There is a good chance that before you had a family you were driving for many years. Most drivers have been on the road for a while, early when they have children coming into the car that they consider their car safety. If you love your ride, you need to make sure that your children will love it too – and they will when they feel safe in the car with you.
If you are pregnant or have a child, then you need to make sure that your car is a safe environment for them. You would regularly check on your tires and shock absorbers if you were managing your vehicle alone, but you need to think about more than the components of a car when it comes to children. It doesn’t take more than a minute to give your carbs once over to see if anything is missing and driving around with a child and ensuring their safety is a massive responsibility. It’s one of the things you need to think about before you even decide to have a family – are you able to keep them safe in a car? Below, we have put together a list of ways that you can ensure that your child is safe while you drive them from place to place.
Check your child’s locks.
Before you go on a drive with your children, you must childproof the car doors. The last thing that you need is for somebody to lean over and open the car door while you are on the highway. Toddlers in the backseat are curious, so any levers or buttons need to be put out of sight. Your car should have a child lock system inbuilt, so you want to ensure this is working. You can also ensure that your child is sitting in the middle of the back seat and properly strapped in the correct car seat – but we’ll get to that later.
Check out your windows.
Now that you’ve got the doors down you know that there are appropriate child locks you need to ensure that the power window switches are operational. Luckily, it’s often the driver-side windows that have controls for all the car windows. This means that you can lock the windows on your side and ensure that your child isn’t opening and closing them or throwing things out of them while the car is moving. Again, a good way around this is to seek your child in the middle seat with the seatbelts fastened. If you have a regular, using a Houdini strap can stop them from getting their arms out from underneath the straps.
Follow the law.
Do you know what the laws say about child safety in a car? The most important rule when riding in a car with children is to ensure that you are following the law. This pertains to the correct child car seats that match their size, weight, and height, and it also means not putting your 8-year-old child in the front seat of a car. There is a good reason that these laws have come into place. When you were a child and you sat in the front seat or even in the bed of a truck, this was happening because nobody knew any better. Research has been undertaken for many years to see the impact of children in cars at high speeds. Some car seats also do not fit the right safety laws, because they haven’t been tested for crashes at over 40 mph. This is where you must do your due diligence and make sure that you are following the law and that your child is safe.
Research car seats.
We’re talking about child safety which means that you need to be speaking to actual experts when it comes to children’s car seats. For example, it is safer to extend the rear-facing longer than the required nine months. At the moment, the law in your country may tell you that it’s fine to turn your child forward-facing by one-year-old. Swapping them means you are putting them at risk of an injury that is five times more likely to be fatal than if you just keep them rear-facing. If anybody asks you what this post is to do with their legs, you can check out this link to tell you everything you need to know about rear-facing children in car seats. Don’t be afraid to stand up to anybody who tries to tell you that you are being overcautious – a broken leg in a child who is rear facing is better than a broken neck in a child who is forward-facing.