LEXINGTON, Ky. – Your kitchen is the center of many holiday activities, but it also can be a recipe for danger, especially for kids.
Here are three holiday safety tips from SafeKids.org to help ensure that your kitchen is safe for adults and kids during the holiday season.
- Create a kid-free zone. Teach younger children to stay at least 3 feet away from your cooking space. Place babies in a high chair outside of the kid-free zone where you can see them.
- Keep hot foods and liquids out of children’s reach. Cook on the back burners of the stove and keep hot foods away from the edge of your counters to prevent burns.
- Teach older children how to cook safely. Teach them never to leave the kitchen while they’re cooking and always use oven mitts or potholders to carry hot pots and pans.
Despite the risks of hot stoves, sharp objects and even certain types of raw food, Safe Kids Fayette County says that the kitchen can still be a fun and good place for kids to learn the craft of cooking while also finding age appropriate ways they can help.
"Burns can be very serious and we don’t want anybody to get burned, adults can even be burned. So that’s something we have to take into consideration is how dangerous the kitchen can be. We gotta use it, we gotta make our food, but we also have to recognize that there’s dangers there," says Sherri Hannan, Safe Kids Fayette County Coalition Coordinator.
For more information about safety and burn prevention, click here.