The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times weigh in on the recent study from the American Academy of Pediatrics on child safety and car seats:
Madonna Behen from the New York Times:
“People cheer when they turn their kid around at one year, but hopefully some day they’ll cheer at how long they were able to keep their child rear-facing,” said Debbi Baer, a labor and delivery nurse in Baltimore who has been a car safety advocate for children for more than 30 years.
The academy’s previous policy, from 2002, said it was safest for infants and toddlers to ride facing the rear, and cited 12 months and 20 pounds as the minimum requirements for turning the car seat forward. But Ms. Baer, a certified child passenger safety technician, said parents tended to take that as a hard and fast rule.
Katherine Hobson from the Wall Street Journal:
Parents of kids older than two can consider using forward-facing car seats until kids are too big. At that point parents should switch to belt-positioning booster seats until kids reach about 4’9″ in height. After that, the usual shoulder harness is okay — but all kids younger than 13 should ride in the back seat, the AAP says.
The AAP says that each year, motor-vehicle crashes in the U.S. kill about 1,500 kids younger than 16, almost half of whom aren’t wearing any form of passenger restraint.
