We tuck our tiny little ones into their car seats before driving off on errands and trips to keep them safe. Some of us even cart the seat indoors if it’s portable to keep from disturbing our sleeping babes, but new research suggests this habit could lead to fatal head injuries or falls.
The journal, Pediatrics, included research conducted by Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, which studied statistics reported by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. According to research, between 2003 and 2007, 43,562 babies were treated in emergency rooms all across the country for car seat related injuries that occurred outside the car.
Head and neck injuries were the most common injuries reported, generally resulting in dangerous falls while still buckled into the car seat, and sometimes out of the car seat when buckles were unfastened.
The advice the experts issued from the American Academy of Pediatrics included things like not putting the car seat on top of a running washing machine or kitchen table and avoiding resting the car seat into the front seat of grocery shopping carts.
That’s all great and good, but I find my skeptical inner-mother asking how many of these injuries happened because no one was watching their baby while he was tucked into his car seat? Babies need supervision, and car seats are not convenient babysitters you can just walk away from to do other things.
Maybe they could alter the warning to say: Don’t leave our child unattended while using the car seat. I mean really… it just seems like common sense to me.