This year’s Child Passenger Safety week is focusing on #mywhy. What does that mean, exactly? It’s sharing your reason for your passion for child passenger safety: your WHY. By using #mywhy, caregivers can pledge their commitment to proper car seat usage and explain why that’s important to them personally.
Last year for Child Passenger Safety week we talked about what you can expect when you visit a Child Passenger Safety Technician. This year, we are going to talk about what you can expect when you go to a Seat Check Event. With Seat Check Saturday coming up September 20, 2014, it is likely that there is an event near you. While the set up of every check event is different, the general idea is the same.
I’d been a Child Passenger Safety advocate since my oldest daughter was little. At her first birthday, she was 18 lbs — below even the lowest limits for rear-facing. That inspired me to explore the safest options for her. I stumbled onto the facts around extended rear-facing in time to keep her seat backward until around her 4th birthday.
As Child Passenger Safety Technicians, we often have the opportunity to work with parents and caregivers that are excited about car seat safety and interested in becoming CPSTs themselves. One of the most common questions they ask about the certification process is what does a CPST do, anyway?
Child Passenger Safety Technicians are often faced with some difficult scenarios. CPSTs can traverse the challenging territory of fitting three car seats across bench seat, selecting a seat for a tiny car with tall children, or the puzzle of a jam-packed minivan where only certain seats can be used in certain positions.
When it comes to resources for child passenger safety technicians, the LATCH manual easily makes the short list of “must have” references. It is jam packed with technical information that is invaluable to the CPST. Need to know how to use a top tether (rear or forward facing)? Want to know where LATCH began or how to use a retrofit tether? Can’t find the anchors in a vehicle that should have them? The LATCH Manual can tell you all of that, and so much more.
We would like to take this time to introduce the newest members of the CSFTL family.
These awesome additions were provided by Huggable Images, a company that makes safety training dolls and custom huggables. Huggable Images has given us the opportunity to take their dolls for a test drive and see what we think. You’ll be seeing these dolls in our reviews down the road to fill in the gaps where we don’t have children the correct age/size to fit the seat we’re reviewing. Today we’ll be looking at these dolls on their own to see how they stack up to real life children.
To start off, what is a Child Passenger Safety Technician? A CPST has been trained specifically on the topic of child restraints and safety within a vehicle. They can spot problems and know the specifics about seats and cars on the market. They make sure that a child is in the correct seat for their age, height, and weight. With upwards of 80% of child restraints being used incorrectly, a CPST educates parents on the correct use of seats and shows them how to properly install them.
