Today’s Hint: The Car Seat Friendly Toys

I was disturbed when I recently read that one of the common car seat mistakes parents make is “adding additional padding, toys or mirrors to a child’s car seat.”

This mistake on AAA’s list of 12-common car seat mistakes especially bothered me because I was guilty of a variation of it. While I haven’t hooked up any toys to my daughter’s car seat directly, I have been giving my daughter board books and other toys to play with while in the car. In fact, we have a few books and toys stored in the car to keep our daughter occupied during long car trips.

According to AAA, the loose toys can become “dangerous projectiles” during a crash and can potentially also interfere with how a car seat is designed to perform in an accident. Still, I can’t imagine going toyless in the car, so, just in time for the holiday toy buying season, I checked in with car seat expert Dr. Alisa Baer, one third of the team over at TheCarSeatLady.com, to find out which toys, if any, are car seat okay.

According to Dr. Baer, there’s a simple test that can determine whether a particular toy is safe for use in a car. Dr. Baer calls it “the ouch test”: “Take the toy and hit yourself in the head with it. If you have to say ouch, then it will have too much force during a crash.”

Dr. Baer says that acceleration during a crash makes flying objects much heavier upon impact than they are at rest. On the other hand, if you don’t say “ouch,” she says the toy is “soft and light enough to be safe in the car.”