Child Seats - Is Your Child Safe?

With hundreds of baby seats on today's market how can you be sure that you are choosing the best one to keep your child safe in the car?

The range of child seats on the market today is mind boggling, you can get embroided ones, suede ones and even leather ones. But it really doesn't matter what they look like if they aren't doing the job for which they are intended, keeping your child safe.

Child seats come in many different sizes for different ages of children. The current law states that child seats are only compulsory for children between the ages of 0 - 3 years. Children above that age are only required to use seats if they are available. Reports show that a child should be sat in a child seat up to the age of approximately 12 years. The report shows that children who use adult belts below a certain height tend to have the belt cross not the chest where it should be but the collar bone or neck. In the event of an accident, even at low speeds it has been proven that adult belts can cause breaking of the collar bone or crushing of the wind pipe resulting in injury or even death.

A good way to measure the safety of a child in your car when driving is to look at the NCAP safety tests for your vehicle and see how they rate with respect to child safety. The flaw with this however is the fact that these ratings only apply to certain child seats and car models tested. For example the child safety rating for a VW Golf is 4/5 if you fit the seat that the tests were carried out on, however if you use an alternative child's seat these safety figures may drop dramatically.

Also the fitting of the seat can have a dramatic effect on the safety of the child using the seat. Recent reports have shown that two out of every three car seats fitted into vehicles are fitted incorrectly meaning they are useless in the event of an accident. The reason behind this is due to the fact that it is near impossible to fit some car seats into certain models of cars. This can be overcome by talking to the car manufacturers who will recommend a seat for their model of car. Another contributing factor is that a lot of the seats on the market are restrained by the existing seatbelts and can be tricky to fit correctly.

Hopefully with new legislation coming into force this will soon be a thing of the past with the addition of Isofix mounts to all new cars. The Isofix mount is a method for attaching child seats to a car in a simple no nonsense fashion. The system works with the use of rigid anchorage points fitted into the car during manufacture that a child seat simply clips onto. This eradicates the need for difficult seat belt adjustments which could render the seat useless in the event of an accident. The good news is that these mounts will be compulsory for new cars from Feb 2006. The bad news is that this means it will take about ten years before they are widely available on the second hand car market.

Help is at hand for the worried parent in the form of a company called Britax. Britax have just compiled the world's first fitting database, which takes into account the make, model and year of the car along with the approximate weight of the child. Once all the details have been entered the system searches the database to suggest suitable seats and where they should be used in the car. This service can be accessed on the internet at www.britax.co.uk

In closing nobody wants to see a child injured or killed while travelling in a car during a road accident but the fact remains that 21 children a year in the UK are. As a conscience parent who has spent the money on a child seat to keep their child safe a little extra research could make the biggest difference.