Flooring for children and kids
As soon as children learn to crawl, the centre of their activities will be the floor—and will continue to be so for years. It will be played on, crawled on and subjected to the hardest possible ‘consumer’ tests! Flooring, the actual floor covering, should be nonslip, warm enough to be walked on with bare feet, as sound-deadening as possible, soft enough to crawl on or sit on for long periods, easily cleaned and, in the long term, economical. Carpet, even cheap or second-hand carpet, can be destroyed quicker than any other floor covering, by just one small child.
Rugs on wood present hazards to the child even if the floor has been treated with a non-slip finish. Besides, expanses of floor interrupted by rugs are inferior bases for train sets or other games or hobbies which involve lots of space. (All forms of wooden floors, incidentally, unless immaculately sanded and sealed, are potentially dangerous because of the possibility of splinters working free.) Rubber, though expensive in the short term, is excellent flooring for the children’s rooms because it is relatively soft and heat retaining, and even fragile objects tend to bounce off it.
Rubber is perhaps the softer of the two but this is a matter of personal taste. Linoleum is cheap enough to be easily replaced after a major disaster, but it has been superceded in both fashion and quality by the vinyl and rubber types of flooring. Rush matting would be unbearably knotty to crawl on—such refinements are best left until the child is much older.
Vinyl tiling is probably the most popular type of flooring for ‘service’ rooms, and few rooms have to be more serviceable than a child’s—it is easily wiped clean and fairly durable.