Having a car seat isn’t enough to protect your child in case of an accident. That car seat must also be appropriate for the child’s age and size, and must be secured according to the instructions from the manufacturer.
One mom from Memphis, Tennessee, made a point of that last condition when her husband texted her a photo of their son in his car seat, as they were about to go out, and it saved his life. Father and son were involved in a serious car crash only minutes later.
As Rebecca Tafaro Boyer writes on Facebook, earlier this month, her maternity leave was up. On her first day back to work, she was so fretful about her son that she asked her husband, who was left at home with him, to send her hourly updates.
One of them was a picture of the boy in his car seat, as they were getting ready to run some errands. Rebecca replied that the baby wasn’t properly secured in the seat: the belts was too loose and the clip was too low on his chest, contrary to the directions on the car seat. She asked her husband to make the proper adjustments before heading out.
He did. Minutes later, they crashed with an SUV and the family’s Volkswagen Jetta was totaled. The baby was so secure in his seat that he didn’t even wake from his nap. The husband wasn’t so fortunate, breaking his foot in several places and dislocating some toes.
Rebecca is now using her family’s extraordinary situation to raise the alarm on the importance of properly securing the baby in the car seat.
“All infants should be REAR FACING in the back seat until at least the age of two and snuggly secured in a 5 POINT HARNESS in a car seat base that does not move more than one inch in any direction,” she writes in the Facebook post that has since gone viral.
“And do y’all know what happens now to the beautiful three month old car seat that protected my little monkey man? It goes STRAIGHT IN THE TRASH according to the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) my expensive, barely broken in car seat is now garbage. Any car seat that has been involved in a moderate to severe motor vehicle incident where the car cannot be driven away from the scene of the crash immediately becomes defective,” she adds.
She urges parents who throw away defective car seats to take a scissor to them, damaging beyond the point where they could be resold by someone picking them up from the garbage bin.
As Rebecca Tafaro Boyer writes on Facebook, earlier this month, her maternity leave was up. On her first day back to work, she was so fretful about her son that she asked her husband, who was left at home with him, to send her hourly updates.
One of them was a picture of the boy in his car seat, as they were getting ready to run some errands. Rebecca replied that the baby wasn’t properly secured in the seat: the belts was too loose and the clip was too low on his chest, contrary to the directions on the car seat. She asked her husband to make the proper adjustments before heading out.
He did. Minutes later, they crashed with an SUV and the family’s Volkswagen Jetta was totaled. The baby was so secure in his seat that he didn’t even wake from his nap. The husband wasn’t so fortunate, breaking his foot in several places and dislocating some toes.
Rebecca is now using her family’s extraordinary situation to raise the alarm on the importance of properly securing the baby in the car seat.
“All infants should be REAR FACING in the back seat until at least the age of two and snuggly secured in a 5 POINT HARNESS in a car seat base that does not move more than one inch in any direction,” she writes in the Facebook post that has since gone viral.
“And do y’all know what happens now to the beautiful three month old car seat that protected my little monkey man? It goes STRAIGHT IN THE TRASH according to the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) my expensive, barely broken in car seat is now garbage. Any car seat that has been involved in a moderate to severe motor vehicle incident where the car cannot be driven away from the scene of the crash immediately becomes defective,” she adds.
She urges parents who throw away defective car seats to take a scissor to them, damaging beyond the point where they could be resold by someone picking them up from the garbage bin.