Child ID Labels for Car Seats

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WHALE logoIn the July 2008 edition of SafetyBeltSafe News, there was an article about a woman in Oklahoma who wants all car seats to have occupant identification labels on them.  I think this is a great idea!  I’ve had make your own labels on my web site since before it became CarSeatSite.com–it just seems obvious to me that you’d want something on the seat identifying your child if you are incapacitated.

Some car seats, such as the Sunshine Kids Radian seats, have special pouches and cards in them for identifying your child.  That’s fabulous!  That’s exactly the type of thing all car seats, including boosters, should have.  Think about how many kids out there have some kind of special need, such as a food allergy or medicine allergy, that an emergency worker would need to know about after a crash.

My reasoning for having the labels on my seats is pretty simple: I have an overly-anal type A perfectionistic personality which means that I often over-worry ;).  What if I’m in a crash and I’m incapacitated and can’t communicate with emergency workers?  What if my kids are transported to a different hospital than I am?  How would the hospital workers know who to contact?  If my kids are OK, how would they know that my baby drinks only Nutramigen formula or that if they want to get my dd to drink milk, they’d have to first lace it with strawberry syrup (thankfully, those days are long gone now–whew!)?  A friend of mine was in a crash a few years ago where someone hit her van at an intersection and it rolled.  Her child was transported to a different hospital but fortunately she had printed one of my labels and attached it to her car seat and the hospital used it to call family members.  My friend told me about it later and it gave me warm fuzzies :).  Of course I was glad, too, that her dd wasn’t seriously hurt.

There are labels that you can order online.  There’s the WHALE Program: We Have A Little Emergency.  Or you can just print your own, like from my web site, use a label maker, like my favorite label maker (my dog’s lucky she doesn’t have a label on her!), or just handwrite something on a piece of paper and tape it to the seat.  Whatever gets the message across.  In a crash, you want emergency workers to know who to contact in case you aren’t there to advocate for your child.  It’s all about peace of mind and for those of us overly-anal type A perfectionistic personality types who over-worry and can’t sleep until all the “i’s” are dotted and the “t’s” are crossed, this is one thing you can cross off your list very easily with little effort.

15 Comments

  1. Amy Kamen February 4, 2014
  2. Heather (murphydog77) January 22, 2014
  3. Amy Kamen January 22, 2014
    • Bridgett E. McWatters April 3, 2015
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