Has Your Baby’s Car Seat Expired?

“No need to bring a car seat,” we told our niece. “We have at least four of them somewhere.”

“How old?”

“You mean for what sized child?”

“No, how old are the seats? When were they manufactured?”

“What difference does that make?”

“If they are older than six years, they may be expired.”

“Expired? Like a bottle of milk? You’ve got to be kidding!”

I looked it up. She wasn’t kidding. Car seats sold in the US these days come with expiration dates. As in: Do not use after…!

It’s not a federal or state law. But all car seat manufacturers use expiration dates. And you’d be hard-pressed to find any information that doesn’t advise parents to respect them.

It sounds absurd. But I searched online and found numerous websites that provided some justification in terms of safety. Improvements in technology and changes in standards are made all the time.

I can certainly understand, then, why my niece wasn’t going to strap her most precious cargo into something that was antiquated and possibly dangerous. Still, I wanted to know: Is this just another umpteenth rule about parenting?  Is there any, as they say, “science” behind it?

I spent more time looking. There were many magazine articles and even published guidelines by parenting organizations that abided by the idea that car seats can expire. And there were even some explanations – i.e., the plastic can harden, the straps can weaken, etc. But I could find no studies. I found only one article in Motherly Parenting that that even addressed the issue. Click here.

Of course, the lack of evidence that baby car seats expire is not proof that they don’t. And when it comes to the safety of our bambinos, what parent is going to roll the dice?

And what do we do with all those hundreds of thousands of “expired” baby seats? Are they put into landfills to slowly biodegrade and cause more pollution? Don’t worry. No Green issue here. Most of them are collected and resold south of the border.