Baby Safety in any Car: Advice from Volvo
Volvo gives vital information regarding how to ensure your baby is safe in the car
BABY’S FIRST JOURNEY
The first car ride for most babies will be the drive home from the maternity unit. It’s an exciting but still rather jittery time for most. A new little person has come into the world. And a new life is beginning for the parents and any other sibling too.
Ahead of you is a new routine, punctuated by feeds, sleeps both short and long, and nappy changing. Most things will have been planned and prepared for, but there will always be a few details to iron out.
One thing which really must be planned for is that first journey home. Right from the start, your baby needs to have his or her own baby seat-properly anchored, correctly fitted and facing the rear of the car. This baby seat will provide good protection for the first few months of the baby’s life. Depending on the type you start with, the baby may be anything between nine and eighteen months old before you need to move on to the next seat. The main thing is that the seat should always be the right size for the baby. When the baby has grown so its head reaches the top end of its seat or beyond (depending on whether the seat has a hood or not), the time has come to change to a bigger one. You can of course, move your baby to a bigger seat earlier than this. There are other kinds of rear-ward-facing child car seat which provide equally good protection for a growing baby. But they must also be of a suitable size for your baby at the time.
TAILER-MADE SEATS
Any parent who has ever chosen a car seat for a baby will agree that it is no easy task. Volvo is one of the few carmakers who design baby and child seats, made for and tested in their own cars. Most other seats are designed by child seat manufacturers. They will be suitable for some cars, but not for all. The methods used for anchoring car seats also vary.
This can result in parents buying the wrong kind of seat for their particular car. Or they may find that the seat they have bought is extra hard to fit correctly.
The car industry was long aware of this problem, realizing the need for a single standard to ensure that all types of child seat could be used in any car. A working group was set up by the International Standards Organization, ISO, to draft such a standard. After nine years of work, the fifteen or so nations represented in the group reached agreement on the Isofix anchorage system. The international standard defining it was published in 1999. In the following year, legislation was passed in the US requiring all new cars to have Isofix anchorage points. Similar legislation was soon in place in Canada, and corresponding European legislation came into force in 2006. Several other countries have also introduced the Isofix standard or are about to do so.
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