Child safety seats are incredibly important for children's safety. You should always restrain your children in a child safety seat when they are in a moving vehicle.
Did you know that car crashes are the number one preventable cause of death for children? In fact, most car crash deaths of children occur because the children were not held in a child safety seat and their lives could easily have been saved if they had been properly restrained. It is very important that children and especially infants be restrained in a child seat while driving, even for a short trip down the block.
One of the biggest reasons that it is so important to restrain children and especially infants is because their bones are still developing and subsequently they are very fragile. Even short stops and other minor jolts of a vehicle that would barely impact a grown adult will cause great injury to an infant that is not properly restrained. The infant seat doesn’t just hold the child in place, it also helps redistribute the energy of a hard stop or a crash so that the force of the impact does not hit directly on one area of the child.
Child seats also help reduce the incidence of car crashes. Children are less likely to misbehave when they are restrained in a child seat and therefore cause distractions to the parent. When the parent is less distracted they will focus more on their driving and therefore it will be less likely that they will have an accident.
The reason that many parents cite for not restraining their children in child seats is due to a misunderstanding about the effectiveness of the safety restraint. Many people believe that holding an infant during a car crash will help restrain them and they will be fine, but this is not the case. Because of the laws of motion, the momentum that is gathered as a vehicle moves is a great force. At high speeds an impact occurs backed by literally tons of pressure. Even in crashes that occur at lower speeds the impact is still delivered with hundreds of pounds of pressure. No human has the physical strength to hold on to an infant that is being torn from them with that much force. If you try to hold your child during a trip and a crash occurs, the infant absolutely will be torn from your arms as if they had almost no restraint at all.
People also commonly misunderstand what exactly constitutes a proper child restraint seat. All infant seats must be officially made for the purpose of restraining children in the car. Anything else will not provide the protection from a collision that the infant needs. You cannot use a cloth carrier, a pillow, a plastic feeding seat, or any other sort of makeshift cushioning to restrain the child. This will cause the same outcomes listed above, as if the child were not restrained at all.
Also make sure you are getting the right kind of child safety seat. Child seats are made differently to respond to the needs of growing children and not all ages and sizes of children need to be restrained the same way. Be sure to look for more information in our next article about how to choose the right kind of child safety seat for each child’s age and size, because getting the wrong kind will result in your child not being properly restrained.
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