful safety tips!