By Perri Klass
The Philadelphia Tribune
https://www.phillytrib.com/news
—2010 AP IMAGES PHOTO FOR DOREL JUVENILE GROUP/DAVID GOLDMAN
How are there so many new car seat “rules” that didn’t exist when my kids were young? And do I really need to follow them?
When my first baby was born, back in the 1980s, I could see that my parents — his loving, cautious, anxious grandparents — didn’t really understand all the fuss about car seats. With fond perplexity, they watched us wrestle the rather primitive rear-facing infant car seat of the moment into and out of our little two-door hatchback. Occasionally, one of them would murmur that I myself, as an infant, had always traveled safely in my mother’s arms — in the 1950s.
Perri Klass is a pediatrician and professor of journalism and pediatrics at New York University, and author of “The Best Medicine: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future.”
