Productopia | Infant Car Seats

Installing a child car seat can make the most capable parent want to kick a tire in despair. Secure in the fact that our vehicles have LATCH (Lower Anchors and Tethers for Children) systems to supposedly make installation a breeze, many of us instead find ourselves searching for hidden parts or jerry rigging the restraint.  Or worse, we think we've installed our child's car seat properly, when, in fact, it's a disaster waiting to happen.

According to a study of LATCH hardware and passenger vehicle rear seat design, parents can finally rejoice that it's not us, it's the system itself that's the problem. Only 21 of the 98 top selling 2010-2011 model passenger vehicles evaluated have LATCH designs that meet ease-of-use criteria, found the joint research conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. Read more

From crawling to walking, babbling to talking, children go through a predictable set of developmental stages. But the "Look, I can push the little red button on my car seat buckle" phase, which can happen as early as age 1, is a one of those milestones that can take you by surprise, especially if you're a first-time parent. Read more

My family is already on our third car seat. We're big into donating and recycling, but we couldn't do either with our first infant car seat: Most charitable organizations won't accept donated car seats because of liability issues and most municipal recycling facilities can't handle the extensive labor involved to break down a car seat, so you can't just stick one in your recycle bin. 

So, we left our car seat on the curb with a "Free, Please Take" sign. Our seat had several years left before it surpassed the expiration date, hadn't been recalled, and hadn't been in any car accidents, the main reasons most charities won't take them. And because places like Goodwill or Salvation Army can't verify the latter at all, most of us with these backseat behemoths on our hands are stuck trying to find another, responsible way to make sure they don't end up clogging a landfill.

Luckily there are ways to recycle car seats, if you know where to look, or who to bother. Read more

While parents play chauffeur, their little ones might be playing Houdini in the back seat, undoing their safety belts much to their delight but to their parents' horror. According to a recent pilot study by Yale University School of Medicine, most kids start to unbuckle themselves at age three. And many children play escape artist while the vehicle is in motion, putting them at a 3.5 fold increased risk of serious injury. Read more