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Blog: Can You Believe All the Things You Need to Know About Car Seats?Posted by: Lorrie Walker at Sep 15, 2011 12:00 AM CDT Keywords: Education | Send This | Article Link | Comments(1)
I can! I have worked with car seats for more than 25 years and there are many things that people who transport children need to know before turning the key in the ignition. While there are lots of nice-to-know things, there are 5 key points every caregiver needs to know and we are telling everyone we can during Child Passenger Safety Week (September 18-24):
I can tell you that most parents and caregivers get this wrong. Almost 3 out of 4 car seats have a major problem in the way they were installed. There is a car seat certification course that over 100,000 people have taken so they can help people in their communities. If you have ever had your car seat checked by a certified car seat technician you are getting someone who has gone through extensive training and testing. When these people walk into the classroom they see a wall of car seats (there are hundreds of models out there) and a huge manual. They also spend lots of time outside in a variety of vehicles (they are all different in how their LATCH system or seat belts work) so that they can open any car door and immediately begin to help people get their car seats right. Safe Kids USA, the National Child Passenger Safety Board, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration all support the child passenger safety technician certification program to train interested public safety officials and others to climb into any car and evaluate all the safety points so children can travel safely. When people arrive at one of our Safe Kids checkup events, they complete a waiver on our checklist form. This allows us to enter their car and begin to assess the car's safety features and all the children in the car. We look at each child individually and the car as a whole. We may move kids around in the car to get the best fit of the car seat into the car. It takes 20-30 minutes per child to do the assessment. We sometimes get parents who pull into the event and tell us "we are on our way to tumble class and only have 5 minutes" or "I just had my nails done and I can't help". We ask them to reschedule. We want each child to leave safer than when he or she arrived and that can't be done in 5 minutes. One of the best parts of an event is how the parents learn all the safety features in their car and how to best protect their children. They are proud once they learn all the tricks. Our inspections are not like an oil change where you wait in a room for the work to be done for you. Parents climb into the car and learn about the safety belts, the airbags, seat locations and much more. They like learning all the details for the most part. We ask if they feel comfortable taking the seat out and doing it again. If they tell us they will never move the seat again because it fits so well now, we may unbuckle the seat and watch as they install it again just so they gain the confidence and competence to do it on their own. The goal is for the parent or caregiver to know how to do it alone when we are not there. Once you learn a few small tricks, it gets easier each time. Let us know about your experience at a car seat checkup event by writing to me at lwalker@safekids.org. More About Child Passenger Safety
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