Choosing Child Restraint – What’s after infant car seat?
So many car seat products! What are they for and when do I need them?
In North America, even with living in a very walkable city, occasional travel by car is still unavoidable. Children car seats are the most popular and effective safety gear used to protect our precious cargo in an event of a collision. Outside road transportation, air travel also benefit from the use of car seat for convenience and comfort. But for urbanites like us that relied mostly on public transport and ride-share services, constantly installing and hauling these very sizeable objects around is not an easy task.
Our scenario
Our daughter has been travelling with her infant car seat since she was born. However, once she reached two years old and began to outgrow the height limit of her infant car seat, we had to start looking for the next piece of equipment.
There are lots of legal mandates and recommendations out there when it comes to travelling with children in a vehicle and in air, not to mention that each parent and child would have their own unique circumstances to consider. In order to clarify the different aspects, we have attempted to summarise some of these requirements in the table above.
Our requirement
Our priority, aside from safety, was ease of transportation. While the infant car seat was reasonably weighted and could be coupled with a compact stroller to improve mobility, the traditional forward-facing car seats made for bigger kids simply do not offer such convenience. While some parents did manage to find lighter version of these car seats and hacked their stroller to carry them for air travel, the solution doesn’t seem to work well on a day-to-day setting.
Our options eventually narrowed down to two products: the WAYB Pico compact car seat and the RideSafer travel vest. While both are certified safety equipment for car travel in the USA, their major difference are:
– Approved for use in airplane
– Can be used from two years old
– More expensive of the two
– Weights 8lb
– Not yet approve for airplane use
– Only available for three years old and up
– Less expensive of the two
– Weights about 1lb
We were originally going to opt for the WAYB Pico compact car seat mainly due to the lower age limit. However, since the pandemic of 2019-2020 had greatly limited travelling in general, our daughter was fast approaching age three before we were able to travel again. The ease of being able to put on the vest in advance of the ride, combined with the lower cost and lower weight, eventually propelled us toward the RideSafer vest instead.
Six-month Review & Our recommendation
So far, we have had the RideSafer vest for six months and had used it in many car rides, ranging from 20 minutes to one hour. The advantages of the vest over traditional car seats were very forthcoming; the vest is lightweight and very transportable, can be put on in advance of the ride, and is easy to secure and detach in taxi and ride-shares. However, I can also see that younger children may struggle without the restrain and support of a traditional bucket seat. Usually, wearing the vest, my toddler tends to begin slumping and sliding after about 15 minutes in the car. Therefore, for younger children, the vest may not work very well in long car rides and/or without an adult accompanying them in the back seat.
How do you travel light with your child? Comment and share below!