[Sca-cooks] A question about knives

[David Friedman]

Petru asked:

>All of this has also raised a question in my mind, given that I have one
>young child already, and hopefully one or two more to come eventually.
>
>Given that if I'm smart enough to find it, a 5-year old can get there before
>I will...
>
>Where and How do you guys store your knives to prevent children from messing
>around with them?
>
>(I still have a few months ahead of me as Victor is not even able to access
>the kitchen yet, but that will surely change soon!!!)

The short answer is that it depends on the kid. My first child at two 
could be set up with a computor game on my husband's computor and 
trusted not to mess with anything else on the computor. I wouldn't 
have dared to do that with my second child. Similarly with knives, 
which leads to a story (and don't worry, no one actually got hurt.)

When we moved into this house with a 5-year-old girl and a 2-year-old 
boy, the knives (Chicago Cutlery) sat in a knife block at the back of 
a counter in the kitchen. The older child understood that knives were 
sharp and that meant don't touch, and that was fine, and the younger 
couldn't get at them. One morning we were woken by my daughter with 
the information that her brother had the two largest sharp knives and 
was running (!!!) around the house with them. It was true. He had 
discovered that if he pushed a chair against the counter, he could 
climb onto the chair, then onto the counter, and reach the knives, 
and the French chef's knife and the butcher's knife made good toy 
swords. (!!!!) I had a long serious talk with him and told my 
daughter that she had done the right thing to tell us and not to try 
to take the knives away from him herself. I kept my eye on him the 
rest of the day, and I really thought I had gotten through to him.

The following morning the same thing happened. That time, my son got 
spanked and confined to his room for the rest of the morning, and for 
a long time afterward, the knife block went up into a high opaque 
cupboard at night after my son went to bed, and only came down during 
the day when he was not in the room, so that he never knew where it 
was, even if he could have figured out how to get up there. Maybe a 
year or so later, when he understood about sharp knives, we stopped 
putting the knife block up out of reach, and never had any more 
problems.

(If you meet my son, by the way, don't mention this to him. He has 
long since forgotten the original event,and he has heard the story 
too many times.)

Elizabeth/Betty Cook