Car seat safety & related accidents and injuries: The growing awareness of safe driving and state safety laws has alerted the general public and parents to the importance of using car seats for their small children whenever and wherever they are driving. As this use of infant seats is on the rise, so is the rise of defective child restraint related injuries and deaths of children in such seats. Despite numerous campaigns to reduce accidents by promoting the use of safety belts and car seats, and despite child occupant protection laws in every state, motor vehicle crashes continue to kill and seriously injure children at an alarming rate. Each year approximately 1,800 children ages 14 and under are killed as occupants in motor vehicle accidents and wrecks, and more than 280,000 are injured.

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Car seat accident lawyer- Defective child restraint related injuries

While car accidents can be dangerous for all passengers, infants and small children are especially at risk, due to their lack of strong muscles and bones that help protect adults. The weight of the head of a child makes the cervical spine much more vulnerable to spinal cord injuries and head traumas. An infant has little control in the muscles of the neck, and the head can bounce from side to side and fall forward, which can cause serious spine and neck injuries. Ejections from the child restraint and even the vehicle itself can occur if the seat belt buckle of either the vehicle or car seat comes unlatched during auto wreck collision or rollover accident. In other cases the infant may be injured as a result of intrusion from another vehicle due to other defects in the design or crashworthiness of the vehicle itself. If a child is seriously injured, then all possible angles need to be investigated and explored by the attorney.

Problems with child restraint installation?

Child restraints, when correctly installed and used, are extremely effective in saving children's lives, reducing injuries and lowering the risk of death by as much as 71 percent for infants in properly fitted and correctly installed car and infant seats. However, theses child restraints and the manufacturer's directions can be confusing and complicated to understand. This is one of the reasons many installation errors are made.

Recent studies however have found that as many as 4 out of 5 car seats are not installed or used correctly. Some of the common errors include: too loose of the vehicle's seat belt holding the seat, harness straps not tight or correctly routed into the proper position, the retaining clip not adjusted properly, the seat belt buckle not buckled, use of a child restraint that has been recalled. Other factors include the difficulty of using seats correctly include a variety of age and size requirements, incompatibility between seat and vehicle design, improper seating position and gaps in child occupant protection laws.

 Defective and recalled child restraints

Car seats are intended to protect children from injuries that may occur in a motor vehicle accident. Sadly, some children involved in automobile accidents suffer more severe injuries due to the design of the seat and its installation than they do from the actual accident. In many cases, the car seat the child was in at the time of the accident has been recalled. Some of the defective child restraint recalls include problems and failures with the seat belt latch buckles coming open during impact, handles falling off, lack of sufficient padding or design to protect the baby, sharp exposed metal edges, poorly worded instructions, car seats detaching from the base, inadequate safety warnings, lack of tether straps to prevent the seat from moving violently during a crash and many other life threatening defects and malfunctions. These defective child restraint issues may lay dormant and unknown until the time of a  wreck.

Is the child restraint manufacturer liable for my child's injuries?