Hello, and welcome to our unit on children's car seats. My name is Adrienn and I'm a public health educator and certified child passenger safety technician at Children's Hospital Colorado. Car crashes can happen at anytime to anyone who is on or near the road. Pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcyclists, drivers, persons using cars, even pets in cars are at risk when a crash occurs. More than 32,000 people are killed and two million are injured yearly due to motor vehicle crashes. Many of these deaths can be prevented. Let's talk about how we can help parents and caregivers to understand the need for car seats for infants and how to use them correctly. Children need extra protection while traveling in a vehicle to help keep them safe and reduce the risk of injury and death. Despite how well car seats protect children, they are often used incorrectly, which can make them less effective or even dangerous in the crash. According to reports from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), car seat, booster seat, and seat belt misuse rates vary from 74 to 90 percent. That's a lot of children that are traveling unsafely in vehicles. When used correctly, car seats reduced the risk of fatal injury by 71 percent for infants and by 54 percent for toddlers. In these videos, I will do my best to help you understand how to use a car seat correctly. Let's start by looking at what is called crash dynamics. Let's take a few minutes to understand what happens in a crash. The science behind crashed forces show that an object in motion continues in motion at the original speed until it connects with an outside force. There are three stages that happen during a car crash. The first stage is when the vehicle hits something and comes to an abrupt stop. The second stage happens when the person in the vehicle at the original speed, moves towards that point of impact. The third stage happens after the person comes to a complete stop. At this point, the internal organs are still moving forward until they hit something. This third stage or internal crash often results in serious injury and even death in some cases. Think about a person inside a car, how they continue moving at the speed of that car until it's stopped by something else or an outside force. That outside force can be something harmful such as a steering wheel, a windshield, the pavement or even another person in the car. Interestingly enough, it can also be an object that is designed to protect you during an accident such as a seat belt, an airbag, or even the car seat. When safety features are not used correctly or not used at all, the chances of sustaining serious injuries or deaths increases substantially. So, if a person is in a car traveling at 40 miles an hour, their body continues to travel up that rate of speed until it's stopped by one of these things. So, you can probably see from this information that cross forces are severe and this is why they can be deadly. The human body is simply not designed to travel at 40 miles per hour and hit another object without sustaining serious injuries. The safety features built into modern motor vehicles were designed to reduce the risk of death and serious injury for older children and adults. They were not designed to protect infants and young children in the way that modern car seats are now designed to do. When used correctly, car seats work to keep the child passenger in the car and to prevent ejection, being thrown from the car, in an accident. For rear-facing seats, crash forces are distributed throughout the shell of the car seat and over the entire body of the child putting less strain on their head, on their neck, and on their back. For forward facing seats designed for larger and older children, crash forces are distributed throughout that harness system, which is positioned over the child's shoulders and their pelvis. You can watch this video to see how crashed forces are distributed to protect the child and the child seat during crashed. Next, we will look more closely to see how these safety features work in a crash, from this conversation about crash forces and the video where you can actually see them. In the next lesson, we will look how safety features are designed to protect children during a crash.
