Your Guide to Child Safety Seats

Do you have a safe car seat?  Are you using it properly as that is the biggest problem with car seat safety?  There are a lot of car seat mistakes that parents make which only add to the lack of safety of car seats. 

Car Safety Seat Mistakes

The most common mistakes parents make include: 

Using the wrong car seat or putting it in the car

Using the car seat restraints too loosely or in the wrong position in the car

Using the harness clip wrongly 

Failing to use the LATCH system in the right way

Removing the booster seat too soon

Allowing children to ride in the front seat of the care too soon

Safety Seat Warning

Even if you are correctly using your infant seat for your car, it doesn’t mean the baby is perfectly safe in a crash.  Consumer Reports recently looked at a total of twelve infant seats and put them through regular crash tests.  If you are using the car seat correctly, not all child safety seats protect baby from harm.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration tells us that:

Car infant seats provide 71% more effectiveness in reducing deaths in infants and a 54 percent effectiveness in keeping children ages 1-4 from death. 

Belt positioning booster seats can help a child reduce their chances of injury by 59 percent.  The Consumer Reports testing reported that European car seats were much safer than American-made car seats.

Controversy over Child Safety Seats

The National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration disagrees with the way the Consumer Reports did their studies on Infant car seats, stating that the crash tests mimicked a side-impact crash greater than seventy miles per hour, twice as fast as Consumer Reports claimed.  When they retested the studies at half the 70 mph rate, the car seats performed much better and most stayed in place as they should have.

Consumer Reports withdrew their report on car seat safety until further testing is performed and plan to republish the results.  While a lot of professional organizations disagreed with the Consumer Report’s findings, the report did highlight the potential danger of car seats and indicated that the car seats could be made safer than they currently are.  We need to wait until the report is republished to reveal the latest findings. 

Child Safety Seats that are the Safest

If you already have a safe car seat, stick with it and don’t bother buying a new one.  On the other hand, if you don’t have a new one, consider that only two car seats were able to pass the rigorous Consumer Reports testing.  These were the Graco SnugRide with EPS and the Baby Trend Flex-Loc.  You need to suspend some judgment because the testing is not complete in its new format but these are car seats to consider anyway because they passed the initial, more rigorous, testing.