Baby-proofing gets sold as a shopping list. It's mostly a survey.
Before buying anything, do the thing everyone recommends and nobody does: get down on the floor in the room where your baby spends most of their time, and look at it from there. Half of what you were about to buy turns out to be unnecessary, and one or two things you hadn't thought about become obvious.
The order things become a problem
Baby-proofing isn't one event. It arrives in stages, and doing it all at once wastes money on a stage you're not at.
Rolling, around 4–6 months. The floor becomes the whole world. What matters is what's on it — cables, small objects, the underside of furniture you've never looked at.
Crawling and pulling up, 6–10 months. The first real shift. Now the height that matters is about 60cm: table corners, hearth edges, low shelves, and anything that can be pulled down by someone using it to stand.
Cruising and walking, 10–18 months. Reach extends and speed arrives. Door hinges, stairs, and anything on a surface near an edge.
Deal with each stage a few weeks before you get there, not a year ahead.
Corners and edges
The most common genuine hazard in an ordinary sitting room is a coffee table at exactly head height for someone learning to stand.
Two things help. Corner protectors cover the four points, which is where most bumps happen. Edge strips run along a whole edge, which is what you want for a hearth, a low windowsill or a long table run.
Neither prevents a fall. They take the point off a corner, which is a worthwhile but limited job — supervision is still doing most of the work.
Anchoring, which is the serious one
Furniture tipping is the hazard worth taking most seriously, and the one that soft padding does nothing about. Chests of drawers, bookcases and anything a toddler can climb should be secured to the wall.
Follow the manufacturer's instructions and the fixings appropriate to your walls. This is not a category for improvising, and it's the one place we'd say spend the money and do it properly.
The floor does a lot of the work
A padded surface where they play absorbs the falls that will happen anyway. On hard floors this matters more than any single gadget, and it keeps earning its place long after the baby-proofing phase.
Non-slip socks are worth knowing about for the same reason. Early walking on wooden floors in ordinary socks is genuinely slippery, and grip underfoot is a small fix for a common problem.
What you probably don't need
- A latch on every cupboard. Secure the ones with chemicals, cleaning products or heavy pans. Leave one cupboard of plastic containers deliberately open — it will buy you more peace than everything else combined.
- Padding on everything. Bumps are how walking gets learned. The aim is to take the edge off the worst of it, not to eliminate it.
- A full kit bought at once. Buy for the stage you're at, and look again in two months.
The thing most worth doing
Tidy at floor level and give the small things somewhere to live. A basket in the room where they play is more useful than most safety hardware, because the commonest hazard in any house is the small object that shouldn't have been within reach.