Thursday, May 1, 2014

Traveling with a car seat, part I

A question I hear a lot is whether it's worth traveling with a car seat to your final destination and the answer is "It depends." Obviously, if you're driving from your home to your final destination, then taking the car seat is an easy no-brainer, but what if you're flying overseas?

Nine times out of 10, it's probably a really good idea to take your own car seat with you but there are a couple of exceptions to that rule: a) if you're primarily taking public transportation (trains/subways and buses) and b) you're not likely to spend much time in an automobile (either rental or taxi). Now, it's always a good idea to use a car seat in a taxi, but that's also a judgement call. When we went to London during Easter 2013, we left the car seat at home, knowing we would only be in a taxi for the ride to and from the airport (the child sat in our laps for the flight). It was a risky decision but we figured it wasn't worth dragging a 25 pound contraption across the Atlantic for two 30 minute taxi rides. Your mileage may vary.

We did take our car seat to India -- a country where attitudes about seatbelts are lax (if seatbelts are even available in the car!). It was challenging to find a car with seatbelts in the back (forget about LATCH), but we did but lots of people traveling to India don't feel the need to take the carseat simply because the culture and the "infrastructure" (i.e. cars with seatbelts) don't support the use of them.

If you know you're going to be spending a lot of time in a personal vehicle, it's well worth taking your own carseat; the pain of dragging around a carseat well outweighs the safety gains made from taking them. I also recommend taking along the installation manual just in case you need a reminder or if the installation is different than what you're used to (ie LATCH versus seatbelt).


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