CarCrashDetective

1. Most kids should actually be in some form of car seat at least until the age of 10.

2. Rear-facing car seats are the safest position for both kids and adults.

3. The rear-facing seat is often called the orphan seat in EMT and ER circles because in bad crashes, it's often the only seat where there's a survivor.

Yes, expiration dates are definitely real. I don't have any links on hand right now but I've been meaning to write about that for a while. However, yes, they do expire because the plastic shells break down over time, and manufacturers establish limits based on the statistical likelihoods of breakdown (much like shutter life ratings on digital cameras). If you've got a 7 year seat and you use it at 7.5 years, it's not like it's going to disintegrate if you drop it, but manufacturers do want a significant buffer, since seats make life/death differences.

Also keep in mind that the expiration date is based on the date of manufacture, not the date of purchase. The clock starts ticking the day the seat is made.

As evidence that manufacturers aren't just trying to sell more seats, note that the expiration dates have actually been increasing in recent years with most seats due to technology changes. There are now some seats that are rated for 10 years or more.

That's a good point. Buses use a process called compartmentalization to secure children, and they also have the advantage of weighing massively more than most other vehicles on the road. As a result, the corresponding crash forces are much lower.

Actually, tires have unofficial expiration dates; studies have indicated the rubber tends to wear down whether tires are used or not within around 6 years. There are political reasons for why they don't have official dates, but yes, tires can and do expire in the sense of becoming unsafe to use, regardless of how or if they were used. I believe seat belts are also recommended to be replaced after a certain number of years, even though they also don't have official expiration dates. Things simply break down over time.

Ooh, good question. This one is hard because yeah, you don't want a frozen child but you also don't want one that's unprotected. What you want to do is test out the coat or snowsuit you're thinking of right in the seat with the child in the following way:

1. Suit on, strapped in.

2. Remove child, don't adjust harness, remove suit.

3. Suit off, strapped in.

4. Check harness for looseness. If the harness isn't any less tight, or is only a bit more slack, then it's fine. If you've got a lot of slack, it's not a good suit.

So essentially, you kind of need to trial and error your way through it to be sure. Don't just go by how a suit looks without trying it; some can look identical but behave very differently with the harness.