How to make your children window blinds-safe

Keeping children safe around window blinds is really important to us here at English blinds, for the obvious reasons (such as that we’re not monsters) and the possibly less-obvious reasons too, such as “we don’t want to be sued any more than is absolutely necessary.”

However, while blinds and child safety gets tonnes of attention all over our website and that of every other blinds retailer who shouldn’t, by rights, be in prison, there is another topic very close to my heart that gets far less attention than it should; this being blind safety around children, or “how to keep your blinds safe from your child.”

I’m guessing that the parents of particularly splattery/bashy kids will already have a fairly well-honed radar for what can and cannot be brought into their home and survive, and/or how to keep things out of the clutches of/throwing range of small folk.

However, even if your child is a literal angel (which frankly I think, makes them the least trustworthy type of all, and the type most likely to sit and stare at you while you’re sleeping) I suspect that you still enjoy a cheery game of “how the hell did he do that in the literal six seconds I wasn’t watching him for” every now and then nonetheless.

With this in mind, in this blog post I’m going to share my suggestions of the sort of blinds you will probably want to rule out entirely for use around kids, as well as some tips on how to keep any blinds that you do already have or are thinking of getting as safe from your children as it is possible for them to be.

Window blinds not to use around children

The sort of window blinds you probably won’t want to pick for use around kids are those that are both expensive and not good with either cricket bats or spaghetti, and the top three “blinds to avoid if you have children” are Roman blinds, day and night blinds (a.k.a. zebra blinds), and real wooden blinds respectively.

All three of these very different blinds types are reasonably pricey, none of them are waterproof, and none of them are able to take a meaningful beating and get right back in the ring either. Keep blinds like these for The Good Lounge that you never actually use, or even better, your scrapbook of ideas for when the kids eventually leave home – or possibly more accurately these days given the price of housing, when the kids eventually turn 25.

Keep your blind’s controls out of your children’s reach

Telling you to keep your blinds well out of the reach of your kids would be the path of least resistance here but also, uh, patio doors? The fact that kids start their ambulatory career at around 2ft tall but soon grow to grasping heights, however much you try to squish them down again? Oh. Challenging.

While you may not be able to avoid having blinds themselves in reach of your children, one thing you can and really should do for very good reasons is to always keep the controls for your blinds out of the reach of children. This usually refers to the control cord or chain that you use to raise and lower the blind, and for some types of blinds, it may mean a wand or stick used to tilt or slant the blind’s slats or louvres too.

This advice may seem self-evidently a child safety thing; for some reason, kids of all ages (and frankly, far too many of my friends’ husbands too) seem to think that loops send out a secret transmission saying something along the lines of “just stick your head through here and spin around a few times…” And of course, doing this could come with the risk of hanging/strangulation, as well as the potential risk of pulling the blind itself (or part of it) down and causing injury.

Now, all window blinds sold in the UK (legally sold, anyway; I cannot speak to the provenance of that screaming bargain of unknown origins that Dave down the pub offered you from the back of his van, cash only thanks) have to be child safe by nature.

This is so that should your child/significant other actually get to the “hey look at me spinning with my head in a noose” stage, the cord or chain they’re trying this on will snap by means of a breakaway “weak link,” totally ruining their game but also, leaving them to live another day so that they can climb out of the loft hatch and onto the roof tomorrow as intended.

However, the child-safety-ness of any blind relies not just on how it’s made, but how it’s fitted; you need to follow the instructions. These instructions may vary a little from blind to blind, but often involve using a cleat or P-Clip to secure the blind’s chain or cord out of reach, instructions on how long to cut the blind’s cord to/how low it should fall, and potentially other things too.

I really have blarted on for far longer than I intended to there about how to keep children safe around the blinds rather than the other way around; but doing this also quite neatly goes a long way towards keeping your blinds safe from your children as well, and now all you have to worry about is the things that they might throw at the blind, smear on it, or hit it with, rather than whether, or rather, how, they’re planning on trying to pull it down.

Protecting your window blinds from child-directed foodstuffs, fizzy drinks, paint, and urgh whatever the heck that is too

The first thing you should try when it comes to protecting your blinds from sticky, mushy, soggy, painty, or absolutely unidentifiable nastiness originating from your children is to ask your child not to throw stuff at/smear stuff on your blinds.

When this doesn’t work, maybe a little light yelling would come in handy? Threats to ban TV for a week? Although frankly, the only person you’re really hurting with this latter idea is yourself.

Aside from exercising the sort of parenting superpowers that those without kids seem to think come naturally but those that actually have kids fully know only exist on Insta, my suggestions for protecting blinds from children in possession of liquids/foodstuffs/muck of all types are:

• Choose waterproof blinds if there’s even the slightest chance of them getting mucky, which basically means “choose waterproof blinds.”
• There are a few other tricks that may help to keep smushy stuff off your blinds, like facing your child’s highchair or eating position away from the blind – although this may mean sacrificing a wall instead if your kid really is a committed food thrower or smearer.
• Keep your kid’s hands relatively clean/wipe them off when they stand still for long enough for you to do so; yes, I do recognise that this is an uphill battle.
• If you do have advanced warning of mess (for instance, you’re hosting your child’s birthday party at home this year, or you’re finally going to have to let your child use that fingerpainting kit that your passive-aggressive MIL got for them) and you think your blind may become collateral damage and/or not easy to clean, pick up a cheap waterproof ground sheet and hang it over the blind.
  They actually sell these or something similar in the DIY Section of Poundland, albeit I feel obliged to mention that it might not actually cost £1 now that Poundland have started colouring outside of the lines with their pricing structure in a move than I have somewhat mixed feelings about.
• Wash off/remove anything that does get onto the blinds as soon as possible; waterproof blinds won’t absorb liquids or muck left in situ even for a long time (like, until your child deigns to advise you that there may possibly be a meat paste sandwich somewhere within the rolls of the roller blind you haven’t touched for a week) but they may in occasional circumstances stain or mark the blind.
  This is most likely to happen with something like marker pen or another substance designed to be indelible, though honestly if you’re letting your kid loose with something like that I’m not sure that you deserve any blinds at all TBH, as we don’t like to rehome ours to such environments.
• Also, and I have no idea if this works, but “broken windows theory” may (or may not) apply here. If you consistently clean your blinds when they get messy and thereby avoid having them get clarted up with layers of goop, this may subconsciously encourage your child to make a mess with something else instead.
• Or perhaps more to the point, leaving mess on the blinds could be seen as implicit permission to your child, whatever you say to the contrary, for them to continue crapping it up.

Protecting your window blinds from bashing-related damage

So, your kid more of a thrower of solids than liquids? Budding career as a drummer manifesting as anything within reach being a stick, and your blind being the drum? Baseball starter kit seemed like a good idea at the time but now not so much? What’s to be done, Pol!

• First up, and I’m drawing heavily on my knowledge of dog training here, which is far more extensive than my knowledge of parenting: allow your dog child to exhibit their natural behaviours in a healthy manner, and provide appropriate outlets for their energies.
• Kid thinks everything is a drum? Maybe consider getting them an actual drum (and a new house with no neighbours).
• Child has tantrums/rage issues? This is literally all of them in my experience, and my BFF’s five-year-old is a legend in his own lifetime in this respect. The only thing that really works in my admittedly spectator-like experience is letting the little sod get on with it in a relatively open space away from the blinds, and where they can cause minimal damage to either themselves, property, or your mental health.
  Should this happen to be in, say, the middle aisle of Aldi, yes absolutely walk off and leave them to it, I promise hand on heart that not a single person in the store will judge you for it. The parent ones will have empathy for you as they’ve gone through it all themselves, and the non-parent ones will just be thinking “wow, thank God it’s not me, poor bloke/woman.”
• In fact, if possible, encourage rage-related exhibitions/tantrums to take place outside of the home as much as you can, in order to potentially prevent damage to your blinds altogether.
• Don’t give projectiles to throwers.
• Try taping your kid into oven gloves; this may be seen as enabling, but also, diffuses the force of the potential damage they can cause.
• Remember also: even when the blinds-bashing is at its height, this is still probably preferable to the basher being able to get to the window behind the blind instead.

And finally: Think laterally when it comes to kids and blinds

To be honest, that’s pretty much all I’ve got.

My main advice when it comes to keeping window blinds safe from children is to buy waterproof ones from the lower end of the price scale (like waterproof roller blinds) or alternatively, slightly more costly but also far hardier ones like faux-wood blinds, which are in fact made of thick PVC. I want to say that these are virtually unbreakable, but I know that if I do, someone under the age of 10 will promptly prove me wrong.

So to tie off then, this whole “think laterally” thing I mentioned above.

If your kid is damaging or trying to damage your blind by any method available to them, this may be either deliberate because they’re being an ass, or inadvertent because they’re just careless, have poor hand/eye/mouth coordination, or just don’t really “see” the blind or damage they may cause to it.

It’s highly unlikely that your child has a personal vendetta against the blind they’re attacking or considering attacking; they’re highly likely to have no strong opinions on it either way, or more to the point, view it as furniture.

However. You may actually be able to get your kid invested in not just not hurting the blind for the sake of it, but actually caring about it and wanting it to thrive… By getting your kid to like the blind.

Uh, what/how? I mean, I have asked R&D if there’s any way they can produce a kind of Pavlovian window blind for children that decants treats for good behaviour; they haven’t replied to my email yet, but I’m sure that’s just because they’re so busy working on it.

In the meantime though, how do you get a kid to like a window blind? Get a blind that is relevant to their interests, i.e., that has dinosaurs on it, their favourite character, cute animals, or something else that they actually like, and will not want to damage and may even want to proactively protect.

Encourage anthropomorphism. Tell your child that the animals/characters on the blind come alive at night, or will tell Santa if they’re treated unkindly, or eat small children that anger them.

Now, if you’re dealing with a formal lounge setting here or you handle a lot of serious work-related Zoom calls with the blind as your backdrop, picking a kid-friendly blind might not be an option… But that aside, I see literally no reason whatsoever why you shouldn’t have cartoon animals on every single blind in your home, and you shouldn’t either.

Do you have any further tips on keeping blinds safe from children? Please do tell me in the comments and I’ll be happy to add any solid wisdom to this post.