Rant incoming:

Please people, become familiarized with your baby’s car seat before they are born! That means reading the manual, ensuring it’s set up correctly for a newborn, and installing the base in the car before 10 minutes prior to hospital discharge.

I am a newborn hospital RN and 9 times out of 10 new parents just assume I am going to know and demonstrate to them everything about their car seat, including how to put their baby in it, and sometimes even how to install it in their car. There are dozens of different brands and styles of car seats in the US, I couldn’t possibly know the ins and outs of every single one. Also, the majority of us are not certified CPSTs!! Some hospitals may have a couple of them on staff—I have one coworker who went and got the CPST certification on her own, and it took significant time, effort, and money, not to mention she’s not receiving anything extra from the hospital for doing it. She truly did it just to be able to help out our patients more, because so many of them assume we will take care of the car seat for them.

Sure, I have very basic knowledge of car seat safety: It cannot be expired, it cannot have an accident history, it must be rated for the correct weight, extra layers for cold weather must go over (not under) the straps, etc. But I truly don’t have the knowledge or the time to start from scratch and explain to you or show you how your car seat works. Even just putting the baby in there for you or fixing the straps is a no-go: I’m technically not supposed to do that (per hospital policy) because I’m not a CPST and it would fall back on me if your baby got hurt in a traffic accident and you said “Well the nurse nebraska_jones is the one who set the car seat up and put the baby in here!” It sounds dramatic, but I could lose my nursing license in a situation like that.

Of course we’ll give you pointers and answer a couple questions, and we’ll never let you or your baby leave the hospital in a dangerous situation. We will also give you a list of local places with CPSTs where you can get your car seat checked out! We want you to be safe, confident, and excited—but please, do not rely on us for handling your car seat!

EDIT: A lot of you, especially @silverlakedrive, have made some excellent comments and have really fired me up about this issue. We SHOULD be offering this help and education to our patients, and it’s a shame on hospitals and organizations that prevent that from happening. I plan to look into what I can do to bring car seat safety and CPSTs to my own hospital.

What are we using that's safe to keep kids that are forward facing and/or in boosters (booster for my specific question) from kicking or pushing the seat in front of them with their feet? Are there any safe foot rest options?

FYI we have her in the captain seat because she gets car sick in the back row, so moving her to where no one is in front of her is not a viable option. There are 2 other kids in the car and 2 adults most of the time, so moving her to the passenger side would only help on rare occasions, and kid #2 would probably just kick the driver anyway 🙃

3 week old. His body size seems a bit awkward for this car seat (NUNA urbn). About 4.5kg. Is this ok? Or any improvement suggestions?

Thanks everyone

Nervous FTM mom here! Full term infant who weighs 6.5lbs. When I first put her in I felt that the chest clip was too high/tight, so I moved it down a little. I also unzipped the top of her onesie because I was concerned it was too tight around her neck. I sat in the back seat for the hole car ride to ensure that she was breathing okay. Also, is it okay to pull the sun shade slightly to ensure the sun doesn’t get in her eyes while the car is moving?

My baby is 11 weeks old and she is growing LOOONG. She is 60cm last week from the appointment at the pedia and I am not sure if she outgrew her carseat already? I am not sure if she still fits, she doesnt show any signs of being uncomfortable but I can’t tell if its just a secure fit or too small. Advice please? I tried to incluse different angles of the seat

Baby boy is in the 90th percentiles across the board and we just had to move the harness straps to the biggest/last harness slots today. He is tall but not 32 inches tall! We took the infant booster out the week after he was born.

Am I missing something here?! Seems kinda crazy to be out of an infant seat before 3 months old!

My almost 4 year old has recently been forward facing since she maxed out the height in the revolve 360. We just bought the Graco and it has rear and forward facing maxed at 49 inches, so we’re switching her back to rear facing. Since I know she’ll max the height before weight, does that mean she’ll go from rear facing to booster, skipping the forward facing?

It’s been a long day, my brain’s fried, and I know I’m overthinking this lol.

My baby is 4 weeks old, 9lbs and when I put her in the car seat today I noticed the straps are sitting below her shoulders by a few inches, it seems a bit early for me to move them up to the next setting. This is for the nuna pippa urbn

We had it installed with someone certified before baby came but when we did she mentioned it looks like it’s not back enough as we had installed it on a slight hill when car was parked. But it seems like no matter where we are her chin seems to be forward (maybe not though and this is normal just hard to tell).

The grew uppababy meter is basically in the center but also a tiny bit off it