Officials Note Perils of Installing Child Car Safety Seats Improperly

When Cecilia Tsui and her husband bought a new Toyota Sienna minivan recently, they found that their 4-month-old baby’s car seat didn’t strap in properly. So Tsui, having heard that many seats are used incorrectly, made an appointment for a child seat checkup at an Eastside health center.

When she arrived, Tsui learned that she had not one, but two problems with her car seat, and her “checkup” dragged into a two-hour project requiring the collaboration of several volunteers.

The episode illustrates the multitude of things that can go wrong with car seats, a point underlined by National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Jim Hall at a news conference Friday in Los Angeles.

Hall, who is often seen by the public at televised scenes of air crash disasters, has accused car makers of making child passengers’ safety an afterthought. Now, he’s making a major push to educate parents and elevate the children’s safety issue in the public eye.

“We all react with horror when a random act of street violence takes the life of an innocent child, and we demand action when we see children being killed in one of our schools,” Hall said. “Yet we don’t react with equal shock to the No. 1 killer of our children: highway crashes.

“The only way it can be addressed is by individuals . . . themselves. It’s an education issue. Parents think routinely of the importance of taking the child to the pediatrician. But we haven’t really put a focus on the most dangerous place we take our children every day, which is the highway.”

Child safety seats can reduce the risk of death in an accident by 70%, according to the NTSB--but only when installed and used properly. By all accounts, that is an astonishingly rare event.

The NTSB says about 80% of car seats are used incorrectly. (By contrast, 96% of parents and caregivers think they’re using them correctly.) But Stephanie Tombrello, executive director of SafetyBeltSafe U.S.A., which conducted Friday’s checkup, said the 80% figure is far too low.

“It’s way over 95%,” she said. At its annual child car seat event in Griffith Park, Tombrello said, her group checked 131 seats for parents. Only three had them right--and two of those three had attended the previous year’s event.

Chris Murphy, assistant director of operations at the California Office of Traffic Safety, said one of the most common errors is installing the seat too loosely. But, according to many parents, avoiding that is often more easily said than done.

“The seat needs to be snug, so that when you grab it, there is not loose play,” Murphy said. “Sometimes the retainer clip is not positioned in the right place; it’s either too high or too low.”

Tsui’s first problem was that her minivan was incompatible with the seat, so workers removed the seat’s base and instead used foam “pool noodles” to prop it up at the right angle. More problematic, when Tsui’s infant daughter spit up recently, Tsui removed the car seat’s harness while cleaning up--a major no-no because the harness is extremely difficult to put back in place.

The child seat “is not washable,” Tsui said. “But that’s not realistic, because babies throw up, and you want to wash it. There’s a conflict there.”

Car seat instructions can also be difficult to decipher, and installation is tricky, because every back seat is different. What’s more, as infants become toddlers, they require larger seats, and after they’ve outgrown car seats entirely, a booster seat is needed to keep the seat belt on the child’s shoulder.

In Tsui’s case, she couldn’t reuse an older daughter’s infant seat because the new baby is much bigger.

To ensure that parents are using the seats appropriately, the NTSB has pressed for car makers, car seat manufacturers and government agencies to establish child safety fitting stations.

In particular, Hall on Friday called for more fitting stations in Latino communities. Highway death rates for African American and Latino children are disproportionately high.

Unfortunately, having the proper car seat is expensive, said Raul Yzaguirre, president of the National Council of La Raza, who also spoke at Friday’s event. “Sometimes, [Latino families] buy one, and the kids grow out of it and they can’t afford to buy a new one.”

Hall said that’s a problem we should all be concerned about. “Safety should not be an economic issue,” he said.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Safety Check: Child Car Seats Child passengers must be buckled into safety seats until they are at least 4 years old and weigh 40 pounds. Most parents willingly comply, but many are using the seats incorrectly. More than 90% of the seats inspected at safety seat checkups are improperly used.

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COMMON ERRORS

* Safety belt not holding seat tightly

* Child under age 1 seated facing forward

* Harness straps not snug

* Harness straps not routed correctly

* Locking clip not used correctly

* Car seat recalled but not repaired

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For more information, see https://www.carseat.org or call SafetyBeltSafe U.S.A. at (800) 745-SAFE, or (800) 747-SANO for information in Spanish)

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Graphics reporting by JANICE JONES DODDS/Los Angeles Times

Sources: Sheryll Bolton, Orange County Health Care Agency; American Academy of Pediatrics

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