Cars and Strollers: Safety Belts Save Lives

illo from www.vote29.com

Here in Utah, seat belts are a big deal.  Lately the “Click it or Ticket” logo can be seen almost daily on billboards, in the news, and in television ads.  It’s a good law.  It saves lives, and it’s pretty obvious that when you get behind the wheel of an automobile, your life is in the balance.  So buckling up seems to be the smart choice.

But when it comes to infant strollers, those safety belts and harnesses are all too often left un-connected.  There is an arsenal of excuses for this, like “I just set him in the stroller for a minute while I was chatting with my neighbor,” or “I was only walking down to the mailbox, it’s not far,” or “I was in a hurry to get inside for that awesome one-day sale.”  Is it ever safe to deposit an infant in a stroller without engaging the seat belts and/or safety harnesses?  The simple answer is “No!”  

illo from www.cpsc.gov

Infants can surprise you.  You never really know when they are going to discover that if they wiggle to the left and then squiggle to the right they can inch their chubby little bodies right through one of those leg holes.  The problem is that their heads are almost always chubbier than their bodies, so while their body many slide through the hole, their heads can become stuck.  Dangling with body on one side of the opening, and their head and neck on the other side can result in strangulation and death. It can happen in only minutes, and it is totally preventable.

Most stroller manufacturers design strollers to minimize or eliminate this strangulation hazard, but it can happen even on fully compliant strollers.  In the case of four models of Lan Enterprises’ Zooper Strollers, manufactured between February 2009 and June 2010, the leg opening between the seat bottom and the front and side bars was found large enough for this hazard to occur.  These four models were sold nationwide  from May 2009 through May 2011. Although no injuries have been reported, Lan Enterprises is recalling the strollers and providing repair kits as a solution starting on July 1, 2011.

For details of the strollers recalled, click here.

For stroller safety tips from CPSC, click here.