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babys and your components

Many of us have or had small children for example bellow 2 yo

They're in general free to do anything and can make themselves harm crowling onto the bunch of wires or touching naked tubes. They can also bite knobs, move movable components and so on...

My son is about to crawl and He will be visiting living room with my equipment quite often. I am not worried about my equipment pretty much since He won't be able to move even a single component -- too heavy. I worry about power cords, interconnects that are in the rear of my equipment stand. I worry about naked tubes on the mono amplifiers. I worry about speakers since thay can fall down when pushed.
On the other hand, I cannot limit Him to be in carriage or stroller or in bed while he's awake -- He has to walk and crawl.

It's not often the issue to keep separate room for that purpuoses(I've never seen that in my life). Most likely no matter how big or how many rooms is in your space, there is a wife in the family that will want to have it.

How do you manage this problem? What do you do to avoid accidents with babys?
128x128marakanetz
hifimaniac
508 posts
 
I have a 4, 2.5 and 10 month old and I can relate to your problem. My two older girls were very good about not touching the speakers, the wires etc. However, I have Krell 650mono's and the heat sinks are a weapon and my fear is they will fall and hit their heads on a heat sink and split it wide open. My ten month old is crawling now and he is trying to tear the foam off my Wilson speakers and pull on the speaker cables and interconnects.

To avoid my kids from falling and hitting their heads on the amps and avoid my son from getting too close to the amps, we have put one of those plastic fences around the amps so they can't get near them and for the interconnects and speaker cable we have covered them up with throw rugs so they can't see them to pull.

With time and coaching against touching, I am hoping I can get rid of the protection. When I am listening, I do move the fence out of the way.

Good luck.
albertporter's avatar
Ag insider logo xs@2x
albertporter
4,949 posts
 
Every child is different, you will have to watch yours and see how he reacts to your equipment and your discipline.

By the time my son was walking, I allowed him (holding him up) to turn the volume up and down on the preamp, and control the CD player. Later when he was about four or five I let him cue my LP's up to play. This required some real faith, as I had a Basis turntable, Graham arm and Benz cartridge.

It is much better to allow children to experiment with close supervision from you, than leaving them to learn in your absence. This has worked well for my son, but as I said in the opening line, every child is different.
slawney
242 posts
 
My friend visited with his 1.5 year old "Max" last summer. Max is an out-going, happy toddler, that never cried or whined. We left him unsupervised for awhile until we discovered that he had developed an obsession with climbing to the top of my hifi rack on my second system (about four feet high). I did not have a fence to block him, so we sometimes had to tear him away from the rack. There were some painful scenes where he was screaming, crying, grabbing onto the control knobs to keep from getting pulled away from his favorite "mountain." On the last day, he succeeded in scaling the top. I will never forget the joy on his face when I saw "little Max" standing with his grubby feet on top of my turntable on the top of my rack. The parents were horrified, but we all laughed in the end. I have since thought that all babies go through a "climbing phase" as well as a "mirror phase" and a "crawling phase." A simple foldable divider, like the one you mention, marakanetz, might be the answer.
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