Educational Materials for the Child Passenger Safety Field
News
Off-road vehicles, heatstroke, shopping carts, not-in-traffic injuries, obesity and CPS, and entanglement.
Most CPSTs have noticed that TV shows rarely depict CPS best practices. An episode from ABC’s Modern Family provides a good example when a dad frantically runs toward his vehicle intending to break a window with a garbage can to free his infant daughter locked inside.
Read More from “When and How to Break a Window”The verbiage in a letter received by a customer and subsequently circulated online indicates that NHTSA has issued a cease-and-desist order to ClypX regarding its product claims and the company has begun notifying registered customers.
The topic of safe sleep has been in regulatory and legal news lately as the risk of infant death in products called “inclined sleepers” has begun to spur action (see box below). Inclined sleepers are portable sleep devices that put a baby’s back at an angle of up to about 30 degrees. Over the past 15 or so years, these devices have been linked to infant airway obstruction (from head flopping) or suffocation (from rolling into the padding or partially out of the device). These incidents have led to dozens of infant deaths, with 74 reported to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) in 2019 alone. Read More from “Safe Sleep (and CRs) Back in the News”
Mere days before National Heatstroke Prevention Day on May 1, a 5-month-old baby girl in North Carolina was this year’s first victim of vehicular heatstroke. SRN reminds readers that heatstroke death is 100% preventable! Please utilize the extensive resources that exist to educate caregivers on this topic
Find free resources and information from the following sources:
The National Safety Council (NSC) offers an online training module called “Children in Hot Cars.” This interactive training uses graphics, audio, and video to teach three main topics related to child heatstroke dangers:
The learner can progress at his or her own pace, following links to supporting studies, lists, and information found at the NSC site and others, such as noheatstroke.org and CDC.gov. Although the learner may opt to linger over an array of helpful links, the basic module takes only about 10 minutes to complete.
The training offers many practical tips to prevent heatstroke deaths and is suitable for any audience: CPSTs, caregivers, or any other member of the public.
Go to www.nsc.org and search “kids in hot cars” or click here to find the module. A certificate of completion is provided at the end of the training.
To learn about a bill, reintroduced to Congress in May 2021, that would require new vehicles to have built-in technology to remind people when a child has been left inside, click here. This site offers many other resources, including descriptions of the latest child-detection technology for vehicles and guidance for those who’d like to write to their legislator in support of the act.
Personal experience led Washington Post reporter and parent Lauren Gravitz to write the recent article “Risky transport: Camps, churches and other programs are trading car-seat safety for convenience.” Read More from “Reporter Confronts Common Myths About Full-Size Vans and CRs”
KidsAndCars.org Seeks Data From the Public on Pets Injured or Killed by Cars
For over 20 years, KidsAndCars.org (KAC) has been dedicated to the prevention of noncrash, vehicle-related hazards to children, such as heatstroke, backovers, and trunk entrapment. Since data is key to spurring safety improvements, KAC has long collected data on various not-in-traffic incidents. For many incidents that occur off of roadways, KAC was the first to begin collecting incident data, and it was instrumental in securing the 2005 legislation that required NHTSA to begin surveillance of these types of events. Read More from “Needed: Data on Pets Injured or Killed by Cars”
SRN recently heard from Carma McKinnon, Idaho’s CPS coordinator located at Lemhi County Sheriff’s Department, regarding concerns over ATVs and UTVs. ATVs (all-terrain vehicles, aka quads) and UTVs (utility-task vehicles, aka side-by-sides, recreational off-road vehicles, or ROVs) are used by families across the country for both recreation and work purposes, but can be extremely dangerous to children.
McKinnon noted that ATVs and UTVs are very popular in her state, and this seems to be the case across the country, with the largest sales volumes found in rural areas, especially in the South and Midwest. Sales have grown substantially over the past 10 years. Based on data from the Motorcycle Industry Council and the Specialty Equipment Market Association, roughly 250,000 ATVs are sold in the U.S. each year. Sales of UTVs have been even hotter; this newer market entry has surpassed ATVs in sales, with around 400,000 currently sold per year. Sales of these vehicles fluctuate with the strength of the economy, so they may vary widely from year to year.
Safe Kids provides a multitude of resources to assist local programsOn March 29, Safe Kids held its fifth annual Heatstroke Town Hall meeting. This meeting, which is meant to prepare partners for the Safe Kids’ awareness campaign launch on April 13, was recorded and is posted under Resources on the Safe Kids’ Online Speaker’s Bureau website.
Read More from “Time to Ramp Up Heatstroke Prevention Efforts”
The tragic death last September of a Macon, Georgia, infant in a grocery store parking lot reminds us of the very real danger to children when riding in a common form of “transportation”—the shopping cart. The 3-month-old was secured in his infant seat perched on the child seating area of the shopping cart when he and the CR toppled from the cart as it went over a parking lot speed bump.
Read More from “Grocery Carts Pose Hidden Risks to Children”
Over the past thirty years, the rate of obesity has doubled for children ages 2-5 and 12-15, and tripled for kids ages 6-11. Kim Hermann, Safe Kids USA, discussed how obesity presents challenges for child passengers.
