You May Be Using Your Child’s Car Seat Incorrectly

All these comments debate the merits of which way to face, flame retardants, etc., but sadly, whenever I drive through some of the rougher section of Pittsburgh you see kids in the back of cars bouncing around without a seatbelt, sometimes up to 4 or 5 at a time. I don't know if it's because they can't afford car seats (they can certainly afford the car), are ignorant, just don't care, or whatever, but it seems to me that ANY carseat would be a huge improvement for the safety of their children (even if it's perhaps expired). Why doesn't anyone ever break down the accident stats for kids with and without seats, and if with seats, the installation type. All they do is make best practice recommendations.

Most common mistake I’ve observed is whenever people use the seatbelt system to secure a car seatbelt they forget to pull the seat belt all the way out so it’s locked.

Wish someone would write an article about recommended convertible car seats for people who Uber or rent cars exclusively. We have spent hours researching the best option. Consider, all of the seats are steel framed and most weighing over 20 pounds. If you are by yourself, how do you get a reluctant toddler, car seat and whatever else you need to carry to the car? When you arrive at said mystery car, how easy is it to install by yourself as the child waits patiently in the snow? And, what do you do with the car seat at your destination? What if, you don’t use a car enough to warrant the cost of buying a car just for a permanently installed car seat? With all the rental options available it is not always necessary to own a car. Let’s see an article that discusses these points. And, yes. Some cities Uber offers a family Uber but Chicago doesn’t have this program. We want to keep our child safe but how do we do it without tears (child’s or parents’)?

Another important rule that I see violated a lot: no heavy coats on while in the car seat! The straps can’t tighten as they should when the child is wearing a bulky jacket. I always make my children take off their jackets before getting in their car seats, and we live in northern Vermont. Yes, it means a few seconds of feeling cold. But it’s important.

Check out TheCarSeatLady.com. She's a grassroots consumer advocate for parents and for having children put properly into their seats. A remarkable lady not vested in selling seats. Her daughter went on to be a NYC pediatrician and car seat advocate too! Website shows large children in rear facing seats (safest for their heads as they get flung into the carseat and not the seat in front) quite comfortably crosslegged - kids sit crosslegged all the time. There's also a video demo showing how a baby in a coat is no longer secure in a firmly buckled car seat because the coat compresses readily and the infant slips out.

One thing missing from this article on safety is the highly toxic flame retardants used in every single car seat. There is no evidence flame retardants are necessary much less effective. But the chemicals used in car seats are proven to cause cancer, among other insidious diseases. How about an investigative article on the effectiveness and safety of flame retardants in children’s products vs the risk of cancer?

One thing that's not mentioned is the constant change in recommendations, and lack of consensus regarding when to switch from LATCH/ISOFIX to car set belts + seat tethers and then to just car seat belts. Initially we were led to believe that LATCH with top harness is all it took -- then they started saying LATCH is good up to only 65 lbs (seat+child) or as given by the manufacturer. Well, none of my car manuals say what the limit for LATCH is and it's not on the web. Unless specified, I believe you need to assume 65 total lbs. After that you need to know the harness limit of your seat, and start using the car seat belt once that's reached. On top of all this you have to check things like shoulder line/height, ear line/height, inclination angle, belt fraying, expiry date, etc... and then hope that your car seat and belt geometry is such that you can secure the thing.. mine always has some wiggle no matter what I try.

My problem is that I have gigantic children. I bought the largest capacity infant seats for all of them (35 lbs). My older two were absolutely squashed by them by the time they hit 1 and I had to put them in forward facing seats. My youngest is not there yet but she is the smallest so she might make it all the way to 1 year and a couple of months. If it's really necessary to keep them rear facing until 2 then maybe the manufacturers could start making larger seats that account for the great variation in the size of children.

Car seat safety (or lack thereof) is something I cannot wrap my brain around. Parents fret about eating organic, ensuring their offspring can speak twelve languages, picking the no sulfate shampoo, wondering which bouncer will foster early walking skills, agonizing over probiotics, swaddles, killing every germ within a 500 mile radius, and yet...... When faced with actual research that tells them that rear facing is safer, or keeping a kid harnessed or in a booster is safer....parents come us with a million reasons why they can’t/won’t/are unable to follow that advice. “My kid doesn’t like to” “my kid is embarrassed” “my kid cries” “I can’t see my baby” “my kid looks uncomfortable “. Or my personal favorite “well taxis aren’t required to have car seats so I can hold my infant in my lap”. Is there a magic force field in taxis that I’m unaware of? The logic is befuddling. ???

I am so glad I don't have children because my impression is that all parents are using car seats incorrectly. Those poor folks can't win.

I have used car seats for 43 years as a parent and grandparent and I think they are wonderful. In fact, 43 years ago I had to order my backward facing infant carseat from GM! My kids and I have toted carseats at airports so we have one when we arrive and many others do to. In Dallas we have entire families killed in car crashes on our city freeways EXCEPT the six-month-old or the two-year-old is still living and barely injured (of course, sitting in the middle of the back seat). Read a few articles of severe crashes and you will usually find the toddler in the carseat has minor injuries even in rollovers. Even if you can't read the pictures show you how to use a carseat. All car manuals have instructions for seatbelt and latch system carseats. You can find the seat manufacturer's manual online or on your phone's web. For God sakes, even an idiot can figure it out. People won't spend $100 on a carseat or borrow one but they will buy an $800 phone? Booster seats have a cross bar of some type that operates with your car's seatbelt and shoulder strap. The reason for the wide cross bar is to disperse the impact over a larger section of the child's body. A seatbelt alone for young children can severly injure their internal organs.

Obviously child seats increase safety. My six year old always uses his booster. That being said: the car seat brigade is out of control. Trolling FB photos to see if someone’s strap seems slightly too loose, or if a child is wearing a coat. Suburban parents who live in their cars, all of them. If a child dies in a wreck, and it turns out that he wasn’t properly secured, the car seat brigade gets online to post that his parents got what they deserved. I always have a great desire to say: Because my child is my most precious asset, I’ve made the decision to live in Manhattan and not own a car. Sure, it’s a little inconvenient, but I’ve reduced the chance of his dying in a car wreck to 0%. My child’s life is worth any sacrifice. Isn’t yours? Oh, you’ve chosen to live in the suburbs? Why don’t you value your child’s safety?!?

I don’t see why it would be different in Australia, but, contrary to at least one previous post, I found the instructions irresponsibly complex. Basically there are only about three or four steps to set up the baby seat I bought for my grandson but the instruction booklet was about the size of a novella. I got the impression that it was written by lawyers to ensure every interpretation of all possible eventualities was covered in writing to protect the manufacturer in the event of mishap.

I never really understood how so many car seats are installed incorrectly. The instructions are very straight forward and the LATCH system is easy peasy. If you have a car and a car seat built in the last 10 years I’m honestly not sure why it’s so hard. The instructions for removing padding for cleaning are much much more complicated than installation...

I have no doubt that quality carseats, properly installed, and correctly used save many lives of children when there is a car crash. I also have no doubt that there are also some number of excess crashes because drivers are looking over there shoulder to try and figure out what is happening in the back seat. Has anyone ever done a study to compare these two effects?

The entire car seat thing is a scam. Freakanomics pointed out that there are no actual studies of car seat safety v. just using a seat belt after the child is an infant. To the best of my knowledge the industry has still not done this study. Now there are laws so I have to spend thousands of dollars on devices that provide no statistical safety advantage. These laws disproportionately disadvantage the poor and are a subtle way to reinforce lower birth rates because you require huge vehicles to transport even a family of 5. The laws are also a huge factor in reducing social interaction and cooperation. It has eliminated the ability for parents to have spur of the moment play dates, to car pool, etc. All of these so called groups quoted here are nothing but car seat manufacturer shills. Lets see some real studies that show real advantages instead of conjecture and science based on what the manufacturers want to sell. I would argue that more children will die from the plastic waste, additional emissions from huge cars and impossible to install/use car seats than would if we just used phone books and the seat belt already in the car.

Call and ask if your law enforcement departments have installation services. It makes good use of their offices and eases the mind quite a bit. In Vermont, I made an appointment with the state police local barracks (each of which has a child seat “expert”). The trooper came to my house. The trooper had an up to date list on car seat recalls, expired car seats, and something else (sorry). My car seat was inspected and installed be the trooper. It’s awesome! The trooper talked about car seat safety the entire time. I thought I knew everything, I learned more! I had the trooper come back to turn the car seat around. (Do yourself a favor and take out the seat and vacuum before the trooper gets there...it was an embarrassing amount of waste underneath ^_^) And I drove there to have boosters inspected. I did this with my second as well. I could have done it but I felt better having them look it up and so on.

Car seat manufactures have created a mess with these car seats. The highly rated seats cost between $200 and $400 a seat. They are very difficult to use correctly and installation has to be done by a professional. On top of that you have a very young infant in the car you can not see them unless you stop the car get out and go to the back seat to determine why they are crying. Absolutely no viewing of the infant unless you buy an additional item a mirror for the back seat which blocks your review mirror. Children's car seat manufactures have to rethink these seats to make them user friendly and reasonable costs. Everyone wants their child protected in a car but the manufacturers have made it very difficult.

Expiration date on plastics? I hadn't heard about that before. Remind me to walk down to my local Sierra Club branch and let them know that all the fuss about 300-year decomposition cycles is overblown.

Is the car-seat lobby behind this fad of "expiring" plastic and metallic seats? All it does is clutter up the landfills and lighten parents' already-too-light wallets. The average price for a car seat today is around $200. Car seats apparently expire every five years, even if they've NEVER been involved in a car accident. Why is it that a coffee cup made of the same plastic can keep my drink warm for a decade, no problems, but the same plastic in a car seat somehow goes bad after a few years? Follow the money! There's only one industry making a sweet profit from it.

I moved to be near my daughter and her 3 little ones between the age of 6 and 15 months, and I like to help with the car pooling and driving. And of course I really believe in safe car seats. The problem is that, at 74 and with arthritis in the hands, car seats now are the bane of my existence. The clips are so difficult and sometimes near to impossible to handle. Of course that the children should be unable to open them but at the same time I wish that something was invented to make it easier for older caretakers to handle those locks while at the same time keeping them safe.

And, don’t forget to tighten up the straps appropriately after say, you had the child in the seat with a coat and now s/he isn’t wearing one. I’ve been guilty of that one.

While my brain knows it is safer for the children and I do in fact use car seats in the back seats of our car for our kids. Statistically it makes perfect sense. Still I can't help but remember sitting in the middle bench seat of my Dad's car (not truck, car) with a lap belt and him letting me change gears while he worked the clutch when I was young as 7 years old. While I am sure there are more children that make into adulthood unmaimed, or even at all then, then when I was growing up, there is still a part of me that thinks...I made it with out all of the extra coddling that goes on today, I bet my kids would too.

We kept both our kids rear-facing until they were both past the age of two...memory fails me now, but I think my youngest was almost three when she hit the height threshhold and we turned her seat around. Yes, it was annoying to not see them as well or be able to hand things to them from the front seat. Yes, my older daughter got carsick more often than she did after we turned her seat around. Still: worth it. It's a simple intervention with potentially huge dividends that far outweigh the inconvenience.

“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.”