I was excited to publish an article on child car seat safety, because I love children, and want them to be safe. Also, when I found out that most car seats are not used correctly, I realized that many people would want to know about it so they could correct any mistakes they were making. I know I did! I was very happy to learn the proper way to protect my children in the car.
My children are now much too old for child safety seats. It’s been a few years since we even had to use a booster seat. Of course, I still want to protect my children, and always will. I do what I can, and hope that they will continue to use safety measures even when I’m not with them. I think the best and easiest way to do that is to teach them when they’re young. It’s easier to get younger children to cooperate, and when they grow up doing things a certain way, they’re more likely to both accept and keep the habit. Kids don’t always want to cooperate, though, especially when you introduce a new idea to them. I guess we all resist change to some extent. So, creativity can be an important aspect of teaching safe habits to our children. I’m the oldest of seven, so you can imagine that creativity was even more important for my parents. Trying to get that many kids to pay attention, cooperate, and retain good habits couldn’t have been easy. One way my dad found to help us stay safe was to use the “rotten egg” saying. No kid wants to be a rotten egg, right? I didn’t know what he was doing at the time, but when I got a little older, I realized how clever he was being. Here’s how it went. When we would be going out to get into the car, to get us all to fasten our seat belts quickly and willingly, he’d announce that the last one buckled is the rotten egg. Well, you should have seen all of us getting those seatbelts on as fast as we could! My father, not wanting to deal with arguing and crying, very smartly ‘struggled’ with his belt, and always managed to be the “rotten egg”. In all of those years, none of us caught on. At least not until we were old enough and wise enough to play along, that is.
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