Keeping Your Flatscreen Monitor Safe from Children's Fingers

Our children of three and eight have a computer in their room that our oldest child has had since she was three years old. It's a very popular toy, and they actively seek out educational software. They also seem to stay within safe pages (both in terms of computer security and child safety) on the net.

At the time we gave our daughter her computer we equipped her with a 15" CRT monitor. CRT monitors were still prevalent at that time, and CRT monitors have a unique feature that is required in children's rooms: no matter how much you touch the screen, the marks left by the perpetually dirty child fingers can easily be wiped off, and more importantly, the screen doesn't break.

Put a TFT flatscreen monitor in a child's room and have the child point at the screen a few times, and it will be broken within minutes. Children's way of pointing at a screen is a highly physical interaction with the hardware. And, as any parent will know, children cannot be told not to touch it.

The CRT screen wore out eventually, in part because of the hostile environment of a child's playroom, and in part because it was getting rather old.

This left us in a somewhat awkward situation. Our children needed a new monitor, of course, but flatscreen monitors had replaced CRT monitors in the stores.

I decided to buy an inexpensive 15" flatscreen monitor and harden it a bit with the help of acrylic plastic.

A store specializing in mirrors and windows half a block from where we live was happy to cut a sheet of plexiglas about 1/10" thick in the size of the monitor for a few bucks.

I had thought about fastening the acrylic plastic to the monitor with velcro, double-sided tape, or perhaps super glue but decided that this wouldn't look good.

Instead I drilled four holes in the corners of the acrylic plastic with a #65 drill (.35" or about .9mm) and got hold of some black steel wire with a diameter a little less than that.

I bent the steel wire so that the end of the wire would just grab the acrylic plastic when inserted into the upper hole, and drew the steel wire over the back of the monitor, to the front again, and into the bottom hole of the plexiglas.

The difficult part was to measure the steel wire so it fit very tightly onto the monitor. I had to plug the steel wire into the holes in the plexiglas sheet before I attempted to snap it onto the monitor; it would probably have been impossible to get the steel wires tight enough otherwise.

The monitor doesn't look too great from the behind, but the back end is facing away from the room anyway and isn't seen. On the front, only about 2/10" of the steel wire is seen, and the plexiglas is cut to size of the monitor and looks like it was always there.

The plexiglas was full of dirt from the children's fingers within minutes, proving that this little project had probably both saved the monitor's life and made it possible to use a TFT monitor in a child's room.