Car Seats Expire!

I know I touched on this briefly in my Car Seat 101 Post ages ago, but I feel like it needs to be revisited.

CAR SEATS EXPIRE!

Plastic degrades over time, especially when exposed to the elements.  Imagine that plastic play set you probably have in your back yard.  Left in the son for six years, it starts to get brittle, and it starts to break.  Car seats aren't much different.  We leave them in our cars where they end up baking in the 130 degree heat, or freezing in the -40 degree cold.  They are designed to withstand this abuse, for sure, but not forever.  The plastic deteriorates, cracks, and breaks.  The foam padding, after being compressed for ages, does the same thing.  I'll be honest and say that I have a hard time with the idea that the nylon harness also expires, but if you're buying a new seat anyways, why would you reuse the harness?

 

Most seats expire six years after the date they were made, NOT six years after you bought them.  While normally you will get a new car seat close to when it was made, it doesn't always happen.  If you bought it on sale, for instance, it may have been marked down due to an early manufacture date. You have to check the seat for a date of expiration or a date of manufacture.  Generally speaking, both are on the seat somewhere, usually on the bottom, or one of the side stickers. Sometimes you find a month, a day, and a year, and sometimes you'll only find month year. Graco is the only company where the seats expire at the end of the sixth year.  All other seats expire in the month they were manufactures (so my kid's Evenflo Tribute - pictures here - will expire in July 2014).

Sure, it's highly unlikely that your seat is going to magically disintegrate on the first day of the sixth year.  Here's a video showing what happens when a ten year old car seat is used during a crash.  The shell has degraded so much that the harness, while securely holding the child, rips through the plastic shell.  It doesn't state the injuries sustained by the "child" in this case, but I think it's pretty obvious that this is not a good outcome:

Yeah, this was ten years after, not one year after.  But without knowing exactly when the car seat went from a safe condition to this condition, it's just a better choice all around to believe the manufacturer.  I, too, wish they would publish this kind of information, or do more tests, or at least give us a CLEAR reason why the seats expire except "they might be broken."  but alas, this is all we have to work with right now.


Not all seats expire after six years, so here's a useful list.

Baby Trend: 6 years

Britax classic generation: 6 years
Britac new generation: 7 yearsYears for most
Britax Frontier specifically: 9 years

Chicco: 6 years

Clek: 7 years
Clek Foonf specifically: 9 years

Compass: 7 years

Cosco: 6 years

Combi: 7 years

Evenflo: 6 years

Graco: 6 years (December of the 6th year) for most
Graco Nautilus specifically: 10 years

Harmony: 6 years

Maxi Cosi: 6-8 years

Orbit: 7 years

Peg-Perego: 5 years
Seats manufactured starting 2011: 7 years

Recaro: 6 years

Safety First: 6 years for most
Safety First Complete Air specifically: 8 years
Safety First Alpha Omega Elite specifically: 8 years

Sunshine Kids: 6 years for most
Sunshine Kids Monteray: 8 years
Diono seats: 10 years

The First Years: 7 years

If your brand of seat isn't on this list, and you can't find an expiration date or a date of manufacture, please don't hesitate to post a comment asking, and I will find the information for you. =)

Keep your kids safe!

Cars and Projectiles

Upon deciding that Thoughts from Momland needed a theme and some consistency, I decided to keep all my "advocacy and informed consent" babblings to another blog, which I've already created: Eclectic Advocacy.  The goal of Eclectic Advocacy is merely to inform and provide information on various parenting subjects, rather than advocating for a particular decision in most cases.  Topics already discussed there are Circumcision and Birth choices.  I'm advocating for informed consent on the part of parents.  Whichever action you choose, make sure it is an informed decision, and that's really all I care about.  If you want an epidural or if you think they're evil, that's cool.  Just make sure you know what an epidural is, the potential risks and side effects, so that you can weight those against the benefits and decide for yourself what chances you are willing to take.


All that said, I'm still a car seat Nazi, so I think car seat stuff will end up being posted on both blogs.  This isn't a carseat post, but it IS about car safety.  Car seats are all about keeping our kids safe from harm and death, and so is this blog post on unsecured projectiles.  So here goes.


I read this article today, and my desire to make sure there is nothing potentially harmful in my car was renewed. 
http://www.used-car.com.au/for_sale/car-safety.html  I spend hours ensuring my children are properly restrained in car seats that are properly installed, and it makes little sense to not finish the job.  After all, they are safe in their seats this way, until something hits them in the face.


The gist of the article (which is Australian, by the way, so the numbers pertain only to Australia) is that unsecured items in the car can become lethal, and everything cargo related should be in the trunk or under a well-secured net.  I know it's considered a freak accident to be killed by a projectile rather than the crash forces, but it's a not a freak occurrence to be injured by one. I looked up Mythbusters to see if they've ever tried to bust a projectile myth (that have, for the record, with a box of tissues), and according to them 13,000 people were injured by unsecured projectiles in 2001.  They don't list a source, so I don't know for sure how accurate that is.  Either way, I can't help but think, "why risk it?"


The article I linked already details a few incidents of people being killed by their stuff: a tyre, holiday (vacation) luggage, and in a bizarre incident, 936 bricks (Yeah "WTF?" is what I thought, too).  But they also talk about pets.


We go through enormous effort to make sure our 50 pounds children are secured in the car.  We don't want them to become a projectile for their safety as well as our own.  But the family pet is often neglected in this aspect.  People somehow fail to realize that, just like your child needs to be restrained, so does your dog.  a 40 pound dog IS a deadly projectile, both for the dog and for a person that may be in it's path.

They make car restraints for pets, and they are cheaper than car seats.  If you wouldn't put your kid in the car without a car seat or a safety belt, you shouldn't do it to your pets either!

And finally, the very end of that article details the story of a Ford Laser, two small kids, and 26 kilos (57 pounds) of computer parts.

This is a Ford laser:

This is 57 pounds (give or take)

In the story, the computer parts actually forced the folding seat to unlatch, sending the items into the passenger area of the car (I'm not sure how this works with the kids in the seat.. maybe it makes more sense to someone else).  So even if your cargo is secured in the trunk, or behind the second or third row of seats, it may be best to invest in a net just the same.

What happened to these children?

One afternoon in April 1993, South Australian couple Paul and Michelle Wood buckled their three-year-old daughter, Sheena, into her booster seat and  five-year-old son, Tristan, into the car seat alongside in the rear of their Ford Laser hatchback. Second-hand computer equipment weighing 26 kilos was in the luggage compartment.
Just east of Millicent on the Princes Highway, they ran into the back of a tip-truck. Paul sustained a broken nose, Michelle a fractured hip. But the children, correctly seated and appropriately restrained, fared much worse. The computer equipment shot through the latched split back seat, knocking Sheena’s booster seat from under her, causing whiplash that fractured her spine and made her a mild quadriplegic.
Tristan cannoned forward against his seatbelt, causing abdominal injuries so severe that he died seven weeks later.

This is incredibly tragic, and probably a freak accident, but still on the realm of possibility.  Honestly, I'm not convinced the computer parts in the hatchback really had anything to do with the kids' injuries (maybe a little, but not the root cause of them).  I hate to take a scenario like this and apply what ifs, especially when it involves tragedy and grieving parents who are probably still beating themselves up with the what-ifs all on their own.

However, I would argue that if the children were PROPERLY restrained, they may have survived/had less severe injuries.  I know they were legally restrained, and restrained as per Australian recommendations, but the 3-year-old was in a low back booster, and the five year old was in nothing at all, when they both should have been harnessed (while I would harness my five year old if I could, I know it's okay to put some of them in booster seats.  This child was in neither).

Had either or both of them been in harnessed car seats, the little girl's restraint would not have been pushed out from under her, and the plastic shell of the seat would have absorbed a lot of the force from the cargo.

The little boy would have either been in a safety belt that fit across his hips or thighs, rather than his stomach, and the seatbelt would have hit his bones rather than his delicate belly.  He may have broken his hips or pelvis, but that's a whole lot better than what actually happened.  And had he been in a harness, the force of the crash / the weight hitting the back of his seat would have been distributed better.

Would either of these children have walked away unharmed? It's unlikely.  Would they have been LESS harmed? Would the little boy have lived? *I* think so, but of course I can't prove it.  It just goes to show how important it is to make sure our children are restrained in a way that fits their height, weight, and development.

What it really boils down to is, once again, probability.  I like to weigh the probability of something happening against the convenience of avoiding it.  Is it THAT inconvenient to stick stuff under a nylon net, JUST IN CASE you get in an accident where it matters? Guess that's up to you.

I Don't Like It Either!

I don't like screaming.  I don't like doing it myself, unless I'm on a roller coaster, and I certainly don't like it when my kids scream.  In fact, I probably like it a lot less than most parents.  To me, even my own children screaming is like nails on a chalkboard, and I will jump through hoops of fire just to silence the ear splitting shrieks emanating from their sweet, cherubic little faces.  So you can imagine that if my children are screaming someplace public, not only am I completely mortified and wishing I could disappear, I'm also thinking that if I shove this Q-tip far enough into my ear, I will never have to hear this sound again.  As if this isn't punishment enough, I'm also getting glares and rude looks from complete strangers who think I need to be schooled in parenting 101 - and some of them even try to school me themselves.


Of course, I am not everyone.  There are some people who are so numb to the horrific sounds of their own children (probably from hearing it all day every day for the last couple of years) that they fail to realize other people are NOT used to hearing their toddler freak out because he dropped a potato chip and still wants to eat it.  I firmly believe that these parents are merely sleep-deprived to the point of deafness or insanity, or so desperate for some peace and adult interaction that they are pretending their child is a product of June Cleaver rather than the subject of an Edvard Munch painting.      


There are certain things you can't go back and change even if you regret them.  If you are overwhelmed by the number of children you birthed, or regretting that you didn't space them all 18 years apart, it's a bit late to fix that, and you just have to make do.  And since you DO have to feed your children (at least according to DCF and law enforcement), this means that sometimes you will have to "make do" in public places, like the grocery store.  Here I've compiled a list of problems and suggestions for people who are adamant about never wanting to hear screaming children, ever.


Problem: Kids cry in the grocery store
Solution: Order your groceries on line, pay the store to deliver them, or hire the local neighbor kid to do it for you, and let HIM listen to the screaming.


Problem: Kids cry in restaurants
Solution: Take Out


Problem: kids cry in movie theaters
Solution: Wait for the DVD


I know, I know.  Other people have bratty children, and that doesn't mean you should skip out on things you would otherwise enjoy, or go out of your way to accommodate these children.  Well, I can assure you, the child doesn't care one bit if you're at the restaurant or movie theatre, so you don't have to worry about trying to accommodate them.

And there are lots of things in this world that you shouldn't HAVE to do.  You shouldn't have to die eventually, you shouldn't have to lock your doors at night, you shouldn't have to teach your children not to talk to strangers, and you shouldn't have to research every food on the market before you decide if it's edible.  But we adapt to these things easily enough, so why are screaming children any different?


Obviously, I have children.  Like I said before, I don't like hearing them scream.  If my children are crying at a restaurant, or crying in a movie theatre, or crying period, you can bet your rear end I'm not enjoying the experience any more than you are.  And I agree there are some places children shouldn't generally go.   

• If you're staring at a $50 plate with four egg noddles, two tablespoons of sauce, and three peas, you shouldn't have to listen to a crying child.
• If you sitting in a hotel room that you're paying $6000 a night for, you shouldn't have to hear a crying child.
• If you're in a store that expressly says "no children" for one reason or another, you shouldn't have to hear a crying child.
• If you're flying first class or business class, you shouldn't have to hear a crying child.
• That's about it

Airplanes, grocery stores, and even regular, middle class restaurants mean you're going to encounter regular, middle-class people, and they will sometimes have children.  Suck it up.  You don't want to listen to a screaming baby, and I don't want to listen to racial slurs, profanity, and vulgarity, especially when my children are around.  I'm gonna call it a fair trade, okay?

I'm not arguing that parents should force other people to listen to their child scream.  I think parents should be doing what they can to make sure their children are well-behaved in a given situation, but still, as a parent, there's only so much you can do.  I'm not going to make excuses for my children when they misbehave, but I know they WILL misbehave, and I will deal with it in the way that works best for them, not for strangers.

I've seen it over and over, from parents and non parents alike: "and they were just standing there not doing ANYTHING to quiet their child that was screaming for a cookie."  What exactly would you like them to do? You can't REALLY force a child to stop crying.  You can try to soothe them, you can threaten punishment, you can actually punish them, you can try to bribe them, but short of smothering them with a pillow you CANNOT actually make them stop.  Oddly enough, this is true even in the grocery store.

So, in short:


Parents of screaming children: Do what you can to make sure your children aren't disrupting the people around them
Parents of other children: Try to have some sympathy, because chances are you have been or will be there at some point
Non-Parents: Stop being a cry baby yourself, and realize that most parents are doing what they can, and aren't trying to make your life miserable.


Everyone: Remember that the only Cry Baby that anyone likes is this one: