Stairs prove dangerous for kids

Homes aren't designed for children.

Living rooms were never intended to substitute for trampolines.

Dining room tables weren't created to serve as storage spaces for backpacks and jackets.

Dining room chairs weren't designed to be trains, planes or automobiles but imaginative children see them that way.

One of our wooden TV trays has been condemned by our children to a life as a teacher's desk. No TV dinners find their way onto this tray.

Stairs weren't designed for roller skates. But don't tell that to Bailey, our first grader, who regularly tries to navigate up and down the stairs wearing her skates, oblivious to our warnings of impending doom.

Then there's Becca. She's in fifth grade, but she still has a tendency to crash into things in her roller skates or fall off chairs. She's been known to be a human avalanche coming down the stairs. It's not pretty.

No builder ever intends for stairs to be so dangerous.

For one thing, stairs aren't designed as storage shelves, although children often view them that way.

Becca and Bailey have a bad habit of dropping clothes on the stairs. You'd think the clothes weighed a ton the way they abandon them, generally on the first few steps. Their dolls regularly gather on the stairs, looking a little worse for wear.

Our dog, Cassie, has added to the hurdles on the stairs. To keep our puppy confined to the first floor, we use a kiddie gate at the bottom of the stairs. It keeps Cassie from running around upstairs, but it also means we have to climb over the gate every time we want to go upstairs.

When all is said and done, it's a vertical obstacle course that Jane Fonda would envy.

It takes a brave soul to navigate our stairs.

Lately our house has the added clutter of boxes and boxes of Girl Scout cookies which have to be delivered to hungry customers.

Some of the cookies naturally stay here. I love the cookies, but cookie-box décor is never attractive. It does, however, make you hungry.

At any rate, homes were never designed to be child-proof. Years ago, wealthy parents understood this. They sent their kids to boarding schools.

These days, few kids get shipped off to boarding school. Parents have learned to repaint the room that Johnnie tortured with pen and ink.

A neighbor told me recently that homes change a lot once the kids move out. I'm sure that's true. There is certainly less chance of finding assorted shoes or children's necklaces under the easy chair.

We talk a lot about remodeling our home, but I'm afraid there's little hope of tackling such a project when we can't even eliminate our obstacle course on the stairs.

Not surprisingly, Bailey and Becca have no problem getting up and down the stairs. They don't get trapped on the obstacle course. They are oblivious to the dangers of stair climbing.

But with any luck, they'll grow up and see why one day the federal government will surely ban stairs and make us all live in single-story houses with obstacle-free floors.

For now, we just hope we can keep our kids from bouncing off the walls or into them.

That way maybe one day they'll reach the top ... or at least their bedrooms.

Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.