Window Covering Safety Month: What to Check in Your Kids’ Rooms

October is National Window Covering Safety Month. The Window Covering Safety Council runs it every year, and the message has not changed: blind cords are a hazard in homes with young children, and the fix is simpler than most people expect.

We measure windows in Boise, Meridian, Eagle and Kuna homes all week long, and we still walk into nurseries with a looped cord hanging within reach of the crib. Nobody put it there carelessly. The blinds came with the house, or they went up before the kids did, and nobody thought about them again.

Why cords are the problem

A cord that hangs in a loop can go around a child’s neck, and it happens quietly, usually with a parent in the next room. The guidance from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is direct: where young children are present, the safest window coverings are cordless ones.

Two kinds of cord matter, and the second one catches people out.

• Operating cords. The pull cords and chains you use to raise, lower or tilt the blind. These are the obvious ones.
• Inner cords. The cords running through the slats of a horizontal blind. A child can pull a loop of inner cord out from between the slats even when the front of the blind looks perfectly tidy.

A ten-minute walk-through

You do not need to buy anything to do this today.

• Go room by room, starting with the bedrooms, the nursery and the playroom.
• At each window, look for any cord, chain or loop a child could reach, standing or climbing.
• Pull gently on the slats of horizontal blinds and see whether inner cord comes free.
• Move cribs, beds, chairs and toy boxes away from windows. Furniture is what gets a child up to a cord that looked out of reach.
• For cords you are keeping for now, mount a cleat high on the wall and wrap them up out of the way, every single time.

Check the guest room too. That is the one people skip, and it is where the grandkids sleep.

What replacing them actually looks like

Cordless lift is standard on nearly everything we install now. You push the bottom rail up or pull it down and it stays where you put it. There is no cord on the shade at all, so there is nothing to tuck away and nothing to remember.

It is available across the products most Treasure Valley homes use:

• Roller and solar shades. Simple and clean, and good on the big west-facing windows that cook a room in the afternoon.
• Cellular shades. The honeycomb ones that hold heat in winter, which matters here in January.
• Roman shades. A softer, fabric look for living rooms and bedrooms.
• Horizontal blinds. Wood, faux wood and aluminum.
• Plantation shutters. No cords at all by design. You tilt the louvers by hand.

If the room needs real darkness as well as safety, cordless and blackout shades are not an either-or. You can have both on the same window.

Motorized is the other answer

A motorized shade has no cord either, and it solves the windows you cannot reach anyway: the stairwell window, a tall great-room wall, the window behind the kitchen faucet. You can run them from a remote, a wall switch, or a schedule that drops them in the afternoon before the house heats up. Prices have come down a long way since most people last asked.

We are a Graber dealer, and cordless and motorized lift options run across their whole line, so going cordless does not mean settling for a shorter list of fabrics and colors.

If you are not replacing anything yet

That is fine. Do the walk-through anyway, move the furniture, and put cleats on the walls. Those three things cost nothing, and they are what we would tell our own family to do first.

If you want a second set of eyes, we will come out and look at what you have, tell you which windows are a problem and which ones are fine, and leave you with a plan. The visit is free and there is no pressure, whether you buy from us or not.

More on both observances: the Window Covering Safety Council and the CPSC’s Go Cordless campaign.