How to: Celebrate Halloween child safely
Halloween Child Safety Tips
It is Halloween, so it is time to dress in scary costumes, decorate the house with spooky elements and walk through the neighborhood to go trick-or-treating. Especially kids love this holiday as they can collect as many sweets as they can and put on crazy costumes. Popular costumes are witches, ghosts, vampires, or zombies. As much fun as Halloween is, it is important to follow some safety measures to make sure that children are safe during this holiday. In this article, we from Arte Viva will give you some tips on how to celebrate Halloween child safely.
The number one rule is: Never let your child go alone trick-or-treating on Halloween. Make sure that one adult is always around to make sure the kids are safe!
1. Pumpkin carving
When carving a pumpkin, always supervise your children. The skin of the pumpkin is often extremely hard and difficult to cut with a knife. Therefore, a sharp knife is necessary to carve a scary face into the pumpkin. As a parent, you can do the hard part and let your child help you when hollowing the pumpkin. That can easily be done with a spoon and is not dangerous at all.
Tip
You do not know what to do with the pumpkin seeds? Separate them from the pumpkin meat and dry them up with a towel. After that put all of them in a bowl and marinate them with olive oil, salt and pepper, curry, and paprika powder. After that spread them out on baking paper and put them in an oven for about 10-15 minutes at medium temperature. A fun activity to do with your child, with a delicious and healthy outcome at the end.
2. Check treats and sweets
Your kids should not eat sweets during their trick or threat. But why? Especially when going to elderly people they often have sweets from years ago leftover in their sweet cabinet. Therefore, we highly recommend checking the date on each sweet before eating to make sure it is still up to date, and your child will not get sick from it. Thus, some sweets are filled with alcohol. Kids should not eat those and therefore it is important to check them before eating.
3. Be safe in the dark
To have the full Halloween experience, many kids prefer going trick-or-treating at night. But the sun goes down incredibly early at the end of October. Therefore, it is necessary that the kids wear reflective elements over their costumes, so other people on the streets and especially car drivers can see them better. Reflective tapes on children’s arms, shoes or bags are highly recommended and easy to buy online or in a Bicycle accessories trade. To help your children in the dark, hand them over a flashlight. This not only helps them to see better in the dark but also makes the kids more visible to others.
4. Use LED lights
Instead of candles in your carved pumpkins, it is recommended to use LED lights. Kids will not be able to burn themselves on those lights and overall, it is safer if a pumpkin should accidentally falls over.
5. Costumes
Make sure that your children’s costumes are not too long. Long dresses can not only bother them while being on their candy hunt, but it is also dangerous as children are more likely to fall or trip over when wearing a long costume. You do not want the Halloween night to end up in hospital because of an accident, right?
Furthermore, you should make sure that the material of the costumes is made of cotton instead of thin synthetic fabrics as they are more likely to flame.
6. Soft accessories
We all know that costumes are the main highlight of Halloween. Nevertheless, you should make sure that the accessories, such as swords or knives, are made of soft materials, so kids are not able to hurt themselves or others with them.
We hope that our tips will help you to celebrate a fun, spooky but especially child-safe Halloween together with friends and family. In this case, we wish you a “Happy Boo Season”!
