>> Shannon Kearns-DePatto: Hi.
My name is Shannon DePatto.
I am the Pediatric Health Educator here with the Penn State Hershey Children's Hospital,
with the Pediatric Trauma Injury Prevention Program.
Today we're going to be talking about car seat safety, and proper installation in your
vehicle.
It's important to remember that this proper installation could someday save your child's
life in the event of a crash.
First of all we're going to focus on the infant seat, which is the seat that you will be using
to bring your baby home from the hospital.
When installing a seat, there are two different ways to install properly.
You can either use the lower anchor system, which is at the [inaudible] your vehicle seat
here, or you can also use the seat belt.
You never want to use both of them together, it's either one or the other.
Let's start by showing you the lower anchors.
The lower anchors are attached to the car seat, as you can see here, and this will attach
to the anchor in your vehicle.
Once we have them attached, we need to make sure this seat doesn't move any more than
an inch side to side.
So we're going to pull the adjustor strap to make it nice and snug by pushing at the
same time.
This will allow the seat to be nice and snug, and not move any more than an inch.
If your vehicle does not have the lower anchor system, you will then use the seatbelt.
The seatbelt and the lower anchor system are never used together.
You will either use one or the other.
If you are using the seatbelt, the best way to do this is to pull the seatbelt out as
much as you need, feed the seatbelt through what we call the belt path of the infant carrier
base, and buckle in.
Once you have that seatbelt buckled in and laying nice and flat, you will then pull your
seatbelt out the whole way to lock it within the vehicle.
After you've done that, you want to let the slack go back into the vehicle, and then pull,
and push at the same time to achieve that tightness, and less of an inch of movement.
You will then check your seat at where the seatbelt's going through the car seat to make
sure it's nice and snug.
Once the car seat has been installed in your vehicle properly, and is nice and snug, you
will then place the actual carrier in the base, making sure that you hear a click to
know that it is attached to the base.
Once we have it attached to the base, we will make sure that the baby is nice and snug in
the actual car seat itself.
Now that we have the car seat installed properly in the vehicle, it's important now that we
place baby safely in the seat.
Baby will be placed in the seat with the [inaudible] pushed all the way back.
Harnesses will now come over top of baby to make sure they are either at or below the
baby's shoulders.
Once we have the baby in, we are going to clip together the harness clip, as well as
the clip in between the baby's legs, making sure that we hear clicks on each one of those
clips.
Now that we have the harnesses together, we need to make sure they're very snug.
If you can pinch the harness straps together like so, they are too loose, so it's important
to make sure that you pull the harness strap adjuster on this particular seat to make sure
harnesses are very snug on the baby, and there's no room for movement.
Once you have them nice and snug, the harness clip, one buckled, will need to sit right
at the armpit levels going across their chest bone or nipple line of the baby to provide
extra support.
You don't want it down too low on the belly where there's soft tissue and could cause
internal damage in the event of a crash.
Sitting at that armpit level is very important, with these harnesses nice and snug.
The baby then will be buckled in between their legs to keep their position safe, and not
have them slide down into the car seat.
For more information, or to schedule a car seat appointment, please contact the Pediatric
Trauma Injury Prevention Program at 717-531-SAFE, or visit us at our website at www.pennstatehershey.org/injuryprevention.
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