As a tag onto Darren’s post the other day about CPS burnout, why do you do CPS? What brought you into the field?
It’s a question I get fairly often at checkup events from parents: what made you decide to do this? They find out that I’m not a police officer, I’m not a firefighter; nope, not EMS either. Just a mom, who, for some crazy reason, decided to learn how to install carseats. So why did I decide to take a 40 hour class on just carseats and seat belts and crash dynamics?
It was simple. I was frustrated. When my 5 mo. old ds needed to switch from his infant seat to a convertible, my dh and I wanted the “best” carseat for him. But which model was best? I researched as best I could back in 2000. The internet wasn’t quite as developed as it is now and there wasn’t much information on carseats on it back then. I read Consumer Reports (!), but their recommendations were a year old and I wanted something more current (Whew! At that time, their recommended carseat was convertible with a 22 lbs. rear-facing weight limit that my ds had already outgrown and an over the top of the shell rf belt path!). I think the Baby Bargains book was the only resource I remember being around. I managed to find *the* premiere carseat bb online at the time, ParentsPlace, and the wonderful moms there steered me to the Britax Roundabout I still have sitting in my ds’s closet. It’s long since expired and served 2 children wonderfully, but really, who can bear to part with their first-loved carseat?
Because I’m . . . anal . . . about researching and sharing information, I created my first web page to share my newfound knowledge with my ds’s birth board and the rest is history. That simple web page of “Did You Know . . .” morphed into www.CarSeatSite.com. My whole reasoning behind CarSeatSite.com is that carseat information shouldn’t be hard for parents to find. Carseats shouldn’t be difficult for parents to use.
So, what’s your story? How did you decide to get involved?
Ummm…I think Parents Place had some addictive substance that streamed out of my computer screen? Before that, I at least knew from Consumer Reports that I needed a 5 point harness and to rearface for a year. I muddled through with a few of ‘the last seat you’ll ever need after the infant seat’ products with rear harness adjusters, and bought a Recaro Start because the Starriser Comfy seemed so terribly flimsy by comparison (those were the only two boosters at The Right Start, not that my 3 year old should have been in a booster yet!).
Seriously, the people I’ve met in the carseat field are some of the nicest, most dedicated people I’ve ever known…I can’t imagine my life not knowing you guys or without the real joy I get helping parents online and in real life 🙂
It is nice that there are nice covers on seats now ;).
3B, I’m curious about the EMS culture and CPS. I’ve worked with a few EMTs through my coalition who were opposites on the CPS educational spectrum–and we train all our techs with the same information, so it was personal opinion shining through. One, who didn’t have kids, was gung ho for ERF and EH and was a bit carseat geekish for being so young ;). The couple of others I’m thinking of just kind of did the minimums with their kids: turned ff after age 1 and 20, booster after 40 lbs. even though there were plenty of HWH seats on the market by that point, etc. I’m surprised at the rather apathetic attitude they had toward CPS given they are first responders with children of their own. I guess they just don’t “get it.”
I’m still waiting for a class to open up nearby so I can become a certified tech but I’m still a huge advocate. It pretty much started when I got ready to move my daughter out of her infant seat. My reason for buying that 3-point harness Graco Snugride in 2005 was that I liked the cover. Once I went to try to find a convertible seat I noticed tons of price differences and wanted to know why. Of course I started discovering different car seat sites and I discovered car seats weren’t always simple. It just became an obsession from there when I found out there was something so simple that I could do to keep my daughter much safer. Shortly after that she became the proud owner of a Britax Marathon and I stopped using aftermarket products and coats in the car seat.
Crunchy, sooo sorry to hear about your baby. I believe that losing a child is the hardest thing in the world to have to get through.
When my oldest son was born in 1977, the hospital nurses were absolutely horrified to find that I was going to put him in a plastic seat (GM Infant Love Seat) to take him home from the hospital instead of holding him like “any good mother” would do. Each of our four children had the safest seats we could get at the time, although at one point for two of them they were the old shield boosters (77 Chevy wagon, no shoulder belts in back seat). Later on as a family child care provider I was really disturbed by the parents who didn’t properly restrain their children in their cars (including one mom who sat her then 4-year-old in a seriously outgrown OHS seat that was SITTING on the front seat of the car, not buckled in). I took the certification class hoping that my daycare parents would be more inclined to listen to my suggestions with that certification behind my name.
Now that I’m unemployed I volunteer with our local Safe Kids program which provides reduced-cost seats for families that can’t manage their finances to afford seats on their own. I’m really blessed to have the information and technical knowledge to help these parents to keep their kids as safe as possible.
When I was a paramedic, I worked with a medic who ‘coded’ a three year old who suffered severe injuries after being in a seat-belt only car crash. (Take that, you Freakonomics jerk-faces. She didn’t die right then. She just became paralyzed from the neck down and unable to breathe on her own.)
Over the next two years, I cared for her many times. In fact, I think another CPST on c-s.org worked in that area and probably cared for her too. She died two years later of complications from her paralysis. She was a normal, talkative preschooler who was just unable to move from the neck down.
When I had my own kids, that horrible story was always in the back of my mind. I decided I was going to do it right, and I was going to help other parents do it right too.
Crunchy, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know about your baby.
My mom was in a crash when she was a teenager where someone was killed and she was thrown from the vehicle and she still has trouble remembering to wear her seat belt. I’m glad I became insistent on wearing them when I hit junior high age (I must have seen one of those gory movies they show to scare you into wearing them). But still, I didn’t catch the bug until I had my own kid.
Well I am currently on the waiting list for a class nearby us, but I will share why I want to become a CPST. When my first son (now age 4) was born. We really didn’t know anything about the carseat at all. We were told by a friend that the hospital we were delivering at would help us and that they had someone who would make sure it was in right. Well no one at the hospital knew anything and we had no help. The nurse just had to make sure we had a car seat (seriously? I probably could have held the infant seat on my lap in the car and they wouldn’t have noticed). Anyway, we put him in the middle on a hump in the backseat (2 door 98 Honda Accord) we were terrified the whole way home… We found a local place to get the seat checked, and they were of no help – I’m still wondering what this place was, they closed shortly after and I’m not sure they were even certified. I started doing research online, and we’ve had “good” checks since then. So now I see all the simple mistakes made everyday with carseats, and am hoping maybe if I’m certified at least some of my suggestions might be listened to 🙂
You can’t replace your kids.
If anything ever happened to my children as a result of my negligence, ignorance, or irresponsibility, I would NEVER EVER forgive myself. Furthermore–few marriages survive the loss of a child…so not only would it destroy me to lose a child without having first done everything in my power to protect them, but it would destroy my family–my husband, and our other children. Our lives would never be the same.
I first got into CPS when I was expecting my third, and trying to retain the family SUV. I eventually managed to squeeze three kids in, with the help of “illegal” US carseats (the Starriser). I eventually got a minivan ;)…and a fourth child.
I haven’t looked back since–from becoming one of the first techs in British Columbia, to becoming a US tech, and becoming a Canadian instructor. The amusing part about all of this is that for all of the carseats that I have owned and used over the years, I’ve always hoped I would NEVER *really* “USE” them. Fortunately, so far so good.
ParentsPlace seems so long ago..but I can honestly say that through PP, I made some life-long friends.
I caught the bug while trying to fit 3 kids safely in our Corolla while pregnant with no. 3, though I was always a “read and follow all directions” mom, and grew up in a house where seatbelts were ALWAYS worn, my brother was in a seat until 4 and 40 (I don’t remember mine), and my dad vehemently defended the increase in age and weight in the state’s CR law when I heard about it and thought it was silly as a jr. high school student. (My dad is a doctor, who showed me the medical studies showing that injury and death rates were higher in children in crashes not using a booster.) I was also permanently injured in a crash in which I was in a lap-only belt as a preteen. So, yeah, it’s always been in the background of my life. But learning of the Radians opened my eyes to a world of car seats I didn’t know existed– the ones not sold on the shelves at Target. It opened my eyes and then became a hobby, and long-since passed on to full-blown obssession. And I don’t regret it one bit!
yeah, there’s the anal thing. I’m a compulsive researcher, if there’s such a thing. Plus, I was already spending too much time online, so car-seat.org just fed into that addiction.
my biggest reason for getting certified as a CPST (and subsequently volunteering on the board and with my state advisory council, and with my local coalition) is that our newborn daughter died. It was not unexpected and was completely unpreventable, but still the worst thing I’ve ever gone through. If I want to help other parents avoid the pain of losing a child, what better way than putting my efforts into the number 1 killer of children?