I don’t like the setup of my house, but it is what it is. My kids room door is at a 90 degree angle to ours. I’ve always wanted to install and practice an escape since we’re on the second floor, but my ex wife had a problem with that (go figure). When I manage to get her out of my house, how do I go about retraining my kid with this? He absolutely refuses to sleep with the door shut, even with one of us in the room, and if he wakes up with it shut, it’s bloody murder.
Her logic (that’d I have been overridden on) is that I am literally 4 steps away from his bed in an emergency, and I could leap in, close the door and escape through that window. Mind you I’m 207 227(edit, she cheated on me again and I caught her on 06/05, probably caused the weight gain) lbs and deathly afraid of fire.
What I want to do is install one of the fire escape ladders that rolled through the window and practice going down that with my kid before working on getting him to close the door at night.
Is there an order I should do these things? Like door first, then escape? Or escape first, then door?
Did you even click the link provided? It provides some pretty good reasons with examples and a video demonstration of why it’s so important. I don’t know anything about your ex wife or what your living situation is, but maybe show it to her not as an “I’m right you’re wrong” thing but as a genuine safety of your kid thing.
As for your child screaming bloody murder, there comes a time when you need to realize you’re the parent and they’re the child. For obvious reasons they are not equipped to make decisions regarding their own safety, which is why they’re supposed to have you. Sit down with and have a conversation with them Mr. Roger’s-style (meaning don’t treat them like they’re an idiot), maybe try and make a game out of it. If they still scream then honestly too bad, let them cry it out. You don’t have debates with your child about if they can stick a fork in an outlet or not do you?
I don’t debate shit when it comes to safety with my kid. To be honest, it isn’t even a doubt in my mind that his door should be shut. It’s his mother. But I think you (intentionally or not) may have said exactly the way I need to go about this:
It’s about his safety. Not her sleep. a few bad nights of sleep is worth it (to me at least).
Yep, I had a cat that would paw on the door if it wasn’t open. I decided to see how long he’d stick with it. My sanity broke at 2 hours. He won and it was open from that night forward.
Closed because many years ago a firefighter gave a fire safety talk at our elementary school. He told us to keep the door closed at night since it can give you an extra 30 minutes to escape in a fire. For some reason this advice stuck with me…
Gotta train them that doing that doesn’t get them the outcome they want. I make it a policy with my cats that if they wake me up, they get yeeted to the basement.
When they were new, that meant picking them up and carrying them to the laundry room and closing the door. It evolved to me simply carrying them to the top of the stairs and setting them on the top step, and now all I have to do is open the door when they scratch or yowl and they scatter. It took a while, but now they only bother me at night when there’s another cat in the yard and they want to get to my window to look out.
Using thermal imaging cameras, researchers found that closed-door rooms on both floors during the fire’s spread had average temperatures of less than 100 degrees Fahrenheit versus 1000+ degrees in the open-door rooms. “You could see a markable difference that a person could be alive in a room with a closed door much longer,” says Kerber.
Gas concentrations were markedly different as well. The open-door bedroom measured an extremely toxic 10,000 PPM CO (parts per million of Carbon Monoxide), while the closed had approximately 100 PPM CO.
It sure is; here’s a video demonstrating the effectiveness. Shutting your door can mean the difference between life and death. I encourage anyone to watch or re-watch this, just to hammer it home.
Unfortunately, my cats can’t deal with shut doors, so if there’s ever a fire in my apartment, at least we’ll all go together 🙃
In that case, keeping the doors and windows shut will give you the best chance of survival, because there will be less oxygen flow and thus a slower burn.
You’ll need to call in a fire emergency, lie low on the ground, and try to use a rag/shirt/towel to filter some of the smoke while you wait to be rescued. You still might die, but at least this way you have a chance.
Closed. Even a simple hollow core door can offer 30 minutes or more of protection from smoke and indirect fire. More time for alarms to go off and get to safety.
Sometimes, a perfectly terrible fire (in a perfectly unlucky layout of a house) could emit toxic gases / smoke in sufficient quantities to impair you, potentially to the point of not being able to react to the alarm. At that point you may not escape.
nods I used to sleep with the door shut and locked, and the home alarm on whenever I was out. That’s no longer true ever since the queen demanded that I do neither.
I’m the opposite. I like it when the cat curls up on my feet, but I’m not a fan of just letting them stalk through the house and jump around freely when I’m trying to flipping sleep.
They can’t not do that, so they get shut out. And I taught them early on that if they yowl and scratch at the door on the middle of the night, they’re just gonna get launched down the stairs.
Cats only get to be the boss if you let them. They absolutely can be trained to not be total tyrants.
Open, so that the air that gets pumped into my room can tell the Mr. Thermostat in the hall that it’s actually fine in there and they don’t need to call Mr. Furnace or Mrs. A/C.
Depending on your thermostat, you might be able to find satellite sensors for each of your rooms. I did this and we can change which temperature sensor the thermostat monitors.
Add comment