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Strollerderby
Is your booster seat safe?
Graduating from a car seat to a booster seat is a big deal for parents and kids. Kids love how grown up they feel sitting in a less restrictive seat that doesn’t involve a five-point harness and muttered expletives from the adult attempting to strap them in. Parents, of course, love no longer having a reason to mutter expletives every time they have to go somewhere in the car.
But booster seats aren’t just convenient. They save lives and prevent injuries. According to a study by The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, kids ages 4 through 8 riding in booster seats are 45 percent less likely to be injured in a crash than kids who are simply strapped in with seat belts alone. In fact, the widespread use of booster seats has been credited with reducing the number of traffic injuries among kids ages 4 through 6 by 18%.
But not all booster seats are created equal. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) recently tested 72 models of booster seats to see how well lap and shoulder belts fit children ages 4 to 8 when sitting in them. A correct fit is important when considering how well a booster seat will restrain a child in the event of a crash. Continue reading »
Nine year old Logan Hearn saved his two-year-old brother Brendan’s life performing CPR after the smaller boy fell into the family’s swimming pool.
Brendan fell into the pool and was quickly found by his mom, Tabitha, who called 911 and then began performing CPR. Logan saw that she was doing it wrong and stepped in, saving his brother with the skill he’d learned in lifeguarding lessons over the summer.
It’s the week for lifesaving kids! Yesterday we ran a story about a three-year-old who saved her dad by walking to a nearby fire station for help.
What do these kids have in common? They knew how to help in an emergency, and they had the self-confidence to do it.
Three-year-old Alessaundra Tafoya has made her parents very proud. In fact, the preschooler is winning praise from her community and the news media, too, for being such a brave little girl this past weekend.
The tiny tyke was home alone with her dad when he collapsed. Instead of panicking, she walked two blocks to the local fire station, and brought firefighters home to help him. Doctors said he would have died without immediate medical care.
Wow. And I’m impressed when my three-year-old can carry her plate from the dining table to the kitchen without breaking it. This girl deserves all the gold stars.
What’s most amazing to me about this story, though, isn’t that a three-year-old had the presence of mind to help her dad, or the ability to walk two blocks to a fire station. It’s that the adults around her prepared her to do it, and let her.
I’m not much of a worrier, really I’m not. Like my fellow Strollerderby blogger KJ, I think we’ve gone a bit overboard when it comes to protective gear for kids. Kids are kids, after all. They’re bound to get hurt.
But I also don’t see any reason to court disaster. So just to be safe, I apply sunscreen to my kids before going outside and I make sure they wear helmets when we go bike riding.
According to The Dallas Morning News, which polled experts, most parents — myself included — have certain dangerous misconceptions about summertime safety: Continue reading »
According to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recent World Report on Child Injury Prevention, more than 25% of all accidental injury deaths among children are due to drowning. While the majority of these occur in low-income and middle-income countries, drowning remains the second leading cause of injury death of children in the United States. Those numbers are sobering and particularly heartbreaking because these deaths are entirely preventable. Continue reading »
Graco is recalling about 217,000 cribs over concerns that they could strangle, suffocate or trap an infant or toddler.
The recall focuses on drop-side wooden cribs manufactured by LaJobi. The cribs were sold under the Graco brand between February 2007 and now.
This week, Oprah had a moving op-ed piece in the New York Times about the danger of driving while using a cell phone. Whether you’re holding it or using a headset, talking or texting, there’s mounting evidence that using your phone in your car is just about as dangerous as driving drunk.
Most of us would never dream of getting behind the wheel after a few martinis, but we blithely pick up our phones while driving.
A few weeks ago, a friend posted about this problem to her blog. I was shocked by the number of parents who weighed in to say what I have always felt: my kids distract me, too.
Lori Garcia 
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
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