Jun29
Travelling with Kids – Surviving the Journey

Travelling with Kids – Surviving the Journey

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As the summer holidays roll around, you may be planning to take your kids on a holiday abroad or a staycation. Either way, this can involve a fair bit of travelling, so it’s important to ensure your kids are safe and happy along the way. Thankfully, a huggybelt can help with the former.

Getting there

Whether you’re driving to a holiday home or caravan, or simply making your way to the airport, the huggybelt is an ideal way to ensure your child is fully protected on the journey. Working in tandem with your child’s car seat or booster, the huggybelt ensures the seat belt sits in the correct position on your child’s body. This means it’s highly unlikely to fall off, and can offer maximum protection with less chance of sustaining injury should you become involved in a crash.huggybelt

Home or away

The great news is that a huggybelt is flexible and portable, so you can take it with you wherever your child goes. If you plan to rent a car while abroad, simply unclip the huggybelt from the Isofix point, fold it up and pop it in your hand luggage. Whilst the rules of the road may vary slightly in other countries, you can still ensure your child is protected in case of a crash by taking your huggybelt with you.

It’s worth bearing in mind the belt’s portability when you are at home too. If your child is going on a trip with a friend’s family, you can easily remove your huggybelt to transfer to another car, in the event that the other car owner does not have a huggybelt.

Keep the kids amused

traffic-637118_1920When you’re sure your child is comfortable and safe in the car, the hardest part begins – keeping them amused! Fortunately, there are plenty of games you can play that everyone in the car can enjoy. For instance, if you’re on a car journey abroad, you could play spot the difference between there and home. If you’re in a rural area, you could each pick a farm animal and see how many you can find before you stop. Why not check out our car games for Easter travellers post for more inspiration?

Whether you’re travelling at home or abroad this summer, our tips should keep your kids safe and happy. If you haven’t purchased a huggybelt yet and want one in time for the summer, you can get yours from Halfords, Tesco, Amazon or Baby Security. Each come with express delivery options so you needn’t be without yours for long

Jun21
Why Use Experts to Install Your Car Seats

Why Use Experts to Install Your Car Seats

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When it comes to child car safety, there are great laws in place ensuring our children are protected appropriately with the best equipment available. With standards for car seats and specific guidelines for each stage of your child’s growth, it’s fairly easy to make sure your child is strapped in to their specific requirements.

However, despite legislation stating which car seats should be used for which age groups, and standards that safety equipment must meet, there’s still a risk that your child is not being protected to the best level possible. This is why it’s necessary to seek the help of safety experts to help install your car seat.child-33959_1280

It can be difficult to get right

Laws exist to ensure protection to a minimum standard amongst safety equipment such as car seats and boosters. The equipment you buy could be the best and safest in the business, but it might be tricky to install correctly. Each seat and booster is different; even within brands car seats of different sizes can have completely different fitting instructions.

It could be that you are not correctly fitting the seat yourself. This is usually through no fault of your own, as an upgrade to your child’s seat could mean installing something in a completely different way than before. You are not alone in this instance, as 9 out of 10 parents this year have said they’ve experienced problems fitting a car seat, according to a survey conducted by Halfords and Britax in association with Mother & Baby magazine.

In addition, you need to be sure the seat is compatible with your car, or the equipment may not be installed to the best fitting position. Over half of parents are not sure that they have purchased the right car seat equipment for their car.

Older cars for example, may not have ISOFIX points, which is something many new car seats and boosters rely on to secure them in place. It’s worth checking the make and model of your car before upgrading your seat, and similarly if you’re upgrading your car, it’s worth noting the features and whether it would be compatible with your existing car seat or booster.

If installed incorrectly, your child could be in danger

As much as 70% of 3,000 seats checked by Good Egg Safety in 2015 had been installed incorrectly. This is worrying as it means that kids sitting in those seats could be put at serious risk in a crash situation. In short, the seat could fail and offer little to no protection for the child, should an accident occur.

Experts are everywhere

The good news is, experts are everywhere. Good Egg Safety are relentless in their child car safety campaigns and can be found checking seats and helping parents up and down the country throughout the year. Check here for events near you soon.

In addition, Good Egg Safety have worked with TRL to develop courses which car seat retailers, professionals and individuals can study in order to become child car safety experts. Anyone with their CPD certification will be able to help you check your car seat is fitted appropriately. Always ask the retailer about their safety qualifications and how to fit a car seat before you consider purchasing.

Jun01
Child Safety Week 2016

Child Safety Week 2016

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The annual Child Safety Week runs from 6th-12th June this year. Organised by the Child Accident Prevention Trust (CAPT), this year the theme is ‘Turn Off Technology.’capt

The week focuses on a variety of different aspects, but the main aim is to raise awareness of the risks children face, and how to prevent accidents from happening. One of the main areas looked at throughout the week is road safety, and how we can help prevent child accidents on the roads.

With the theme in mind, parents are asked to focus on technology in terms of their children using devices as pedestrians and adults using technology in cars. For instance, your older children may already have mobile phones, if not a tablet or portable gaming device. The temptation for children to message friends, watch YouTube videos or send Snapchats on the way home from school can often mean that your child will not be paying 100% attention to their surroundings. As with road safety campaigns in the 90s where youths were encouraged to remove earphones as a distraction for crossing the road, children are also being asked to stop using their devices before crossing any street.

That’s just one facet of road safety that Child Safety Week looks at. The other element is of technology in cars. Some technology has been fantastic, for example sat-navs, hands-freenavigation-1048294_1920 kits for your phone and sensors to warn you if someone doesn’t have their seat belt on. On the other hand, technology can also be a distraction. In 2015, over 5,500 people were caught using a mobile phone at the wheel. This is not only a distraction, it becomes a danger to those in your car, and other road users. It also leads a bad example to your children, who may then grow to develop the same bad habits.

With more than 2,000 child deaths per year attributed to road accidents, there has never been a better time to focus on road safety and the things we can do to protect our children. A huggybelt is a great piece of equipment which can help in the event of a crash, but if we can stop dangers such as technology distractions, we could well prevent crashes happening in the first place.

For more information on how you can get involved in this year’s Child Safety week see the Child Safety Week website.