Good driving habits are vital to keeping families safe on the road, but once drivers become parents, they’re faced with additional safety issues not taught in driver’s ed.
Car Seat Safety
Whether your going for a long trip or for a ride to town, the children have to be secure and seated on age appropriate seats or booster seats. Unrestrained or improperly restrained children are at risk of being seriously injured or killed in a car crash. If your not sure how to, here is how:
- Infants i.e. below the age of 1yr are supposed to be placed in the car facing the rear seat.
- Make sure the seat he/she is placed doesn’t have an air bag.
- Once the child outgrows the rear facing seats, they are to be placed in a forward facing child safety seat.
- Once the child outgrows the forward facing seat they are to be placed on a booster seat, at the back seat until they are 8yrs.
- Once they have outgrown the booster seat children under the age of 13 should ride at the back seat with a safety belt on, remember children are safest at the back seat.
Installing the seat properly is crucial, but so is continuing to check that the seat is buckled securely. Children can unbuckle a seatbelt accidentally or out of curiosity, but for a car seat to protect your child, it must be firmly secured to the car.
N/B: It is not safe to place a child younger than 12 years in a seat equipped with an airbag. Airbags can deploy even in minor accidents and seriously injure or kill young children.
Look out for Flying Objects
Beware of unsecured items, diaper bags, books, sporting, water bottles, these items can be flying missiles in the case of an accident. the president of Safety Research & Strategies, Inc. Sean Kane states that:
“Any unrestrained object in the car can be a potential problem, the two main factors are how fast the car decelerates or even how fast you’re braking and what the mass or shape of the object is….Objects in the vehicle do become projectiles, they do not decelerate with the vehicle”
Keep Keys and Kids with you
Never leave your kids and the keys in the car NEVER. Kids with access to keys or remote access buttons can put cars into gear or even neutral, causing the vehicle to roll away. Children with car keys can also enter a trunk either from the outside or, in some cars, through rear seats, finding themselves trapped inside—a dangerous predicament. Reminds me of a day i was on my way home on a Sunday afternoon from church, it was blazing hot, as i was turning into NPC a crowd of people were staring into this vehicle and the unfortunate thing is, there was a baby in there crying, the car is dark in color, of-course absorbing a lot of heat, the windows rolled up and the poor kid was suffocating in there, shame shame shame on you whoever you are shame, your lucky i dint get your number plate, wish someone broke your window to save the poor infant. SHAME!
Moral of the story, lets keep our kids safe people.
