Every year, thousands of children under 15 are hospitalized for injuries incurred from falling from the bunk beds. Other less obvious but potentially serious hazards in bunk bed structures include suffocation or strangulation. A few safety tips must be followed to ensure your child's safety.

Some general rules

Bunk beds are not designed for very young children. This rule, however, is often ignored. As a result, there's a high incidence of children falling from their sleep or while playing on the top bunk. Tell your children to sleep only in bed and play only the floor. Children are often tempted to have their siblings or friends come up and play, but you should be firm on this rule.

As a bed that looks like a climbing apparatus, your children will try to climb up and down the top bunk using the side rails. This increases the risk of falls. So, it's very important that you tell your children to always use the ladder when climbing up and down.

Be sure that the bunk bed adheres to safety standards. Look for a label tacked on the bed's frame. If it's an older model or handmade, check if it matches with the current measurements. Also, double-check all bolts and screws from time to time to make sure everything is tightened up.

Attach additional boards

The guardrail spacing is a major concern. On some bunk beds, the space between the mattress and guardrail or the mattress and bed frame is wide enough to allow your child to slip through and get strangled. It seems very unusual, but many deaths have been reported because of this. What you need to do is to close any gap by attaching additional boards to the bed. Make sure that the gap between the bed frame and the lower guardrail should be no wider than 9 centimeter.

Make sure that the mattresses fit

Bunk bed mattresses are created the same size. Wrong. Be sure that the mattress fits snuggly against all sides of the bunk bed. Bunk bed structures and mattresses come in two sizes, regular and extra long. The regular length is smaller by 127 millimeter (5 inches) that the extra long size. Thus if you have a regular mattress for an extra long bunk bed, there'll be a space between the mattress and the footboard or headboard. This could potentially cause strangulation when your child fell through this gap.

Separate bunk beds, if you want

Bunk beds are generally safe if you follow the above rules and precautions. However, if you really don't want to risk your child's safety, consider twin beds instead. Some bunk bed models can be taken apart and used separately as twin beds. Consider this option when space permits. This may give you peace of mind.