Last updated: December 3, 2024

Potential hazards are everywhere and children don’t always recognize dangerous situations. Keeping your child safe requires careful attention. Children of different ages and activity levels require different safety precautions. Babies and toddlers require constant supervision. Older children need clear boundaries and firm rules to help them understand the dangers around them.

Keep your child safe from hazards they might encounter at home or in the community:

• Quick tips: Helping your child stay safe and healthy
• Child safety: Air pollution
• Child safety: Bicycles and tricycles
• Child safety: Fires
• Child safety: Guns and firearms
• Child safety: Streets and motor vehicles
• Child safety: Strollers and shopping carts
• Playground safety
• Your toddler: Safe ways to explore
• Bathroom safety for toddlers
• Quick tips: Safely giving over-the-counter medicines to children
• Safety outdoors in the cold for toddlers 
• Sun safety for children (HealthlinkBC File #26) 

Resources to help you proactively prevent your child from getting injured or falling ill:

• Thinking about child safety 
• Protecting your child from infections
• Child safety: Washing toys to prevent germs
• Preventing poisoning in young children
• Preventing children’s injuries from sports and other activities 
• Head injuries in children: Problems to watch for
• Head injury: Age 3 and younger
• Hip injuries: Age 11 and younger
• Child safety: Preventing falls
• Child safety: Preventing burns
• Burns and scalds in young children (HealthLinkBC File #123)
• How to estimate the size of a burn for a baby or young child

Some small objects and certain foods can become choking hazards for young children. Keeping objects such as balloons and small toys away from young children reduces this risk. Help your child develop safe habits such as not letting them eat while they are walking, riding in a stroller or in a car. Supervise your toddler while they eat to minimize risk.

• Preventing choking in small children
• Choking rescue procedure: Heimlich manoeuvre
• Object stuck in a child’s airway

Always supervise your children while they are in and around water. Near-drownings and drownings can happen during bath time, in pools or hot tubs or around larger bodies of water like rivers, lakes and oceans. You can help prevent drowning incidents by teaching your child swimming skills and water safety.

• Child safety: Bathing
• Child safety: Drowning prevention in pools and hot tubs
• Child safety: Preventing drowning
• Water safety for toddlers

Learn how to keep your child safe and healthy when they’re interacting with pets and other animals:

• Child safety: Pets
• Staying healthy around animals
• Petting zoo and open farm visits (HealthLink BC File #61b) 
• Hand washing: Help stop the spread of germs (HealthLink BC File #85)

Child abuse has lasting effects and comes in many forms. This includes neglect and exposure to violence between adults in the home. Children have a legal right to grow up free from harm and the threat of harm. Everyone who spends time with children shares a responsibility to keep them safe. Learn about identifying abuse and protecting your child:

• Child abuse and neglect
• Abuse: Signs of abuse-related injuries
• Child abuse: Emotional abuse by parents
• Protecting your toddler from potential abuse
• Sexual abuse: Signs and symptoms
• Child safety: Preventing child abduction

Bullying can be frightening, and physically and emotionally damaging for children of all ages. Find tools to help your child cope with and combat bullying:

• Bullying 
• Bullying: Signs a child is bullied
• Bullying: How to help your child who bullies
• Bullying: Building a child's self-esteem
• Media and your child: Making choices

BC Children’s Hospital

Resources on child safety, including playground safety, burn prevention, bicycle safety and more.

Baby's Best Chance

The Baby’s Best Chance handbook offers general information about pregnancy and parenting, with a focus on ensuring the health and wellbeing of you and your baby.