Mom Warns About Car Seat Accessories After Her Daughter Was Ejected From Her Safety Harness

Hannah McKinney’s 2-month-old daughter, Robin, was strapped tightly into her car seat when the family was involved in a bad rollover crash. The car seat should have kept her safe, yet Robin was ejected from her safety harness and thrown to the back of their van during the accident. She’s okay—she only suffered a hairline fracture on her upper arm—but McKinney was shaken up over the fact that the car seat didn’t protect her daughter in the first place. She started racking her brain to figure out what went wrong and quickly zeroed in on the sheepskin seat belt covers she’d placed on the harness to make it more comfortable.

“PSA to all parents and soon-to-be parents,” McKinney wrote on Facebook alongside a photo of Robin’s car seat with the sheepskin covers still in place. In the post, she explained that the family had been involved in a car accident and that her daughter had been thrown from her car seat before making her hypothesis about what happened.

“When we got to the vehicle all straps were tight and intact, plus [the] car seat [was] still in [the] base still attached to seat,” she wrote. “But with the force of the vehicle, the sheepskin slid against her shirt and made her go flying out. Please, please, please people DO NOT put things on a car seat that did not come that way from the manufacturer. Plus, anything on a car seat in an accident voids the warranty!”

Every adult—parent or not—knows that car seat safety is so important. After all, motor vehicle crashes cause one out of every four accidental deaths for children (the most recently available stats show that in 2015, 663 children under the age of 13 were passengers killed in a car crash—and nearly one in three of those children weren’t even strapped in). And added accessories, like McKinney’s seat belt covers, throw unknown variables into the mix that parents can’t always anticipate.

“Anything that didn’t come with the car seat has not been crash-tested and could be dangerous in an accident,” Gloria Del Castillo, a child passenger safety expert for Buckle Up for Life, a national injury prevention program from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and Toyota, previously told The Bump.

McKinney, for one, intends to learn from her mistakes. And hopefully the more than 134,000 people who’ve shared her post will too!

She summed up the experience like this: “We had to learn the hard way and I thank god every day that he had his hands on her! They may look cute and it may be soft, but for your child’s safety don’t do it. We attended a car seat safety class at children’s health care of Atlanta and it was a real eye opener.”

Car seat safety classes are great, and we highly recommend them. And if you want to be extra sure your child is safe, you can always try this paramedic-recommended test at home to ensure your child is properly strapped in.

Please note: The Bump and the materials and information it contains are not intended to, and do not constitute, medical or other health advice or diagnosis and should not be used as such. You should always consult with a qualified physician or health professional about your specific circumstances.