Boost Your Child’s Safety With A Booster Seat
Boost Your Child’s Safety With A Booster Seat
When properly installed, car seats offer much needed protection for newborn children and toddlers. But as young children begin to grow older, something alarming happens. Many parents fail to provide their children with that same level of protection simply because they don’t understand the benefits using booster seats.
Why use a booster seat?
Booster seats are the perfect safety solution for that in-between stage when children outgrow their car seats but are not yet big enough to be adequately protected by a car’s seat belts.
A booster seat “boosts” a child several inches off the car’s seat. Once lifted, a seat belt can now offer the child more effective protection against injury and death because both the lap strap and shoulder strap fit more snugly and securely.
What happens without it?
Without that extra lift, the lap strap may come to rest above the stomach and the shoulder strap is more likely to slip off the child’s shoulder (where it should be) and cut across the child’s neck (where it shouldn’t be).
The result is a fit that’s uncomfortable and increases the child’s risk of sustaining neck or abdominal injuries. What’s worse, when the child isn’t comfortable, he or she may lift the seat belt over and behind the head where it is useless.
Booster seat use among children between the ages of 4 and 7 is only 19% according to the Partners for Child Passenger Safety. Twenty-one states have laws governing booster seat use among this age group; just half the number of states that require booster seats for toddlers.
What can you do?
To adequately protect your child at every age, heed this advice:
- An infant should be placed in the back seat in a rear-facing car seat. This seating arrangement should be maintained until the child reaches the car seat’s recommended height and weight limits.
- The child should then graduate to a front-facing car seat, installed in the back seat, and continue this arrangement until the child reaches the car seat’s recommended height and weight limits.
- After that, a child should be restrained using a belt-positioning booster seat and should continue this arrangement until the child reaches the height of 4’9” and can sit with back against the seat, knees bent and feet flat on the floor.
- At this point, the car’s seat belt should fit properly which means the lap belt sits across the top of the thighs and the shoulder belt fits across the shoulders.