When my eldest daughter was a newborn, date night with my husband involved driving to the Indian buffet 20 minutes from our home to lull her to sleep, putting her car seat on our regular table against the wall so we could stare at her and eating enough butter chicken to get through a night of breastfeeding. I knew that putting the car seat on an elevated surface was dangerous in theory, but in practice, one of us was guarding it like the philosopher?s stone at all times. I didn?t realize that there were other risks associated with letting her catch some Zs in the bucket seat. In fact, with the National Safety Mark stamped on the side, I thought it was one of the safest places she could be. Turns out, I was wrong.
A new study of infant sleep-related deaths in sitting devices?car seats, strollers, chairs, swings and bouncers?found that 63 percent happened in car seats. The study, which was published in Pediatrics in July 2019, looked at all 348 sitting-device deaths in the United States from 2004 to 2014. It found that in over 90 percent of deaths in car seats, they were not being used as directed, meaning that the child wasn?t strapped into an appropriately-sized car seat and travelling in a vehicle. More than half of car seat deaths occurred in the child?s home, and it wasn?t just already-vulnerable babies who were victims. ?We thought we were going to find a lot of premature infants die in car seats,? says Jeffrey Colvin, a paediatrician at Children?s Mercy in Kansas City ...