Child Safety Seats: A History
Before the 1930s, the only “child safety seats” that parents used were burlap sacks with a drawstring; there would be holes cut out for the child’s legs, and the strings would hang the sack over the back of the passenger seat in the car. The only purpose of these were to restrain children from crawling around the car, and to lift them so they would be able to see out the window.
As you might expect, these had no safety benefits whatsoever.
When you consider a modern child safety seat, the image that comes to mind is one of the most complex lessons that young parents have to learn. Car safety laws for children are incredibly complex, with seats having expiration dates like a bottle of milk and requiring the child’s age, height, and weight to be taken into account in their purchase. This is due to the vital importance of protecting children in one of the most dangerous areas of modern day life: automobile accidents.
When it comes to our most vulnerable populations, most parents would agree that there is no room for mistakes. But how did the child safety seat transform from haphazard burlap sacks to the safety-centric seats we know today?
Metal Contraptions for Entertainment
In 1933, the first booster seat was invented by the Bunny Bear Company. The goal of this seat was still largely the same as the burlap sack, lifting children into view and keeping them still. Made largely of metal rods and fabric, some of these booster seats even had play steering wheels to keep children occupied, placing numerous additional hazards around the child in the case of an accident. As the modern seatbelt was still unavailable until 1959, the accident death rate was four to five times higher than it is today.
Apart from minor changes, such as the addition of metal hooks to hang the booster seat over the back of a seat in the 1940s, nothing substantial was improved about these seats until the 1960s, when numerous great innovators for child safety began to come out of the woodwork.
Innovators Across the World
The first of these was British journalist and mother Jean Ames, who pioneered the first child safety seat in 1962. The “Jeenay” seat had the first five strap safety harness similar to today’s models, and a child-proofed quick release buckle to remove the child quickly in the case of an emergency. It was also the first seat designed for the backseat. These changes, and their advertised safety, marked a permanent shift in the way the general public viewed children’s car seats towards the highly tested, safety centric standards we have today.
Next, in 1963, came the first rear-facing seat with a five point harness, invented by Leonard Rivkin. He was inspired to create the “Guys and Dolls Safety Car Seat” after his car was hit from behind, causing his son to fly into the front seat at his mother’s feet. His son was unharmed from the incident, but his dissatisfaction with car seat safety inspired further innovation.
In 1964, Professor Bertil Aldman noticed the protective effects of rear-facing car seats when watching the position of the American astronauts in the Gemini space capsule. Their backwards position helped their bodies to withstand force during takeoff, and it occurred to Aldman that this same principle could be applied to the force of car collisions on children. Because of Aldman’s research, Sweden developed the “T-Standard,” leading the world in strict rear-facing seat regulations that kept children in these seats until age 4.
Developing Laws
In 1971, the United States finally began developing regulations about automobile safety for children. The first law passed was the requirement that child carseats use a seatbelt to hold them into the vehicle, and have a harness to hold the child in the seat. This did not require that carseats be used, only that they be secured when they were.
In 1979 Tennessee became the first state in the US to pass a law requiring children to have car seats. In the 1980s, new safety standards protected children by requiring crash testing, instructions, and childproof restraints. In 1985, all states finally passed laws requiring car seat use, but this was not strictly enforced. By 1987, 20% of children were still not using a car seat.
In 2002, Congress passed several laws on safety testing and age requirements for carseats, leading to the standardization of the LATCH (Lower Anchors and Tethers for Children) system. Vehicles in this time now had standard anchor points to simplify car seat installation, making it easier for parents to protect children.
High Reliability Saves Lives
What we see in the history of child safety seats is a transformation from a system that operates based off the normalization of deviance to a system that aims for high reliability. When it comes to children’s safety, there is no room for mistakes, and yet for much of the existence of cars children were unrestrained or placed in further danger by their seats.
When your grandma looks at your child’s car seat, laughs, and says “back in my day, we didn’t even wear seatbelts!” she is describing a normalization of deviation. Without the laws, standards, and innovations necessary to unravel the root causes of child deaths in car accidents, people lived in the proverbial wild west of automobile safety. Cars were dangerous, but the danger inherent within them was normalized, and for many years parents had no ability to conceptualize what automobile safety for children should look like. It was this lack of understanding that led to the burlap sacks and metal contraptions that seem unthinkable to us today.
With the development of better equipment testing, research on best practices such as with the Gemini spacecraft, and adaptation of cars to make it “easier to do the right thing,” modern child safety seats are at an all time high for their ability to protect our most vulnerable population.
And yet, many leading innovators believe it is still not enough, largely due to the confusing instructions and web of laws that new parents have to work through to learn how to use them correctly. 57% of accident deaths for children 0-15 are due to the child not being properly restrained, and 75% of car seats are being installed or used incorrectly. Suffice it to say, we remain on the winding road to zero accidents, as child safety seats continue to change and develop new safety features.
The TapRooT® System
Our goal with the TapRooT® System is to change the way the world solves problems, transforming systems into high-reliability systems through root cause analysis. We teach organizations to adopt the same principles used to improve child safety seats through history, compiling best practices for skillful solutions made easy.
To learn more about normalization of deviation and what it means to be a high reliability organization, check out our blog here.
To schedule a free executive briefing about what it means to learn the TapRooT® System, visit our executive portal here.
Read more about the history of car seats at these sources:
A General History of Car Seats
