HELP! Learned to climb on the couch tonight!

I knew we'd been having too easy of a time the past few months. Usually, the girls play alone for bits of time as I do housework/cooking. and i can't always seem them from where I am but I haven't worried b/c we're child proofed.

BUT now, DD1 can climb on the couch and she fell off twice and one time DD2 pulled her off by her shirt b/c she was pissed she couldn't climb up too. what am I going to do? I have these visions of her falling off the couch and breaking an arm or worse, falling off the side onto an end table and cracking her head open....

i'll go crazy if I have to have my eyes on them at all times! What should I do!!!!!!!!! they have no safety awareness and not great protective reactions yet.

 

What will be a big help is to teach Seek & Destroy (hahahah) the proper way of sitting on the couch/furniture and how to get down safely (on their tummies, wiggle back until their feet touch the ground.) Alice still stands occasionally on the furniture but for the most part, they both sit on the furniture now like big people (took about 3 weeks of drilling it into their head, "Sit down or get down" "Sit down or get down" and then taking them down if they don't listen after the 2nd time for us) and they haven't fallen off the couch or chair since that first 3 week period.

 

The couch in the living room is off limits to them because of the coffee and end tables. They know it. Pretty much on a daily basis they will try to climb up and I will tell the "no climb" and they will get off.

Now the sectional in the basement I allow them to climb on. I pull off the cushions and lay them on the floor, this way if they fall, they will fall of them. I do not have any tables down there and it's pretty much all their toys.

If you don't want them to climb, you have to teach them not to. But you should give them something they can climb on in a safe area.

 

I agree with Becky, it will be a big help to teach them the proper way to sit on the couch. We've started doing that and they are slowly getting better at it. Good luck!

 

Mine still go through phases of wanting to run and romp on the couch. When they first discovered it (ours is very much a casual couch), I would just take the cushions off and put them on the floor so they had a large area of protection around them, and without cushions the seat area was not very tall so a fall was not as big of a deal. I did that for a couple weeks whenever I didn't have my eyes RIGHT on them. It helped. Eventually, they outgrew the dangerous behaviors. We also did the sit down or get down thing, and that did help over a longer span of time. Welcome to toddlerhood!

 

Try to show them how to get down. Mine still don't know how to climb but they've spent enough time with us on it that they know how to get down properly.

 

I agree with teaching them to get down. Our boys have been climbing on the couch for about a month and they are just figuring out how to get down on their own. James is really good an working himself off the couch backwards. Jack does more of a reach with his arms and then sort of walks his hands out til his body falls off. They are slowly getting the hang of sitting on the couch, but they do LOVE to stand on it and look out the window. I think they like it cause they can see the trucks that go down our street all day and they love when the window is open and the breeze blows in their face. I never did put pillows down because I didn't want them to get used to it being soft when they fell. So far we haven't had any falls so we've been pretty lucky.

 

I'm having mega flash backs to last year. I lost the battle of climbing on the couch so I put it against a wall (so they can't fall over the back), and taught them to sit on it (TOs for jumping or standing after one warning), and taught them how to safely get up and down. Its a battle you won't win, so you might as well teach them to be safe :hug:

 

my biggest problem right now is that she will lean forward to reach a toy that fell off the couch and she'll fall head first to the floor (pillow).

will she just eventually learn she can't just lean off the front of the couch????