Of course, you don't want dingy, nappy stuff that's all worn out or outdated. You want some decent gear. You also want safe stuff. For these reasons, you have to buy a few things new... you know, things with the latest cartoons on them.
One of the things that you absolutely have buy new is a car seat. This is because you can't risk getting a seat which has been damaged in a way that would compromise the child's safety. We knew that. What we didn't know, is that Consumer Reports just did an explosive article on Car Seat Safety, demonstrating that many of the available seats are not very safe.
I heard somebody talking about this story at our prenatal class on Monday, and then I stumbled across the a link to the actual article on some random financial blog. The finance blog had this great summary from the Consumer Reports site (Click on the image to make it larger):
Check out this quote from the article:
Cars and car seats can’t be sold unless they can withstand a 30-mph frontal crash. But most cars are also tested in a 35-mph frontal crash and in a 38-mph side crash. Car seats aren’t.Only two of the twelve car seats performed well in the tests. I think I know what models we're going to be looking at. I just hope they have one with SpongeBob on it.
When we crash-tested infant car seats at the higher speeds vehicles routinely withstand, most failed disastrously. The car seats twisted violently or flew off their bases, in one case hurling a test dummy 30 feet across the lab.
6 comments:
I am so glad that my kids survived their rides in the car with me putting my arm out to protect them when some crazy driver threatened me on the road! But, yes, yeah for car seats now. I think that they are the same thing that I see many moms/dads carrying into the chapel for church and putting them in grocery carts to shop - dual purposes I guess. Am I right?
After reading your blog I went right out to the van to see what I car seat I had. It's an Evenflo Embrace. I remember printing off a car seat report from CR before buying one this summer, but I couldn't remember what we ended up getting. The problem we ran into was availability. I went to about six large stores (including Babies R Us, which is huge!) in the Orem/Salt Lake area and could only find a handful of the seats mentioned in the report. I was surprised at the limited selection. We bought the one we did because it was the only one that we could find that was less than $200 yet still close to the top of the list. I hadn't heard anything about the higher speed crash tests. That's sobering. Good luck in your search.
I am pretty sure we ended up with the Graco Snugride. That was easy to find, though I'll be honest the safety of the seat had nothing to do with it. When I but a car I don't look at the crash stats either. Call me crazy but I like to live on the edge!! Funny how the price is completely invertedly related to the safety. Peg Perego is probably some of the trendiest stuff around, never heard of Chicco. Anyhow even if you had one of the non-passing seats I wouldn’t go out and but a new one just to be safe. I take CR with a grain of salt, not too big of a fan.
Great post. And thanks for the blog tips! I'm gonna keep working on improving it and really appreciate your feedback.
Luke, I hear what you're saying about a grain of salt; however, given that the "safest" models were also the cheapest, it made EXTRA-GOOD sense to go with the safe models.
Some new info that has surfaced about the carseat report put out by consumer reports...a little more comforting :)
USA today article
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