Types Of Car Seats

There’s a lot that goes into selecting the right car seat for you and your child.  It can certainly seem like a daunting task at first when you are bombarded with information from any number of sources; friends, family, advertisements, social media websites, bloggers, vloggers and occasionally even cloggers.  So, where do you start?  

A Good Place To Start

We feel like a good place to start is at the beginning.  Makes sense, right?  First things first, let’s talk about how we as CPSTs come up with the recommendation we pass onto families.  Safe Start’s North Idaho Child Passenger Safety Team always relies on the recommendations from both the National Highway Transporation Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) when we’re helping families.  

Current Recommendations

Both the NHTSA’s and AAP’s recommendations are almost identical and include the following:

1.  Children ride rear-facing as long as possible until they exceed the maximum height or weight of their seat.
2.  Once a child exceeds the maximum height or weight of their rear-facing seat they ride forward-facing with a harness until they exceed the maximum height OR weight of their forward-facing harness seat.
3.  Once a child exceeds the maximum height or weight of their forward-facing harness seat they ride in a belt position booster seat until they reach the maximum height OR weight of the booster seat or they can achieve proper seat belt fit without a booster, usually around 4’9″.  What is a proper seat belt fit?  CLICK HERE for a great, quick video that shows how to check for the proper belt fit. 

OK, I Got All That, Now Help Me Choose A Seat

So now that you understand what we as CPST’s do and where we get our recommendations that we pass on to parents, it’s time to select that perfect seat for your child.  For this, we only need three things: your child’s current height, current weight and our very own, proprietary, high-tech Car Seat Select-O-Matic.  

The Select-O-Matic makes it easy to identify the options that might be appropriate for your child.  The Select-O-Matic is incredibly easy to use, simply find your child’s current age on the left side and read across to see what seat option might work for your child.  There are 3 categories: great choice, maybe and bad choice.  We recommend looking at the seats that have a ‘great choice” rating to begin with. 

Now kids are like pizza, there’s really not one standard pizza.  Some are bigger, smaller, longer, taller, thicker and on and on.  If for some reason the seats labeled “great choice” don’t work for your kiddo then it’s time to look into seats with a maybe rating.  You should be able to find something that works for your child in the “great choice” or “maybe” category, if you can’t, then you have a unique situation on your hands.  If that’s the case it’s time to contact us and come in for a car seat check, we can help you make the best, safest choice for your child in a situation like this.  Heck, that’s what we’re trained for and something we really enjoy doing! 

Once you’ve identified the seat type you’re going to look at first, continue on down past the Select-O-Matic where you’ll see a graphic that lists the types of seats with the general height and weight that each type can accommodate.  Keep in mind that all car seats are different so some might have a height or weight limit that lies outside of those listed in the graphic.  The graphic is simply a visual illustration of the approximate height and weight that each type of seat can accommodate.  When you do select a seat make sure you verify the actual height and weight limits of that seat.