Here's something strange: parents consistently underestimate hazards in their own homes while overestimating dangers outside the home. You might worry about playground injuries but miss the unsecured dresser in the nursery. You lock the car door at a gas station but leave cleaning supplies in an unlocked cabinet.
This isn't because you're careless. It's because your brain has some built-in blind spots.
Familiarity Bias
The more familiar something is, the less dangerous it seems. You've walked past that bookshelf a thousand times without it falling. Your brain concludes it's safe. But your baby pulling on it is a completely different scenario than you walking past it.
Psychologists call this "risk habituation." We become desensitized to hazards we encounter daily. It's the same reason people who live near volcanoes don't evacuate as quickly as newcomers.
Optimism Bias
Most parents believe accidents happen to other families. Studies show that 90% of parents rate their home as "safe" even when professional assessments identify multiple significant hazards.
We think, "I'm a careful parent, so my child won't get hurt." But injuries don't discriminate based on parenting quality. They're about environment and physics.
The Illusion of Supervision
Parents often believe that watching their child is sufficient protection. "I'll just keep an eye on them near the stairs." But research shows that even attentive parents look away for 5-10 seconds every few minutes. A mobile baby can reach a staircase in 3 seconds.
Supervision is important, but it's not a substitute for environmental safety. You can't watch a child every second of every day for years. The environment needs to be forgiving for those inevitable moments of inattention.
Anchoring to Past Experience
If your first child never got into the cabinets under the sink, you might not lock them for the second child. But every kid is different. The fact that one child didn't do something doesn't mean the next one won't.
Parents of multiple children sometimes get more relaxed, not because the risks have decreased but because the first child "was fine." That's anchoring bias at work.
Reactive vs. Proactive Safety
Humans are naturally reactive. We install smoke detectors after a neighbor has a fire. We anchor furniture after hearing about a tip-over accident. We buy outlet covers after watching our baby stick a finger near a socket.
The problem is that proactive safety requires imagining something bad happening in your safe, familiar home. That's psychologically uncomfortable, so our brains resist it.
Social Proof
If none of your friends have childproofed their homes, it feels unnecessary. "Everyone's kids are fine." But survivorship bias is real. You hear about the families where nothing happened. You don't hear about the near-misses.
How to Overcome These Biases
1. Fresh eyes. Invite someone who doesn't live in your home to walk through and point out hazards. They'll see things you've become blind to.
2. Get low. Literally crawl through your home. Our room-by-room checklist can help at baby height. The perspective shift reveals hazards your standing-height brain ignores.
3. Use checklists. They bypass your brain's tendency to skip familiar items. A systematic approach catches what intuition misses.
4. Assume your child WILL find every hazard. Because they probably will. Babies are essentially tiny safety auditors whose job is to find every danger in your home.
5. Think in probabilities, not absolutes. "It probably won't happen" isn't the same as "it can't happen." Low-probability events happen every day when multiplied across millions of homes.
The Bottom Line
Your home isn't as safe as it feels. That's not a criticism of your parenting. It's just how human brains work. The good news is that once you're aware of these biases, you can work around them. Knowledge is the first step toward actually seeing the hazards you've been looking past.