Surviving Backyard Baby Chicks When You Already Have A Toddler

We were standing in the middle of a farm supply store somewhere in the Illinois suburbs when my husband decided we needed to teach our two-year-old about food sustainability. He was holding a cardboard box that vibrated with high-pitched chirps, and my toddler was trying to climb his leg like a feral cat to get to it. I had spent twelve years doing pediatric triage before becoming a stay-at-home mom. I know what an impending disaster looks like. But suddenly we were standing in the aisle, furiously searching on our phones for baby chicks for sale near me to see if we should just buy them here or go to a specialty breeder, while a store employee with a mullet assured us these were definitely all females.

Listen, trying to figure out how to sex baby chicks is basically a parlor trick unless you happen to hold a doctorate in avian genetics. The guy at the store acted like he possessed some ancient agricultural wisdom, just flipping them over and declaring their gender with absolute certainty. The hatcheries boast about their accuracy to justify the premium price of guaranteed hens, but from what I've gathered during late-night anxiety reading, it's really only about 80 to 90 percent accurate. You buy six fluffy little hens, and six months later one of them is waking up your entire suburban cul-de-sac at four in the morning because congratulations, beta, you got a surprise rooster. We took home four. I stared at them the entire car ride, convinced at least two were male just out of sheer spite.

Biohazard containment in the laundry room

Setting up a nursery for poultry is just like bringing home a human newborn, except the human newborn doesn't deliberately poop in its own drinking water. We set up a giant plastic tote in our laundry room. The farm store guy had tried to sell us a standard 250-watt heat lamp to keep them warm. As a nurse, I've seen enough bizarre household accidents to know I'm absolutely not clamping an industrial heat laser to a plastic bin inside my house. Heat lamps cause thousands of devastating fires every year. We bought a radiant heat plate instead, which sort of mimics a mother hen. They huddle under it when they feel cold and come out when they're fine, meaning there's zero fire hazard and I don't have to keep the laundry room lit up like a fast-food drive-thru at midnight.

Then there's the bedding. Never use cedar shavings because it destroys their respiratory systems, and avoid flat newspaper because it gives them a crippling condition called spraddle leg, so just buy the chunky pine shavings and accept that you'll be finding them in your socks for the next decade.

The real issue is the toddler. Toddlers have exactly zero impulse control and a bizarre biological imperative to put everything they find into their mouths. When I casually mentioned our new urban homesteading project to my pediatrician at a routine visit, she gave me the exact same exhausted look I used to give parents in the ER who told me they let their kids ride ATVs without helmets. She told me the medical guidelines essentially beg parents not to let kids under five handle live poultry because they're basically walking, chirping little salmonella factories.

She rattled off a list of precautions that sounded like prep for a surgical theater. If you want to survive this phase without a massive gastrointestinal event, assume everything the birds touch is covered in invisible toxic sludge, so wash your hands until they bleed and never let your toddler within ten feet of the brooder without wearing clothes you don't mind incinerating later.

I kept my son in his Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit almost exclusively during this phase. It's honestly my favorite piece of clothing we own. The fabric is thick enough to act as a physical barrier between his sensitive skin and whatever microscopic coop dust floated into the house, and it somehow handles being washed on my machine's heavy-duty sanitary cycle every single day without falling apart. The snap closures stayed intact even when I was ripping it off him in a panic because a baby chick had fluttered too close to his chest.

I also tried using the Gentle Baby Building Block Set to distract him in the hallway while I scrubbed the chick bin. They're just okay. They're soft and safe to chew on, which is fine, but they only bought me about four minutes of peace before he realized I was doing something way more interesting with the birds and started chucking the blocks at the laundry room door.

The midnight pasty butt triage

Nobody tells you about pasty butt. It sounds like a joke your toddler would make up, but it's actually a lethal emergency for brooder chicks. Basically, their feces dries over their vent, acting like cement and preventing them from passing anything else. If you don't catch it, they die. It's that simple.

So there I was, three days into our sustainability journey, holding a warm wet paper towel to a screaming bird's behind at two in the morning. You have to be incredibly gentle because their skin is paper-thin and their tiny bodies are fragile. I've seen a thousand of these high-stress pediatric situations, but performing bedside nursing care on poultry was a new low. My husband slept through the entire thing. The chick survived, but my dignity took a permanent hit.

The rules of engagement

If you're actually going to mix a baby chick and a toddler, you've to enforce rules like a prison warden. Children think of them as stuffed animals, but these creatures are incredibly prone to dropping dead from minor inconveniences.

• The eighteen-inch drop zone is the first thing you learn about handling them. A fall from just a foot and a half can be fatal, so if you absolutely must let your older kids hold one, their butts need to be firmly planted on the floor first.
• The fifteen-minute stress limit is equally important because they literally die of fright if you look at them too long. We kept human interaction to less than fifteen minutes a day total per bird.
• The water training protocol happens the second you bring them home. When you get baby chicks for sale online and they ship via mail, they arrive dehydrated and completely forget how to drink. You have to physically dip their tiny beaks into room-temperature water so they understand the concept of hydration.

Listen, if you've an infant and you're thinking of starting a backyard flock, just don't. Keep your baby safely under their Rainbow Play Gym in a clean, poop-free living room and wait a few years. Let them bat at the little wooden elephant instead of risking a salmonella outbreak before they can even walk. The play gym is great for their spatial awareness anyway, and it doesn't require you to scrub dried feces off anything.

Looking for natural, chemical-free ways to outfit your kids for their messy outdoor adventures? Check out Kianao's full collection of sustainable baby basics and toddler wear.

The messy reality of growing up

By week four, the cute fluffy stage was completely gone. They entered what chicken people call the awkward teenage phase, where they look like half-plucked dinosaurs and smell like a petting zoo left out in the sun. They started testing their wings, which meant every time I opened the plastic tote, a cloud of dander and pine dust erupted into my face.

We eventually moved them outside to a secure coop. My toddler still treats them like his personal entertainment system, but now there's a layer of hardware cloth between his unwashed hands and their beaks. He stands in his rubber boots, pointing at them and yelling his own version of chicken noises. I guess my husband was right about the biology lesson, even if it cost me my sanity and the cleanliness of my laundry room.

We somehow survived the brooder stage. The birds are thriving, the toddler hasn't contracted any medieval diseases, and we only ended up with one surprise rooster who we had to hastily rehome to a farm in Wisconsin. If you're brave enough to try this yourself, wash your hands, buy the heat plate, and lower your expectations for a clean house.

Ready to upgrade your nursery before bringing any more chaos into your home? Shop Kianao's organic cotton essentials and thoughtfully designed play items today.

FAQ

Is it actually safe to have a toddler around baby chicks?

Technically, the medical establishment says no. My pediatrician practically begged me to keep them separated. Kids under five are terrible at washing their hands and great at putting their fingers in their mouths, which is a perfect recipe for salmonella. If you do it, you've to be obsessive about hygiene and never let the kid touch the birds unsupervised.

How do I fix pasty butt without hurting the chick?

You need patience and a very warm, wet cloth. Don't pull the dried poop off, or you'll tear their skin and cause a fatal injury. Just hold the warm cloth against their back end until the mass softens enough to wipe away gently. It's gross, they'll scream, and you'll hate it, but it saves their life.

Why shouldn't I use a heat lamp in the brooder?

Because you don't want your house to burn down, yaar. Those 250-watt bulbs get insanely hot, and if they fall into a bin full of dry pine shavings, it's game over. Radiant heat plates are vastly superior. They only use a few watts, stay warm to the touch without starting fires, and let the chicks sleep in normal darkness instead of harsh red light.

Can I tell if my chicks are male or female when they're babies?

Not really. The feed store employees will act like they know, but vent sexing is incredibly difficult. Even professional hatcheries only hit about 80 to 90 percent accuracy. Just accept that if you buy a handful of "guaranteed females," there's a decent chance you'll be dealing with crowing in a few months.

How long do they've to live inside the house?

Usually about six weeks. They need to stay in the brooder until they're fully feathered and can control their own body temperature. By week five, you'll be counting the seconds until you can evict them because the smell of dust and growing bird is impossible to ignore, no matter how much you clean.