Car seats and bulky coats: What you need to know about winter car safety

Low temperatures mean heavy coats. We get it, you want to bundle up in your warmest fleece or heaviest down before embarking on any kind of adventure. Who wouldn’t? But when it comes to your little ones, a car seat and a bulky coat do not play nice together.

Emily A. Thomas, an auto safety manager at the Consumer Reports Auto Test Center, recently shared winter car safety tips with NPR. Thomas says bulky layers can cause the seatbelt straps to loosen which would make it less effective.

“What happens is that those layers and that puffiness will compress during a crash, and it introduces additional slack in the child’s harness system in their car seat,” Thomas says.

Wondering what other things you should look out for? Here are Thomas’s other winter car safety tips for kids.

Pinch test

The pinch test requires two steps. First, you’ll want to secure your child in their car seat while they are wearing their winter coat. Pull on the harness until there is no gap left between their clothes and the seatbelt. In the second go-around, you’ll want to secure your child once more into the car seat and go through the same motions of tightening the harness but this time your child shouldn’t be wearing their coat. Essentially, you’re testing the difference in how secure the harness can lay against your child with their coat vs without.

Thomas says, “If you’re able to pinch any of the harness strap between your fingers again at their shoulders, that tells you that the coat that they’re using is creating slack in the system.”

Layer on top of the harness

When you remove a puffy coat from the equation, your child is less likely to move around in the event of a crash. The solution to keeping them warm without their bulky coat is to add layers on top.

Thomas says, “And in order to still keep them warm, you can drape a blanket over them after they’ve been properly harnessed, or you can put their coat on them backwards on top of their harness like a blanket. This will help to keep them warm throughout the car ride.”

Conduct a proper car seat check

Conducting a proper check to make sure the harness is safe and secure is always important, Thomas adds.

You’ll want to check:

• all harness buckles are secure
• chest clip is at armpit level
• carseat sits securely in the vehicle

Thomas says the car seat, “shouldn’t move more than 1 inch side to side or front to back if you pull on the install.” If your child sits in a front-facing seat, she recommends attaching the top strap to the back of the seat because it helps reduce the motion of the car seat.

Car safety for kids can be a tricky thing to navigate, especially when you’re trying to keep your child warm and also be cognizant of their safety.