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CHILD CAR SEAT |
Using a child car seat properly will reduce your child's risk of injury in a motor vehicle collision by 75 per cent. Approximately 80 per cent of child car seats are used incorrectly. Top errors include not tightening the seat belt and harness enough, and a problem called buckle crunch (this is where the buckle of the car seat belt touches the frame of the child car seat putting too much strain onto the buckle that can break or undo in an accident). Make sure your child is safe and secure, and is buckled up right. Children are safest when seated away from all active air bags. Children younger than 13 years of age are safest in the back seat.
Most of us wouldn't even think of travelling in a car without fastening our seatbelt, and for good reason. In a crash, at just 30 miles per hour (48.3 kilometres per hour), an unrestrained passenger is thrown forward with a force thirty to sixty times their body weight. What if that unrestrained passenger were a small child? The child would almost certainly be hurled about inside the vehicle, injuring themselves and other passengers. Worse still, they're likely to be thrown from the vehicle through one of the windows.
it's not even safe to hold a child on your lap while driving. In a crash, the child could be crushed between your body and part of the interior of the car. Even if you were held in by a seatbelt the child would be pulled from your arms by the force of the collision. You simply wouldn't be able to hold on to the child, no matter how hard you tried.
The bottom line is that the safest way for children to travel by car is in a child car seat that is suitable for their weight and size, and is fitted correctly. There isn’t a child’s car seat on the market that fits all cars. It’s important for the safety of your child that the fitting is correct for your vehicle otherwise you are putting your child at risk. The best internet site for checking fitting is the “fit finder” service found on the Britax web site. It lists all their seats and the models of cars that they have tried them in. |
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The newest and safest seats now incorporate the Isofix system available on most new cars. This is where the seat fixes directly to the chassis of the car with a simple “click” fix system. This seat are easy to fix and take out for movement from car to car, and doesn’t need the use of a seat belt so eliminating fit problems such as buckle crunch. This system designed by Britax in conjunction with the VW group in Germany has been adopted by all the major car manufacturers. In fact cars within the EEC can now gain or loose stars in the highly rated NCAP crash test survey results for car seat occupancy test. |
Since we can never over emphasise the importance of safety, here’s our safety checklist |
- Remember that child weight is the determining factor in car seat choice.
- A child cannot go forward facing in a car seat until he /she is over 7 months old, over 9kg in weight and supporting himself sitting up for half an hour at a time.
- Don’t, under any circumstances, use any infant car seat on a passenger seat fitted with an airbag.
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