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New safety standards for child seats recently went into effect with the goal of improving side impact safety for children. Read on to learn more.
NHTSA Updates Child Car Seat Standards
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, is the governmental body tasked with keeping people safe on America’s roadways. Their mission is to save lives, prevent injuries, and reduce economic costs due to road traffic crashes, through education, research, safety standards, and enforcement. One of the key areas they research, monitor, and enforce are regulations related to child seats. The agency refers to them as child restraint systems, but we’ll call them child seats for simplicity.
Over the years, child seat safety has improved thanks, in part, to testing and regulations established by the NHTSA. By creating rigorous regulations, you, as a consumer and parent, can be confident that the child seat you purchase meets a certain standard to protect your children. Recently, new regulations went into effect aimed at improving child seat safety even further.
We’ll explore what the new standards are and what they mean for you as a parent. We’ll also cover some of the NHTSA’s recommendations for choosing a child seat. If you’re looking for affordable used SUVs with great safety ratings, read our review here.
Changes to Child Seat Standards for 2024
One of the main areas the new child seat safety standards are addressing is side impact testing. According to Consumer Reports, side impact testing has not been uniformly evaluated by the NHTSA. Today’s child seats often feature side-impact protection through structures on the sides of the seat. These structures help absorb energy in a side impact and feature additional padding for the child’s head.
The NHTSA will start evaluating the effectiveness of the different designs and pads. New rules adopted from the testing will force manufacturers to meet the performance minimums. Prior to now, side-impact testing was left to the manufacturer which means you, as a consumer, don’t know how rigorous one company’s testing is relative to another.
While a child seat might claim to provide side-impact protection, there is no standard to how effective it truly is. The new standard means you’ll know for sure that a child seat you purchase at least meets the government’s standards.
More Rigorous and Realistic Testing for Car Seats
The new safety standards also include updates to modernize the testing procedures. This means the NHTSA will develop new test bench standards to more accurately recreate modern car seats. This provides more realistic test results as the test conditions match the seats in today’s cars.
Over the last few decades, other regulations and consumer preferences have changed how car manufacturers build the seats in their cars. Everything from the angle of the seat bottom and seat back to the stiffness of the padding can change how a child seat performs in a crash, so these updates attempt to address those changes.
Other changes to the standards include using test dummies with a size and weight more in line with children and babies. It might seem obvious, but by using test dummies that are more representative of the size child likely to be placed in a child seat, the more realistic the test results will be. A related change is to also require using both the lap and shoulder belts for testing seats for larger kids, rather than just a lap belt. Again, by replicating the seat belts found in modern vehicles, the tests will provide better results.
What Parents Should Know About New Child Car Seats
From a consumer perspective, the biggest change you’re likely to notice is the new labeling requirements. Moving forward, the child seats will be required to carry a label that clearly indicates the minimum weight for each configuration of the child seat. So, as your child grows, you’ll easily be able to determine when they are ready for the next configuration, like when it’s time to switch from rear-facing to forward-facing.
That’s a summary of the new standards, but you’re probably wondering how you go about picking the best child seat for your little one. The NHTSA has lots of helpful resources on its website, but let’s cover some of the basics.
What are The Different Types of Car Seats?
First up are the basic types of car seats. Infant car seats are typically portable, allowing you to leave your baby strapped in while the seat locks into a base secured in the car. Infant seats are rear-facing only, which is the safest position for infants and babies.
Just because your little one has outgrown their infant seat, doesn’t mean they are ready to face forward. It means they’re ready for a convertible or all-in-one seat. Convertible seats and all-in-one seats have multiple configurations allowing you to start with a rear-facing seat, transition to a forward-facing seat with a harness, and eventually to a booster seat that positions the child to effectively use the car’s seat belt.
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Finding the Right Child Safety Seat
You’ll find there is a large variety of seats for sale and the NHTSA has a guide to help you determine which kind of child seat is right for your child based on their age, size, and weight.
If you want to find evaluations of different brands and models, Consumer Reports publishes and updates their test results and recommendations regularly.
The most important things to remember are to use the child seat every time, follow the instructions for your specific child seat, and always keep children in the back seat where it’s safest.
When to Replace a Car Seat
According to the NHTSA “car seats should be replaced following a moderate or severe crash to ensure a continued high level of crash protection for child passengers.” The full NHTSA recommendation for using a car seat after a crash can be found here.
The NHTSA also posts product recalls so you should check to make sure your child seat has not been recalled. To check, you’ll need to find the label on the seat that lists the date of manufacture and the model number. You should also check this label to see when the car seat expires. Because the child seat is subject to stress and degradation through normal use, manufactures list an expiration date, after which the performance of the child seat is prone to decline.
You might have one of the top 10 best family cars on the market today, but if you’re not safely securing your child in a child seat when on the road, it really doesn’t matter. The child seat is designed to more securely hold your child in place in the event of a collision and provide more safety than a seat belt alone. The NHTSA’s new safety standards will help make sure that the next car seat you purchase meets a certain testing standard so you can feel peace of mind when you buckle in your precious little one.
