To understand how car seat engineers design their products, let’s look at the simplest elements of crash dynamics. We always remind our readers that it’s essential that every child be in the correct, properly used seat for their age and size; crash dynamics help illustrate why those factors are so important.
Diono has issued a recall for some Radian, Olympia, Pacifica, and Rainier car seats made between 2013 and 2017. When installed with the lap belt only these seats may not perform properly in a crash.
All forward facing harnessed car seats have a top tether. The top tether is an essential piece of safety equipment and an essential part of protecting children who ride forward facing in their harnessed car seats.
Since the model year 1999, all new cars in the United States and Canada include at least three tether anchors to connect those top tethers. These anchors will be identified in your vehicle’s manual and often with a tether anchor symbol near the tether itself.
Top tethers are essential safety equipment for forward facing car seats. They’re generally easy to find — they’re connected at the back to the top of your child’s convertible, multimode, or combination car seat.
There are two parts to top tether togetherness. The top tether anchor on the car seat and the tether anchor on the vehicle itself.
Car seats, child restraints, whatever you call them, here at CSFTL we’re big fans of this life saving technology. So deep is our love that we’ve written love songs to our LATCH manuals and haikus about snowy mornings loading the kids to drive to grandma’s house.
Believe it or not, our idea of a fun Saturday afternoon is helping as many caregivers as possible properly install car seats. As long as we’re fantasizing, we’d like a nice air conditioned garage to do those seat checks in, please.
Your car is a dangerous place for your child, one of the most dangerous places that children inhabit daily. Here at CSFTL we work daily to help caregivers keep kids safe while on the go by making the best choices when transporting their Littles.
This booster seat was manufactured with two different belt guides, one shaped like the letter U and one like the letter Z. Both versions of the seat may have come with misleading labels or instructions for routing the shoulder belt through the guide. If the shoulder belt is improperly routed, the seat may not protect a child in a crash.
Your tiny baby has, somehow, grown into a big kid. The little squishy newborn who you were so careful to keep rear facing as she became a toddler and a preschooler, and for whom you researched combination seats, and then learned to convert her seat to a booster, and kept in a backless booster until she fit in the seat belt, finally passes the five step test. After wondering how that happened so fast, you might wonder if she can now safely ride with you in the front seat.
Transporting families in pick-up trucks is standard in much of North America, and modern 4 door trucks can be comfortable and safe for kids and adults alike. When installing car seats some trucks have unique features, however. Let’s take a look at how installing child restraints in trucks differs from installing in cars.
When children come into our lives, their future is a wonderful, terrifying unknown. As they grow from tiny babies to small delightful people we might have more of an idea what that future can hold, but we don’t stop imagining it. Imagining that future and all that it might be as they grow is one of the things that makes us different from who we were before we had kids.
