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Eliminating sharp corners and cables will make the home office safer for your child, but that's not the end of your job. The single most important thing to do in setting up your home office is creating an area in the office where children don't have to hear the word NO. It's best to be able to work your schedule around kids, but we all know that doesn't always work. There will be times when work requires your full attention and the kids need to entertain themselves. When that happens, a YES environment in the office area will make things much easier for you to finish the task at hand before returning to the kids, while keeping the kids entertained at the same time.

Earlier, I mentioned having a VCR or DVD player on hand. As much as I hate using the TV to baby sit, there are times when Baby Einstein is the only thing capable of keeping my son smiling. There's also the recently collection of Electric Company shows for older kids. With some clever planning, the VCR and DVD player can be turned into a learning opportunity for school aged children. I found some great animated Spanish lessons which give me the opportunity to brush up on a second language, while entertaining (and possibly educating) children at the same time. While having a movie on in the background isn't ideal, having the kids nearby when work is an absolute must makes everyone more comfortable.

A small table with some blank paper and washable markers goes a long way toward creating a home working environment everyone can live with. My son is still too young for unsupervised coloring, but older children will find this an acceptable way to share your work space, without getting in the way. As a school aged child, I remember trips to my dad's office when he worked overtime on weekends. His office was outside the home, but my brother and I would draw on paper scraps while he got real work done. Something as simple as paper and several pen colors turned an otherwise boring trip to dad's office into something we looked forward to.

The one thing all the suggestions in this guide have in common is creating an environment where NO isn't required. Putting important papers out of reach means not having to say, 'No, don't touch that.' Eliminating extra computer cables means fewer opportunities requiring the phrase, 'No, don't pull on that.' Covering outlets and power strips means never having to react in fear as your child plays with a live power cable. Providing entertainment for kids lets them keep being kids, allowing them the security of being close to the action, while keeping them safe and making working at home the joy it should be.

Index of Creating A Child Safe Home Office

Working in the 9 to 5 corporate world, where the company provides furniture, a computer, the staples, coffee, the printer paper, and all the other essentials, it's easy to forget the costs associated with all these things. When the tape dispenser is empty, there's a cabinet with more tape, sticky notes, and other essentials a few cubicles down. Working from home makes you appreciate all the things the company provides. Sure, supplies are a tax write-off at the end of the year, but that doesn't make them cost less.

Most of the suggestions made in this guide aren't cheap, but with some diligent shopping they aren't too expensive either. Virtually everything listed here is available from Amazon.com at close to the lowest price on the Web. Before you consider skimping on any of the suggestions here because of the cost, think hard about the safety provided to your small children (and to your work). It's easy to assume you can get by with any old office chair. I made that mistake early in my work-from-home experience. When you lay awake at night with leg cramps due to a chair that doesn't sit well (pun intended), you will realize just how much more expensive poor quality furniture really is. The desk with the round corners may or may not look as stylish as the other desk alternatives, but it will certainly minimize bumps to the head of the short people playing in your office space.

Read More from Creating A Child Safe Home Office:

• Create a Child Friendly YES Environment

Index of Creating A Child Safe Home Office

Waste paper may be one of the least glamorous aspects of the home office, but it still requires attention. To keep curious children out of disposable papers, get a trash can with a cover. This serves two distinct purposes. A covered trash keeps small hands from finding things like staples and paper clips, which are choking hazards. The cover also keeps children from finding more important documents and throwing them in with the junk as they try to emulate mom or dad. Telling the accounts receivable department you are late on payment because your child must have thrown out the invoice is akin to suggesting the dog ate your homework. And it's just as likely the paper your daughter decides to junk could be a check. Avoid the cans with the hinged lid connected to a foot pedal. These become a toy quickly and result in pinched fingers. Using a Rubbermaid tub with latching lid is a safe alternative to traditional rubbish bins or just don't keep trash in the office and throw it away in some other part of the house.

Paper Shredding Safety

Paper shredders are a must in the home office. Sensitive documents, like financial statements and private contract information should not be thrown away with regular trash. Unfortunately, the noise made by a paper shredder is a potentially inviting sound for small children. It doesn't matter what Wyatt is doing elsewhere in the house, if he hears me shredding paper, he drops everything, dashes into the office, cocks his head sideways and says, "Hey, Jake, What was that?" I can close the door and he still knows what I'm doing.

Shredders are a danger for two reasons. The obvious one is the potential for small fingers to get injured in the paper cutting mechanism. Another potential risk is the potential for small fingers to insert important documents into the shredder. Watching the paper disappear looks like great fun for small children who can't tell the difference between a credit card application and an important contract from a major client.

Keep the paper shredder up out of reach by either keeping it put away when not in use or by placing it out of reach. Unplugging the shredder and putting it in a closet until needed is probably your safest bet.

Read More from Creating A Child Safe Home Office:

• Hidden Costs in Childproofing a Home Office
• Create a Child Friendly YES Environment

Index of Creating A Child Safe Home Office

Baby monitors are a must in the home office, especially if the office and the nursery are on separate floors. Babies and toddlers take regular naps, which are an ideal time to make any phone calls necessary during the workday schedule. While home offices have become quite common, clients and in-office co-workers seem to frown on hearing the noises of small children in the background as you discuss project deadlines.

Children have their own unique nap time temperaments. Some sleep peacefully making it easy to monitor with an audio system until they wake up. I live with a child who talks in his sleep quite often, which makes an audio monitor somewhat distracting. A child with a loud voice can be a rather abrupt interruption to a phone call when a sudden outburst erupts from the monitor speaker.
To avoid anomalies in sleeping habits, use a video monitoring system instead of the traditional audio setup. Most video monitors support both audio and video, with some of the better ones remaining silent, only kicking the audio into gear when the baby's starts making sounds. Using the video monitor provides you with a visual cue to monitor nap times for smaller children. Older children who still take naps can also be monitored, letting you know when they are no longer sleeping and have started to resume a more active play mode too.

Webcams as Baby Monitors

For solid integration into the home office, a variety of Webcams are available in wireless models, making it possible to tie baby monitoring directly into your home network. The Webcams generally come with wall mounting brackets, allowing you to position the camera out of a small child's reach while placing it in a convenient location for watching the bed. The Webcam will have onboard serving software which allows you to configure viewing over your wireless home network. While this certainly doesn't replace tucking loved ones in, it provides peace of mind in a practical solution for the home office workplace.

Standalone Monitors

As prices for electronic devices continue to drop, companies have expanded from audio-only baby monitors into the world of video. Standalone monitoring systems generally have two things in common. They provide a small screen to watch the visual output from the camera and they provide an audio monitoring system so you can hear children too. Depending on your budget, the standalone video monitors provide either color or black and white images, in addition to either always on audio or voice-activated audio that only activates when the child makes noise.

Read More from Creating A Child Safe Home Office:

• Keeping Watch on Children From Your Office
• Childproof Your Trash
• Hidden Costs in Childproofing a Home Office
• Create a Child Friendly YES Environment

Index of Creating A Child Safe Home Office

VCRs should be a thing of the past, but many of us still own hundreds of hours of movies and family vacations on large rectangular tapes. Until the VCR stops being a part of the home entertainment system, children will try to insert small objects into the tape slot. Not every home office contains a VCR, but it does make a good diversion for kids when work requires you to take time out from watching the kids to submit a project at the last minute. I keep a VCR in my office to transfer old tapes to digital formats, which means I'm forced to keep legacy equipment in the office. A VCR lock is provides an able solution for keeping foreign objects out of the VCR when not in use, as well as when a tape is playing. My VCR displays an error message after auto-rewind when the lock is in place, because the VCR attempts to eject the tape, instead getting blocked by the lock.

Find a VCR Lock

DVD players are another child entertainment tool for maintaining balance in the home office. So far, I haven't found a lock designed to keep kids from pulling on the DVD tray. With any electronic device, an out of the way location is always best, especially since most features are accessible via the handheld remote.

Keeping the television out of reach of small hands is easy enough. The solution is readily visible in most sports bars. A wall mounted TV stand puts the screen well out of reach of children, with a system for fastening the TV to the stand, preventing possible slipping. With the increase of flat screen HDTVs, wall-mounting your screen may be another solution for keeping both the screen and your kids safe.

Read More from Creating A Child Safe Home Office:

• Keeping Watch on Children From Your Office
• Childproof Your Trash
• Hidden Costs in Childproofing a Home Office
• Create a Child Friendly YES Environment

Index of Creating A Child Safe Home Office

Whenever possible go wireless. Excess cables are hard to hide from small hands, providing children with ample opportunity to pull something heavy down on their heads or accidentally breaking something expensive. Each powered device offers the disadvantage of an additional item requiring a power connection, which further increases the risk to curious little people. By eliminating cables from the equation, you eliminate clutter from the work area, keeping both your child and PC safer. As an added bonus, performing upgrades and moving hardware is considerably easier because there are fewer cables to untangle behind the PC.

Wireless Input Devices

Keyboards and mice both come in Bluetooth and RF wireless varieties. While there are numerous manufacturers, the most widely recognized human interface devices are manufactured by Microsoft and Logitech. RF input technology is more mature than Bluetooth, with most of the kinks worked out. RF also happens to be about 50% cheaper than Bluetooth. Particularly for keyboard and mouse solutions, the wait time for Bluetooth to come online is about 7 seconds after your PC boots, compared with almost instant recognition for RF devices. Bluetooth offers the advantage of requiring only a small fob plugged into a USB port (or on board support from newer machines), compared with a much larger RF receiver. Bluetooth reaches almost 30 feet, giving you remote access to devices located in another room, while RF devices are configured to operate at only about 6 feet, to prevent interference with other devices.

Wireless Networking

WiFi Internet connections render Ethernet cable virtually obsolete. With the 802.11g standard, 54 Mbps transfer speeds are fast enough for sending video across the home network, making it possible to record television programs remotely, print to a printer in another room, or work from a laptop on the patio. These are affordable conveniences, which make the work place safer, while providing more versatility to enjoy working from home. I have been known to look up phone numbers and movie times using my Pocket PC and my home wireless network while sitting in the driveway outside my home.

In some instances, using Bluetooth for printing makes more sense, especially when trying to eliminate the most cables. Bluetooth printer adapters attach to the parallel port connection, eliminating the need for the cable connection between the printer and your PC. Several adapters are available for converting printers to Bluetooth, with prices starting around $169.

Read More from Creating A Child Safe Home Office:

• Consumer Electronics Child Safety
• Keeping Watch on Children From Your Office
• Childproof Your Trash
• Hidden Costs in Childproofing a Home Office
• Create a Child Friendly YES Environment

Index of Creating A Child Safe Home Office

Computer cases are not child-friendly. Storing the computer safely out of reach (or at least out of site) is always a good policy. Of course, some accessibility is required to use the CD/DVD tray and any removable media readers. Random food or toys shoved in a floppy drive or compact flash slot will not make a computer happy. CD trays are especially vulnerable to being broken off by curious hands. My current HP computer actually locks the CD tray when the computer is idle, keeping the tray from opening without waking the PC back up by clicking on the mouse or keyboard. Small children aren't likely to figure out the combination of tapping keys and pressing the CD tray open button, if the two things are reasonably far apart. Few PC models support this sleeping state and will open the CD tray as soon as the computer power is turned on. For this reason, it's a good idea to keep the PC out of the path of small hands.

The newer flat screen iMacs look very child proof. The only exposed drive is a CD tray. No open button is visible on the surface next to the tray; it only opens from the keyboard. Apple doesn't lock the CD open key when the Mac OS X screen is locked. My nephew makes a game out of opening and closing the drive by pushing the CD open key on the keyboard. The only way to avoid keyboard access is to physically move the keyboard out of the reach of children. If you use a CRT screen, setting the keyboard on top of the monitor does the trick. Flat screens require a different strategy, like setting the keyboard on a high shelf (because there isn't room to rest a keyboard on the screen). Along with other advantages described below, using a wireless keyboard and mouse keep you from being limited by cord length when moving input devices out of reach.

Flat screen monitors

LCD flat screen monitors offer a variety of advantages for home office users not directly associated with child safety. The energy consumption from LCD screens is staggeringly lower than the power required by a CRT. According to a variety of sources, LCD monitors range in consumption from 25-50 Watts, while CRT monitors consume 70 to 150 watts in a 17 and 19-inch models. Reducing monitor energy consumption results in lower power bills, which will more than pay for the price difference between the two monitor styles within the first 12-18 months.

Less power consumption does not mean giving up screen brightness. In fact, LCD screens are almost twice as bright as CRT screens. LCD screens do not suffer from the magnetic interference problems associated with CRT screens, which means no wobbling in the image when your cell phone rings and no picture distortion when your computer speakers are too close to the monitor.

LCD monitors are much easier on your eyes. The flicker associated with CRT monitors results in eye fatigue and can be a cause of eyesight deterioration over time. This is true whether you work from home or not. Using an LCD monitor in your home office protects your eyes, allowing you to work longer without eye strain. Consequently, it also protects the eyes of your children, which will be exposed to many more hours of screen time than anyone born 1990 would ever have experienced.

In addition to saving your children's eyes, the big advantage from a child safety standpoint is the weight of LCD monitors. While you wouldn't want to drop an LCD monitor on your toe, the weight is considerably less than the weight of a CRT, which reduces the potential for injury to a child who tries to drag the monitor off the desktop.

Read More from Creating A Child Safe Home Office:

• Reducing Wires Eliminates Child Temptations
• Consumer Electronics Child Safety
• Keeping Watch on Children From Your Office
• Childproof Your Trash
• Hidden Costs in Childproofing a Home Office
• Create a Child Friendly YES Environment

Sometimes, making the home office child friendly means protecting the office from your child. While psychologists continue the debate over long term effects of video game violence, software cannot physically inflict pain on your children. Unsupervised children can inflict pain on your software by deleting applications or sensitive data. Maintaining a balance between child access to your PC and safety for your data is a must.

Computers offer several easy software solutions for defending against child instigated data loss. For toddlers, a simple password will keep the screen safely locked if you need to leave the room. Be diligent and always lock the screen (or at the very least, set the screensaver to lock the screen after a few idle minutes). Even the best efforts to keep small hands from the keyboard don't always succeed. Having a password in place to keep data safe is cheap insurance for projects with hours of time invested.

Older kids who want to play games or use computer learning tools still need some safety precautions in place, so you don't lose important work files. In this case, assign kids a very limited access Windows XP (or Mac OS X) user account. This lets your child know they are welcome at the computer, while also preventing accidents. Make sure your user account has a password, so they don't accidentally wind up logging in with more privileges.

To add a user account for your child, follow these steps:

1. Open the User Accounts control panel by clicking Start/Control Panel, and then double clicking User Accounts.

2. Click Create a new account.

3. Type your child's name in the new account name.

Click Next when you are finished.

4. Choose Limited for the account type and click Create Account when you are finished (Computer Administrator is selected by default).

Read More from Creating A Child Safe Home Office:

• Children and Computer Parts Don't Mix
• Reducing Wires Eliminates Child Temptations
• Consumer Electronics Child Safety
• Keeping Watch on Children From Your Office
• Childproof Your Trash
• Hidden Costs in Childproofing a Home Office
• Create a Child Friendly YES Environment

Despite my best efforts, I have not found a chair with a good combination of ergonomic comfort and minimal hazards to children. A great chair is possibly the single most important office supply, facilitating long hours at a desk. The Herman Miller Aeron line may seem like a dot.bomb era cliche, but it's among the most comfortable solutions for 8-10 hour stretches involving the seated position.

The adjustment levers found underneath a chair help prevent the onset of chronic back and leg pains later in life (assuming you take the time to adjust the chair). While useful, levers and knobs are of great interest to small children, consequently risking pinched fingers due to unattended exploration.

The only way I've found to avoid numerous levers on a chair is to buy something cheap without any adjustment options. While this seems like a great short term solution, shopping for a chair based on price or lack of features may cause some undesirable long-term damage to your body. Bottom line--buy a chair you would feel comfortable sitting in. Don't purchase one that lacks features necessary to maintain good posture and comfort while sitting. This is one office area where it may be necessary to emphatically remind kids the chair is off limits (unless supervised).

• Protecting Your Computer Desktop from Children
• Children and Computer Parts Don't Mix
• Reducing Wires Eliminates Child Temptations
• Consumer Electronics Child Safety
• Keeping Watch on Children From Your Office
• Childproof Your Trash
• Hidden Costs in Childproofing a Home Office
• Create a Child Friendly YES Environment

At the center of every home office is the desk. In a home office, the corporate ergonomics advisor won't be dropping by to measure the distance between your seated posture and the top of your desk. Height adjustable desks are hard to find outside of high-end office furniture suppliers like Hon and Steelcase. Most of the desks found at office supply stores are of the low quality assemble-it-yourself variety. I know; this guide came to life on one.

Picking a desk with the right combination of functional features and child safety is complicated. What makes a desk safe for children? The best advice is to avoid desks with sharp edges. At age two, I fell on the corner of a coffee table at my grandmother's house and ended up with a trip to the emergency room for stitches. While falling is an unavoidable part of growing up (and often adulthood), minimizing the damage is possible with careful planning. Look for rounded corners, especially on parts of the desk where the edge may jut into the room.

Avoid rough metal edges which might cut or pinch small fingers. An old desk I owned had nice rubberized round corners, but plenty of sharp metal edges, which cut me each time I reconstructed it before or after a move. More than one stubbed toe was a casualty of the bottom edge of the desk leg. Glass surfaces are also a danger. Many glass-surfaced desks look sturdy, but are held together by metal fasteners with sharp edges.

And of course, don't forget to invest in Corner Cushions when necessary. These padded corners aren't perfect, but they certainly help absorb the impact of a full-tilt lunge into a sharp corner. I try to avoid needing the cushions because they don't stay on well in most cases and tend to get in the way, but if you have exposed sharp corners, it might be your only practical alternative.

• Ergonomics, Chairs, and Children
• Protecting Your Computer Desktop from Children
• Children and Computer Parts Don't Mix
• Reducing Wires Eliminates Child Temptations
• Consumer Electronics Child Safety
• Keeping Watch on Children From Your Office
• Childproof Your Trash
• Hidden Costs in Childproofing a Home Office
• Create a Child Friendly YES Environment

How do you keep small children from unplugging electrical cords? Especially cords attached to a PC in the middle of a 4-hour data backup? Wyatt makes a b-line for the vacuum cord whenever we plug it in, so the myriad of computer cables look naturally attractive to little hands.

Outlet inserts keep small objects out of unused outlets. Placing large furniture in front of outlets works great in the living room, but many of my office outlets are in places where large furniture simply can't go. Fortunately, Safety 1st makes some plastic outlet encasements designed to cover both outlets and the power cords connected to them.

Most outlet encasements aren't designed to easily accommodate grounded three-prong plugs common to most PC devices. Safety 1st makes a larger square model with two interlocking pieces which accommodate one grounded plug or one AC adapter easily, but generally waste the other outlet.

Find electrical outlet and plug covers

For outlet protection combined with the convenience of powering multiple devices, use a power strip cover in combination with the outlet cover. This is another Safety 1st solution, with wall-mounting brackets for convenient placement. The surge protector cover extends to enclose longer power strips, but I haven't found a cover wide enough to enclose a surge protector with two rows of outlets. The surge protector cover also won't enclose AC adapters commonly associated with things like routers, Pocket PCs, and other small electronic peripherals.

Find Power Strip Covers

• Choosing a Child Safe Desk
• Ergonomics, Chairs, and Children
• Protecting Your Computer Desktop from Children
• Children and Computer Parts Don't Mix
• Reducing Wires Eliminates Child Temptations
• Consumer Electronics Child Safety
• Keeping Watch on Children From Your Office
• Childproof Your Trash
• Hidden Costs in Childproofing a Home Office
• Create a Child Friendly YES Environment

All the obvious stuff is easy. Outlet inserts easily cover electrical receptacles. Squeezable plastic covers on the doorknobs to my office and office closet keep me out without a coordinated grab-and-turn combination. My filing system went from loose papers stacked in piles on the desk to a more organized series of file folders neatly enclosed in a file cabinet (which improved my ability to find papers). The Pencil holder moved from my desk to a shelf out of reach. The stapler and tape dispenser now have a new home in a drawer. In a few easy steps, I gained a renewed sense of preparedness--until the day Wyatt partially unplugged the surge protector on one of my PCs from the wall. My child proofing efforts weren't nearly enough.

Continue Reading How to Child Proof Your Home Office:

• Maintaining Your Home Office Power Grid with Children
• Choosing a Child Safe Desk
• Ergonomics, Chairs, and Children
• Protecting Your Computer Desktop from Children
• Children and Computer Parts Don't Mix
• Reducing Wires Eliminates Child Temptations
• Consumer Electronics Child Safety
• Keeping Watch on Children From Your Office
• Childproof Your Trash
• Hidden Costs in Childproofing a Home Office
• Create a Child Friendly YES Environment

Working from home is one of the most liberating career moves you can make. The benefits are huge with virtually no downside. A home office provides freedom to wear what you want while you work. Eliminating the two hours commuting to and from the office reduces one of the biggest stresses of the standard work day (not to mention all the money saved on fuel or mass transit). Enjoying a particularly sunny afternoon without fearing the boss will find out the coffee break lasted 25 minutes (instead of 15) provides decadent satisfaction. All these advantages of having a home business or telecommuting also appeal to those of use who want more time with our kids.

Aside from the obvious benefit of seeing kids more, a whole host of other child-related benefits make working from home desirable. A home office means lower child care costs because the kids don't need to be shipped off to daycare before school starts. With some planning, work fits around your children's schedule, instead of fitting kids in around work. Working at home puts career expectations on more equal footing with other aspects of life, allowing work to be scheduled into your life, instead of scheduling your life around work. Establishing a home office means watching the kids grow up, instead of hearing about the latest developmental accomplishments from the babysitter. Your kids win because they get more of your attention. You win because you spend more time with the kids by eliminating some of the workplace stresses.

Having a home office isn't without some inherent risks. Some telecommuters find it harder to leave work because email and projects are always right there. Instead of taking away from time with family, this often translates to sleepless nights. Careful office planning keeps the home office from being all consuming. Closing the office door when you aren't working sends a clear message reminding you that opening the door means you are on your way to the office. Keeping a flexible schedule of work hours eliminates some of the confusion, making sure the work day doesn't spill too far into the night.

The biggest obstacle in establishing a functional home office is the new risks to children caused by the addition of potential safety hazards. Office supplies and computer equipment look interesting to curious youngsters. With proper tools and careful decision making, a home office becomes the place where you are most efficient, while providing a kid-friendly environment where kids can co-exist with your office space and you can still feel comfortable working.

My career as a home-based worker accounts for over half of my adult working life. During that time I've acquired a number of skills designed to make working at home the best decision I ever made. Admittedly, I still have room for improvement. Historically, my physical office and my Windows desktop both look similar--stacks of papers (or icons) strewn everywhere. There's method to my madness, but a casual observer would assume I'm working in a disaster area. I'm continually maintaining several simultaneous projects. I like to keep necessary materials close at hand, so I can work on them when I'm ready.

When I met Robin, the love of my life, I was completely unprepared for having our son Wyatt exploring my workspace. Robin and I met when Wyatt was 22 months old. Everything around Wyatt requires investigation.

In my office he grabbed for the tape dispenser on the desk. He pounded on the keyboard. He tugged at the cord connected to my mouse. My monitor was suddenly covered in little fingerprints. Most of his interactions with the office space in my apartment seemed amusing but harmless. When he wadded up an important contract I left on the desk, I realized my office needed a serious overhaul.

Read the rest of the Child Proof Home Office:

• Childproofing Basics
• Maintaining Your Home Office Power Grid with Children
• Choosing a Child Safe Desk
• Ergonomics, Chairs, and Children
• Protecting Your Computer Desktop from Children
• Children and Computer Parts Don't Mix
• Reducing Wires Eliminates Child Temptations
• Consumer Electronics Child Safety
• Keeping Watch on Children From Your Office
• Childproof Your Trash
• Hidden Costs in Childproofing a Home Office
• Create a Child Friendly YES Environment