Some young adults fit better in the seat belt than their parents. My teenager is as tall as I am. As a short Child Passenger Safety Technician, I feel the pain of other short parents. We get questions about this often — “I’m an adult, I don’t pass the five step test. Do I need a booster seat?” The short answer is no, you don’t.
Most days retrieving the mail is typically a mundane task. When we least expect it, though, we get mail that makes our heart race. Letters from long lost friends, holiday or birthday greeting cards, vehicle recall notices – they all have the ability to make our hearts skip a beat and the breath to catch in our throats. Unlike correspondence from friends, though, vehicle recall notices can be stress inducing. What is involved in a recall and what do you do if your vehicle is part of one?
We’re thrilled to see more laws in more states align closer to best practice. As of January 1, 2017, California will join the states with laws requiring children to remain rear facing in their car seats until at least 2 years of age. On that day, California also adopts a law banning all cell phones from being held by the driver.
Recalls happen all the time. Recalls can happen for as many different reasons as there are variety of items that are recalled. When it comes to car seats, recalls can be anything from a typo on a required line on a sticker to an issue that makes a car seat completely unsafe or unusable.
You may have recently heard that a well established child restraint manufacturer has been spreading the word that that they’ve sponsored a review of a study well known to the injury prevention community, and that review seems to suggest that one of our most baseline understandings of child passenger safety may be wrong.
Each year since 2009, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has released their IIHS booster ratings. These ratings are based primarily on the fit of the 6 year old crash test dummy. Fit is the best indication of performance: regardless of how many optional features a booster seat has, if it doesn’t place the vehicle seat belt properly on the child, it can’t do its job.
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.
It’s amazing, but somehow that Little you just brought home for the first time yesterday is now not so much a Little, but is ready to be behind the wheel. It’s an exciting time. For the parent, it’s another set of wheels in the house to run errands and drive around younger siblings. For the teen, it means freedom.
If you’ve ever flown on an airplane, you’ve heard the flight attendant instructions to put the oxygen mask on yourself before assisting your child or other passengers. It should be no different when you are in a vehicle. You’ve done the research and made sure your children and passengers are properly restrained, but are you?
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.
