Britax takes its commitment to child safety seriously. The company has five testing facilities worldwide, and they work closely with vehicle manufacturers to encourage design improvements that enhance the performance of child car seats. They also maintain an ongoing dialogue with consumers, child passenger safety technicians and other child safety advocates to ensure proper installation and use of child seats and develop new ideas to improve their safety and ease of use.

Britax USA is also a leader in special needs product development. They not only manufacture seats for the general public, but also for the medical community to service children with special needs. Since 2000, Britax has been providing a solution for safe travel for children with special needs. Our special needs seats are distributed through Snug Seat, Inc., who has been distributing innovative products for children with special needs since 1987.

Click here to visit the Britax USA page

Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for children between the ages of 2 and 14, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Child safety seats reduce fatal injury by 71 percent for infants and 54 percent for toddlers.

The monthlong focus of Our Kids: Our Business is growing children into successful adults. The proper use of child safety seats can help get them to adulthood, period. Some car seat facts:

•There’s not yet a car seat for dummies, but experts are working on it.

“Car seat manuals were written by attorneys to protect the companies and not for parents to understand,” explained Teresa Fuller, a Spokane Police Department officer whose passion is child safety. “But now car seat manufacturers and car manufacturers are working together to standardize the language and the functions. One of the things that came out of that was the LATCH (Lower Anchors and Tethers for CHildren) system (straps from the child safety seat connect to metal anchors in the vehicle). In all cars manufactured after 2003, you have to have two latch positions in the car.”

•Most adults get it wrong.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: “Restraint use among young children often depends upon the driver’s seat belt use. Almost 40 percent of children riding with unbelted drivers were themselves unrestrained.”

And even those adults who do the right thing often do it the wrong way. Again, from the CDC: “One study found that 72 percent of nearly 3,500 observed car and booster seats were misused in a way that could be expected to increase a child’s risk of injury during a crash.”

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This is a testing system that is urgently needed in today’s marketplace. Federal regulators currently rate new cars for safety, but they have no such system to rate the safety of child car seats. Recently the Chicago Tribune revealed that nearly half of all infant restraints failed catastrophically or exceeded injury limits when federal contractors strapped them into the back seats of model-2008 vehicles and crashed those cars and trucks into walls at 35 m.p.h.

Making the situation more difficult for parents,  a child restraint that performs well in one vehicle may perform poorly in another because it doesn’t fit snugly in that back seat.

European regulators require automakers to include child seats in their crash tests of new cars. The safety rating for those European vehicles is based in part on how they protect children. LaHood held up the European system as a model.

LaHood said he would push for a voluntary system. The secretary said he also ordered NHTSA to institute stringent safety standards for child seats in side-impact crashes, which account for one third of infant highway deaths.

Like all forms of technology, the products that provide safe, comfortable transportation for our children are constantly evolving. Infant car seats become lighter, stronger and safer with each passing year, as do strollers, child carriers, and travel systems.  This is true of the vehicles that we drive as well, with the addition of side-impact airbags and other safety features not available in our parents and grandparents time.

In addition to providing news and information, we also want this blog to become an open and ongoing discussion as well. If there’s something you’d like to add to a post you read here, please leave a comment (no commercial advertisements or profanity, please!).

Raising our children is indeed a journey, not a destination, and we can all learn things from one another as we travel and world and keep our kids safe and secure at the same time.