How To Check The Quality Of A Hand Me Down Child Safety Seat

If I want to use a hand-me-down child safety seat, how do I check the quality?

Safety seats have a lifespan, and also they need to have all their parts and pieces, and sometimes safety seats are given to a person from someone they trust. That person did not realize that they did not have the instructions or there was a recall on that seat. Or the seat had been in a coalition. And so for all those reasons our first recommendation is to get a new seat. If you do receive a seat that is being used from someone you trust, there are some things you can do to look at it. First of all you want to look at the date of manufacture. Every safety seat, back to 1971 has to have a label with the date it was made, the place it was made, and who made it. If you cannot find that label then you do not know for sure how old that seat is. Also if you do not know the date it made you can not check to see if it was ever under a recall. So the general rule is, that most people think of about six years as the lifespan of a safety seat. In the past we talked about 10 years, and I would say 10 years is definitely the outer limit of how long you would want to use a safety seat. For one thing standards change. Improvements are made. So that is one whole category of reason for using a newer seat. Or another thing, plastic,and webbing, and buckles degenerate over time. You can get food and drink into the mechanisms and not realize that they are not working at their top levels. Or you decide to wash the seat from top to bottom and then if you do not have the instructions, you can not get it back right. So there are lots of reasons, that for this particular baby product, you want to think about new.