Parenting is a never-ending learning process. As you raise your child, you will make a lot of mistakes. However, some of these errors may be very dangerous especially if we're talking about newborns. For example, a new study reveals that more than 90% of parents make two or more serious mistakes in placing their infants in a car seat.
This Oregon-based study, with Dr. Benjamin Hoffman of Tom Sargent Children's Safety Center-Doernbecher Children's Hospital as the lead author, observed 267 pairs of caregivers and newborns as they leave the hospital and place the babies into the car seats. Caregivers are either parents of the newborn or individuals chosen by parents to pick up the babies.
To further narrow down the participants, they also excluded infants who are no more than 37 weeks old and those who stayed in the intensive care unit for over 4 hours.
The study, which was conducted between November 2013 and May 2014, had chosen these participants randomly. Safety technicians were also on standby to observe every step of the process starting from the installation of the car seat.
From these observations, they gathered that 93% of the caregivers committed no less than 2 very serious errors. A family made at least 4 misuses on the average.
The biggest mistake caregivers made was not pulling the harness tightly, which can cause the baby to slip from the car seat. More than 40% of the mistakes, meanwhile, were attributed to loose installation of the car seat.
Other common but serious mistakes included placing the retainer clip too low, positioning the harness higher, and positioning the car seat at a wrong angle.
More than 15% of the new parents installed refurbished, used, and un-approved car seat, while over 10% did not know how modify the length and height of the harness.
Meanwhile, parents who talked to a certified technician for car seats were more than 10 times likely to get the car installation and infant positioning correctly than those who didn't.
