Unlike conventional safety gates that swing or slide open, a retractable baby gate winds open and closed. Imagine a pull-down window shade turned on its side. Baby safety gates work in a similar fashion, pulling across the doorway in which it's fastened, making them a practical barrier against overly mobile infants and toddlers, while making it convenient for adults to draw them aside. This balance of protection and unobtrusiveness on demand makes them more practical for most homeowners than traditional safety gates for babies.
A normal pressure-mounted child safety gate needs to be carefully chosen to match the width of the parents' doorway, while a retractable gate can extend to fit most widths, with 4.5 to 7 feet as the norm. If a doorway happens to be even wider, most retractable baby gate manufacturers offer wide and extra-wide variants. With heights typically between 30 and 34 inches, the screens easily prevent most infants and toddlers from climbing over them. Retractable gates are more flexible than regular baby gates in a literal sense, using a mesh screen that's rigid enough when drawn to discourage babies from penetrating, but not rigid enough to prevent falling through if enough force is applied. For this reason, retractable baby gates are best used for blocking access to rooms, not stairs.
While most retractable baby gates aren't intended to be mounted at the top of stairs, some newer models are marketed as safe for use in this manner, usually featuring specially designed mounting brackets that accommodate the more extreme angles between the wall and the railings. Nevertheless, they use the same plastic mesh as older models, so the still remain inappropriate for toddlers capable of walking a fast speeds.
Retractable baby gates have a wall-mounted roller at one end of the doorway that usually winds up with the twist of a knob (some use automatic rewinders); on the other end the screen locks into place. When walking into or out of a room, the screen can simply be detached from its locking bracket between passes rather than fully rewinding it or drawing it out of the roller. This is a great feature, since the screens can be noisy enough when drawn to wake sleeping babies.
This design should not be confused with older implementations that are sometimes called "retractable", like accordion gates that are less safe for children, possible injuring or cutting fingers when opened or closed. Another advantage of an actual retractable baby safety gate is that the roller mechanism can detach from its wall bracket when not in use, making it very compact for limited storage spaces. They even save space mounted in place, since the screen doesn't have to arc outward and block the hallway.
Ease of use and ease of storage make retractable baby gates more practical and versatile alternatives to accordion and pressure-mounted child gates.
