From avoiding sugar comas to decorating pumpkins without injury, we have your Top 10 tips for a safe Halloween with the kids!
- Don’t use a real knife for carving pumpkins. Get a kit—it’s safer. And even with a kit, don’t let kids under age 14 carve the pumpkin. Instead, let your child draw the design with a marker, and you carve.
- Consider skipping carving a pumpkin completely. Set the kids up outside on the grass with some paint, glitter, glue, feathers, and googly eyes, and let them decorate the pumpkins.
- If you do carve, preserve your pumpkin by spraying the inside with mixture of water & bleach, then wiping it off with paper towels.
- For adding safety during trick-or-treating, consider using the Life 360 app.
- Put a glow stick in your kids’ candy bucket for visibility. Use Glow sticks and/or glow in the dark tape on their costumes as well.
- Speaking of visibility—help your child see where he’s going by opting for non-toxic face make-up instead of a mask.
- Always walk on sidewalks (if available; if not, walk opposite, not with, traffic) and cross the streets only at intersections. On average, twice as many children are struck and killed by cars on Halloween than any other day of the year!
- Eat before they treat. Kids are less tempted to eat all their night’s haul if they’re full.
- Create a candy plan. Allot a certain amount of treats per day or see if your dentist has a candy ‘buy-back’ program.
- Put out a teal pumpkin to indicate that you have non-food treats for kids with food allergies to enjoy!