Saturday, October 18, 2008

Kyle David Miller's Legacy

This is a four minute video offered by the Kyle David Miller Foundation to share 3-year-old Kyle's story and to educate people about car seats. I work with kids and parents every day, and I did not know the information in this video. Please take a moment to watch it.



The main points to consider are:


- Keep your children in a 5-point harness as long as possible. Booster seats rely on seatbelts, which do not always work, especially in roll-overs. Also, children often pull the seatbelt off their shoulder. It takes a certain level of maturity for a child to correctly use a booster seat.
5-point harness seats are available for kids up to 80 pounds
- Keep your child rear-facing as long as possible. Because 96% of accidents are front or side impacts, rear-facing seats provide a huge advantage in supporting your child's body during an accident. Children in Sweden ride rear facing until they are three to five years old or as much as 55lbs, lowering traffic death and injury rates in Sweden considerably. It is uncommon to turn a child to forward-facing before these ages.

"From 1992 through June 1997, only 9 children properly restrained rear-facing died in motor vehicle crashes in Sweden, and all of these involved catastrophic crashes with severe intrusion and few other survivors."
(source:
CPSAFETY).

Please, check out the Foundation's website for more information. It is possible to offer a donation to help the foundation provide free 5-point harness car seats to needy families. The seats are often quite expensive, and as their brochure says,
"We believe that keeping our children safe
should not be a privilege."
http://www.kyledavidmiller.org/

If you would like to help spread this information,
please feel free to copy and paste
this post into your own blog.

2 comments:

Laura said...

Thank you SO much Jessie! I have tears of joy! Kyle is blessed to have you tell his story.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for letting me know about this Jessie. I will look into that carseat when Sabrina outgrows hers.