Advanced Tether Tips

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.

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Tales from the School Dropoff Line

Our daughter’s elementary school was a place where parents would park their cars and then walk children into school. However, they recently opened an optional dropoff line. I’m grateful that it’s optional because some days, getting my kiddo out of the car takes quite a while. There are stray Lego pieces to grab, snacks to throw into her backpack, and the not-that-rare need to slither out of her booster, then ask for help when she’s stuck in an unwieldy position. So we need that time.

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Stow That Top Tether Strap!

Don’t leave a tether strap hanging! A tether strap may have a long tail to accommodate anchors that are far from the vehicle seat. Be sure to appropriately bundle and store the excess so it doesn’t get caught hanging outside of the vehicle or create a strangulation hazard for a child.

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Top Tethers: A Crucial Piece Of Your Child’s Car Seat

Using the top tether in conjunction with installing a forward facing car seat is one of the easiest things a parent can do to help protect their children. It’s the law in Canada to use a tether for all forward facing seats, and has been since 1989; in Australia all seats have been tethered since the 1970s. And yet in the United States, where it’s been highly encouraged since 2000, tether use is often less than 50%, and in some types of vehicles it’s as low as 17.2% (Jermakian, 2011).

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IIHS LATCH Ratings

On June 18, 2015, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) released new ease of use ratings for LATCH. The most important point is that this is not a safety rating in any way, shape, or form. IIHS is merely discussing the ease of use and accessibility in 2015 vehicles.

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LATCH: What’s the Deal with Weight Limits?

LATCH (Lower Anchors and Tethers for CHildren) was phased in between 1999-2002 with the goal of giving parents a standard, foolproof method of installing their children’s seats. However, the advent of larger seats, and older children being restrained in those seats, has led to a concern that never occurred to the experts of 20 years ago; how much weight can those anchors actually bear in a crash?

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