Setup
Why your baby’s head keeps falling forward in the car seat
Almost always the seat is too upright. Forget 45 degrees — your seat has its own indicator, and the right setting changes as your baby grows.
Setup & fit
Most of the time the seat is fine. The setting is not.
Parents tend to worry about buying the wrong seat and rarely worry about the harness being one slot too low or two fingers too loose — and it is the second one that shows up in nearly every roadside check. A seat that fits badly protects worse than a cheaper seat fitted properly. These are the checks worth doing tonight.
Getting the child into the seat correctly
Harness, straps and the usual mistakes
Setup
The mistakes that turn up in almost every car
Loose harness, twisted straps, chest clip on the belly, wrong slot height.
Setup
The three ways a seat can be attached
Clamped to the car’s built-in anchor points or held by the adult belt — and how to tell it is actually tight.
Setup
Has my child outgrown it — or is it just set wrong?
The signs that genuinely mean it is time, and the ones that mean an adjustment instead.
Setup
Winter coats under the harness
Why a padded coat leaves slack you cannot see, and what to do instead.
Is this seat still safe to use?
Condition
Expiry dates: where to find yours and why it exists
Plastic ages, standards move, and the date is stamped on the shell.
Condition
Second-hand seats: what to check before you accept one
Crash history, missing parts, labels, recalls — and when to say no.
Condition
Cleaning without damaging the harness
What can go in water and what quietly loses its strength if it does.
Does it fit this car, and this child?
One thing we will not do
We do not publish step-by-step installation instructions for a specific seat. Your seat and your car both came with a manual, those two manuals are the authority, and a generic sequence written by someone who has never seen your model is exactly how a step gets skipped. What we cover instead is how to tell whether the result is right, what the standards require, and which checks catch the errors that manuals assume you will not make.
For what the law requires rather than what good practice suggests, see Rules & standards. A free inspection by a certified child passenger safety technician still beats any article, including ours.