Buying your child’s booster seat
You’ll no doubt have taken all the precautions under the sun to ensure your baby or toddler is safe when she rides in the car – but what about your preschooler? Once she outgrows her toddler seat – which is happening sooner these days because children are larger – she should move to a booster seat. However, while it’s the law to ensure your baby and toddler use a child restraint in the car, state laws on booster seat usage vary – and the NHTSA says that 80 percent of children who should use one don’t.
However, it’s vital that you do use one for your preschooler – because statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration(NHTSA) show that around 350 children aged from four to seven years of age die in crashes each year in the US, and that 50,000 are injured. In fact, your preschooler is more likely to die in a car crash than your baby or toddler. The reason is that the adult seat belt alone won’t protect your preschooler from injury because she’s simply too short for it to fit her properly.
In order to adequately restrain your child the shoulder portion of the seat belt needs to lie across her shoulder and chest and the lap portion has to run across the tops of her thighs/hip area. Trouble is, that on smaller children the shoulder portion may rest across the neck and the lap portion may lie across the tummy. This not only puts your child at risk because she isn’t properly restrained – it also means that the seatbelt itself could potentially injure her in a collision. A booster seat – which can be either backless or highback – helps you avoid this by raising your child up to a level where the seatbelt fits her properly. Research shows this can lower your child’s injury risk by 59% compared with using the seatbelt alone, and that booster seats reduce the risk of death by about 28%.
So what are the safest booster seats? A whole range has just been evaluated by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) – and the findings are alarming. Of 41 seats that were evaluated, 13 did such a poor job of improving the fit of the car seat belt that the IIHS advises parents not to buy them. Backless boosters were found to provide a better fir when it came to the lap portion of the seatbelt, but it’s recommended that parents use the seatbelt-positioning clip if the shoulder portion of the seatbelt is routing too close to your child’s neck. Highback seats incorporate belt positioning slots or guides, so these generally do a better job of positioning shoulder belts – but 12 of the 26 evaluated incorrectly positioned the lap belt.
Top 10 booster seats
These seats were more likely to position both the lap and shoulder portion of the car seatbelt correctly:
Backless - Combi Kobuk
- Fisher-Price Safe Voyage
- Graco TurboBooster
- Safeguard Go Combination Seat (when used as a backless booster)
Highback- Britax Monarch
- Britax Parkway
- Fisher-Price Safe Voyage
- LaRoche Bros. Teddy Bear
- Recaro Young Style
- Volvo booster cushion
Good fit
These seats were found to provide an acceptable seatbelt fit:
Highback- Combi Kobuk
- Graco TurboBooster
- Safety Angel Ride Ryte
- Recaro Young Sport Combination Seat (when used as a highback)
- Safety 1st/Dorel Apex 65 Combinations Seat (when used as a highback)
The information in this feature is intended for educational purposes only. If you have any concerns about your health, the health of your child or the health of someone you know, please consult with a doctor or other healthcare professional.
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Last Modified: 25/10/2008
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