How To Secure Your Child In A Forward Facing Seat
How do I secure my child in a forward-facing child safety seat?
After you have the forward-facing safety seat tightly in the car so that it doesn't move more than an inch to the sides or front of the vehicle, place the child in comfortably. By the way, at a certain point you should let the child climb in because you want the child to feel "this is my special space and I know how to manage it". Yet you should always check what they're doing. Make sure they're sitting back and that the safety harness on the forward-facing safety seat is at or above shoulder level, not ear level. If you find that your child can't have the safety harness at, or just a little bit above, the shoulders, maybe that child still needs to be rear-facing. Once you have the harness in the proper slots, you snug the harness by pulling on the attachment. This is important: if you chose a forward-facing safety seat where you can't reach the harness adjuster when the safety seat is in there tightly, you're going to make errors and your child will not be safe. So be sure when you select the forward-facing safety seat that you can reach the adjustment for the harness easily when it's in tightly forward-facing or, if it's a convertible, in both directions. Once you have the harness on the child properly you do a pinch test. Just as if you're trying on a pair of trousers or a skirt and you wanted to see if the waist of the trousers or skirt fit you properly, take your fingers and try to pinch the fabric of the harness between your fingers. If you can pinch fabric, it's not snug enough so snug it more. Then push the retainer clip up to armpit level. Particularly, we recommend that when you're getting used to how much to snug it, you keep the retainer clip down while you're adjusting the harness so you don't run it up into the child's neck and then become worried about hurting the child with a part of the harness. But always push it to armpit level, so it's not too high and not too low. It helps to remind you to position the harness in the centers of the shoulders, not out on the tops of the arms and never down on the arms. You want to make sure that the hip straps are low on the child's hips, not up on the abdomen. With a forward-facing seat with a harness, you also want to make sure that, whether you're using the LATCH attachments or the safety belt system to hold the forward-facing safety seat in, you do attach that top tether strap. That reduces how far forward your child's head will go in a crash, and again, your child's head is the most important part of the body. You want to protect the child from brain damage.
