Here’s an interesting bit of info I borrowed from About.com.

It is estimated that about 80% of car seats are misused, either because a child is in the wrong seat, the seat is installed wrong, or the child is not placed in the seat correctly.

I used to think that I was part of the 20 percent of parents who were safely transporting their children in the car. Cutie was in a front-facing chair with a 5-point harness that was snug. Like a good mom, I replaced the old clip on the harness so she couldn’t push it down the straps and wiggle her shoulders out of the harness. Bud was in a booster seat with a high back. Little did I know that my safety efforts would have been useless had we been involved in an accident. A very good friend has been certified as a child passenger safety technician and she has helped me see the error of my ways and inspired me to repent. I feel compelled to confess my sins before you so I can drive forth with a clear conscience.

Cutie’s car seat was expired. We bought it in 1999 for Ant, and it worked well for him and Bud and now Cutie. Experts say that car seats expire six years from the date of manufacture. Click the link to read up on the reason why.

Bud’s booster seat positioned the seat belt across his neck if he wasn’t using good posture. How many 5-year-olds have good posture?

The booster didn’t have any support on the sides to keep Bud in an upright position if he happened to fall asleep. I would often find him asleep with his torso floppily hanging over the arm of his chair.

I didn’t make the seat immovable. I have an older vehicle that doesn’t have all the doo-dads for the LATCH system. I did understand that after threading the belt through the car seat to the buckle there should be no slack. I even put my weight in the chair and pulled the belt as tight as I could to make sure there was no slack between the seat and the buckle and the chair. My efforts were in vain, though, because I didn’t know how to use the seat belt retractor to keep the seat belt tight; that is, until my friend showed me how to do it last night. This morning, I found a short instructional video that demonstrates how to secure a car seat using both the LATCH and the old-fashioned methods. It’s worth watching, but just in case you don’t watch it, here are some vital instructions:

After threading the seat belt through a car seat, pull the car’s seat belt out until it stops and then secure it in the buckle. Slowly let the seat belt retract, you may hear a little click, click, click as the lockbar slides over each notch in the retractor. After the belt retracts as far as it will go, make sure the car seat is right up against the car chair’s back and kneel into the car seat as you pull more of the seatbelt into the retractor. When you’re finished, the seat should not be able to move more than an inch.

I thank God that in the 8+ years I have misused car seats, we have not been in any car accidents. I am currently waiting for the UPS driver to drop off the new car seat and booster I ordered online. In the meantime, I have borrowed safer seats from my friend to whom I am grateful for caring so much for my children.