Rear-Facing Child Safety Seats: Are They as Safe as We Thought?
Finding the right way to ensure your child is as safe as possible while riding in the car can be daunting. With so many different voices offering their opinion on what’s best for your child, it can be difficult to know what’s best. Unfortunately, that decision just became even more complex, with the recent publication of a study that casts doubt on what had been determined to be the safest way to transport young children.
The study, published in the Journal of Traffic Injury Prevention, examined how well rear-facing child safety seats protected 6-month-old infants in the event of a rear-end crash, both when using the vehicle’s seatbelts to secure the safety seat, and while using the car’s lower “LATCH” anchor. The researchers revealed that, when the test cars were struck from behind, rear-facing seats were prone to pitching the seat and child forward, which tended to throw the infant’s head into the seat back the child faced. This resulted in severe injuries to the infant’s head, injuries which tended to be more severe where the “LATCH” tether was used rather than the car’s seatbelts.
Beginning in 2011, the American Association of Pediatrics has recommended that children be placed in rear-facing safety seats until they reach two years of age, or until they outgrow that rear-facing configuration of their seat. While 12 states require that infants be transported only in rear-facing seats until reaching 1 year of age, New Jersey is one of only two states that requires that any child under two be secured in a rear-facing safety seat.
Despite this risk of head injury that can result from rear-end collisions which this study uncovered, the researchers (experts on child transportation safety) cautioned that parents should not take this to be a rejection of the consensus that rear-facing safety seats are best for children under two. The article’s authors instead suggested that the design flaws present in both the seats and the manner in which they are secured in a vehicle need improvement. The authors cited the example of how Swedish drivers secure rear-facing seats with a tether coming from the vehicle’s floor, which keeps those seats from pitching forward when the car is rear-ended.
If you have experienced a car accident which caused injuries to your child, contact the knowledgeable and compassionate Wayne personal injury lawyers at Massood Law Group for a consultation on your claims, at 1-844-4MB-HURT.
