Door Handle Guards

There aren’t many great door handle guards on the market, but some of them do the trick better than others. This is a tricky area for manufacturers because either they work well by keeping your children from opening the doors, or they don’t. And when they don’t work, it renders the product and solution completely useless.

We purchased two types of door handle guards, the Dream Baby 3 set of door knob safety covers sold at about $6.85, and the Kidco Door Knob lock 2 pack for exactly $7.00. Both are currently available with amazon’s free super saver shipping.

Well, to begin with I’ll say that both brands worked fine. We have the Dream Baby covers on several doors downstairs and the Kidco Door locks in master bedroom and the main entrance. Both are easy enough to install with a little bit of figuring out, and both are complicated enough to make opening doors difficult.

The Dream Baby door cover that protects the garage was damaged severely by a very frustrated grandma! But if worked to keep our two year old from opening the door. We replaced it with a highly installed metallic hinge that is only appropriate for the garage door and too impractical for all other use.

The Dream Baby door covers are also used throughout our son’s preschool and it looks like it does the job at keeping the kids from opening doors, though our son has figured out which ones don’t have them and runs to those doors instead.

The Kidco door handle guards are much easier for adults to open, with a nicer pressure point for opening the door with the index finger and thumb. It’s better looking and works well. We use it on our main entrance which makes getting in and out a little tougher, both for us and the kids. We use the other one in the master bedroom where the kids spend a lot of evening time getting ready for bed and therefore experimenting with ways to solve it, which our three year old boy did. His solution, after thinking about it for a long time, was to completely smash the door handle against the wall and splitting the two pieces by force! This can be avoided by using a door stopper. If your child is like ours, they will play with the door stopper until you have to remove it, and now we have dents on the wall because of the boy’s door smashing tendencies!

Still, I like the Kidco guards better because they’re easier for adults to use and look nicer. For economy and similar functionality, the Dream Baby guards work just fine.