44 Families Receive Car Seats for Kids

“Do you know how to install the car seat for a new baby?” Gilbert Marquez Jr. asked Monday at a car seat giveaway sponsored by Easter Seals’ Kids Are Riding Safe and Kaiser Permanente Woodland Hills.

The young mother wasn’t sure. “Facing forward?” she asked.

Wrong answer.

“No. Facing backward,” she said, correcting herself.

Thanks to a $3,800-donation from Kaiser Permanente in the Valley, 44 parents received free car seats at the YMCA/Greater Los Angeles Infant Learning Center at San Fernando High School.

“If you went ahead and bought them at a Target or something, they would cost $45 or $50,” said Marquez, coordinator of the program.

Before the parents received the car seats, they watched a video on how to install and use them properly.

According to Marquez, faulty installation and misuse of car seats is almost as big a problem as not having them at all.

When officials concerned about car seat safety check the seats, they find up to 90% of them are not properly installed, he said.

“I was stunned the first time I went through the training,” said Marquez, who also discovered that auto accidents were the leading cause of death among small children in Southern California. In 1998, the last year for which statistics are available, 46 children died in auto accidents, up from 37 the year before. More than half the children were Latinos, he said.

Marquez watched the parents, all but two of them mothers, install the car seats after they had studied the video. He reminded one mother that car seats for children less than a year old should be tilted back at a 45-degree angle to make sure that babies with relatively weak neck muscles don’t choke.

This can be accomplished by placing a rolled-up beach towel under the front of the car seat, he said.

The car seats were distributed to parents with limited incomes, mostly high school students.

High school junior Lorena Ruelas, 17, got a seat for her 6-week-old daughter, Melady, whose profusion of dark hair was caught up in a tiny pink clip shaped like a butterfly.

“I wanted my baby to be safe,” Ruelas said.