Safety advocates estimate more than 85 percent of kids ride in improperly installed car seats, resulting in 68 deaths and 874 injuries a year. To help parents strap their kids in correctly, carmakers and government officials are beefing up the patchwork of state laws covering car seats, and offering roadside clinics and seat-checks to make sure parents haven’t bungled the installation. New federal laws require auto manufacturers to add special bars, bolts and tethers to make seats easier to secure. They’re not required until 2002, but will show up in some models this fall.
Why do so many kids ride improperly protected? Parental confusion is a key reason. As seat styles have proliferated, safety advice keeps changing. The latest prescription requires infants younger than a year and under 20 pounds to use rear-facing seats tilted at a 45 degree angle (to protect weak necks in accidents). Once kids hit 20 pounds and 12 months, seats can face forward. Most seats can handle a kid in that position up to 40 pounds. For many families, that weight level–which kids usually hit by 5–is the end of car seats. That’s a mistake: kids weighing as much as 80 pounds should use a booster seat so the seat belt fits properly. And all kids under 13 should ride in rear seats.
Getting kids into the right seat is only half the fun. Securing any car seat involves Mom or Dad climbing on top of it and using body weight to get everything tight. Those gymnastics will end soon, when the new snap-on hardware becomes standard. Until then, the struggle to keep a kid strapped in snug is a battle worth winning.
