Car Safety Wake-Up Calls

I was doing about 55 down FM 1431 with my three kids in the back of my Honda Odyssey, singing along to some Disney garbage to keep the peace, when I heard the unmistakable, heavy thunk of a car door unlatching. It didn't swing wide open, but there was that terrifying crack of highway wind suddenly rushing into the cabin. My oldest, Leo—who's currently four, thinks he's entirely immortal, and is my daily cautionary tale—had somehow wiggled his arms out of his five-point harness, reached across his armrest, and pulled the door handle. I slammed on the brakes so hard my Yeti cup vaulted into the dashboard, threw the van onto the gravel shoulder, and completely lost my mind right there on the side of the road.

That was my ultimate "what not to do" moment, because I had totally forgotten to physically flip the child-lock switch on the door frame after my husband cleaned the car that weekend. We think we've it all under control as parents, but the reality is, we don't.

I was reminded of that horrible gravel-shoulder moment when I saw the news last December. You probably saw it in your feed, too. Hudson Meek, the sixteen-year-old actor who played the young version of Ansel Elgort's character in that movie Baby Driver, died in a completely devastating accident in his hometown in Alabama. He fell out of a moving vehicle. Just typing that out makes my stomach drop into my boots. He was sixteen years old. We spend so much time obsessing over our infants and toddlers, terrified of every bump in the road, but this tragedy really shook me because it proves that the danger doesn't magically vanish when they outgrow their booster seats.

Toddler buckled into a car seat looking out a rolled-up car window

The false comfort of the big kid years

I'm just gonna be real with you y'all, taking the baby drive down to the post office with a trunk full of my Etsy packages suddenly felt a whole lot more sinister to me after reading about that accident. We hyper-fixate on rear-facing angles and chest clip placement when they're tiny, but once they hit elementary or middle school age, we just kind of assume they know better than to mess with the doors or hang out the windows.

I've spent literally hours ranting to my husband about the manual child locks on the rear doors of our cars. It's this tiny, insignificant-looking plastic switch hiding on the inside edge of the door panel that you can only see when the door is open. My husband always turns them off when he vacuums the car or gives his buddies a ride to the hardware store, and he forgets to turn them back on. It infuriates me to no end. It takes half a second to flip it down, but if you don't, your four-year-old can just casually open the door into oncoming traffic while you're trying to merge onto the highway.

My mom, bless her heart, loves to tell me that I'm being overly dramatic about this stuff. She loves to remind me that we rode in the back of my grandpa's un-air-conditioned Ford pickup truck going 60 miles an hour down dirt roads in 1994, and we never used child locks, and we all survived. And I usually just roll my eyes at her because survivor's bias is a heck of a drug, and also, cars go a lot faster now and there are a million more distracted drivers on the road. I'm not messing around with door handles.

Meanwhile, I used to lose sleep over the idea of my kids choking on a stray Cheerio in the back seat, but honestly, if they want to quietly eat a stale cracker they found on the floorboard so I can drive in peace, I don't even care anymore.

I do try to keep their hands occupied so they aren't treating the car doors like a science experiment. My youngest, baby D, is currently teething and wants to put his mouth on the dirty seatbelt straps. I bought him the Violet Bubble Tea Teether to chew on instead. It's about $15, and honestly, it's just okay. The shape is cute, the little boba pearls are funny, and the silicone is soft, but my kid usually throws it under the driver's seat after about five minutes anyway, leaving me to just hand him a frozen washcloth from my cooler bag. It works in a pinch if you need a quick distraction, but it's not some magic wand that cures car tantrums.

What Dr. Miller mumbled about physics and flying kids

My doctor, Dr. Miller, is this incredibly blunt, tired woman who looks like she hasn't slept a full night since 2014, and she's the one who really terrified me about car safety. We were at Leo's four-year well-check, and she told me that the absolute biggest risk of serious injury in a moving vehicle isn't always the crash impact itself, but ejection.

She threw out some statistic from the CDC or the NHTSA that I completely butchered in my head, but the gist was that teenagers actually wear their seatbelts the least out of any age group. That makes zero sense to me rationally, but it also makes perfect sense because teenagers are basically toddlers with cell phones who think nothing bad can ever happen to them. Dr. Miller mumbled something about how human bodies just aren't meant to withstand the sheer force of a sudden swerve if a door flings open, and because I don't really understand the actual physics of velocity and centrifugal force, my main takeaway was just that if they aren't strapped firmly to the seat, they become projectiles the second things go sideways.

Part of the reason kids try to unbuckle or wiggle out of their straps in the first place is that they're hot and miserable. This is where I'll actually praise a product without hesitation. I bought the Sleeveless Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit for the baby, and it's entirely worth the $22 price tag. I know that sounds a little steep for a plain onesie, but the fabric is incredibly soft and it doesn't bunch up into a sweaty, chafing nightmare under the crotch buckle. When he isn't sitting in a puddle of his own sweat with synthetic fabric rubbing his thighs raw, he doesn't fight the five-point harness nearly as much.

If you're dealing with a kid who screams every time you put them in the car seat because they run hot, you might want to browse through Kianao's organic collections, because just finding clothes that actually let their skin breathe is honestly half the battle of car safety.

Making the car a non-negotiable zone

The hardest part of all this is the transition from physically strapping them down in an infant seat to trusting them to sit correctly in a booster or a regular seatbelt. The boundary testing is exhausting.

I realized that instead of screaming at them to stop touching the door and praying they listen, you basically just have to throw the car in park, turn up the radio to drown out their whining, and refuse to put the vehicle in drive until every single person is buckled correctly and sitting on their bottoms, which usually means we're late to preschool at least three times a week. It's annoying, it's sweaty, and I hate doing it, but it's the only thing that honestly registers with them.

Honestly, sometimes the most dangerous part of our daily routine is just trying to back out of my rural driveway without running over a stray tricycle or a wandering toddler. On heavy shipping days for my shop, I usually leave baby D inside on his Rainbow Wooden Play Gym for an extra ten minutes while I load my boxes into the trunk. The wooden frame is sturdy, the little hanging elephant keeps him totally occupied on the living room rug, and I don't have to panic about where he's crawling while I'm maneuvering the van in reverse.

The tragedy with Hudson Meek is just incredibly sad, and my heart breaks for his family and his community, but it's also a loud, glaring warning for the rest of us. It's so easy to get complacent. We survive the baby years and we think we're in the clear, but we just trade choking hazards for peer pressure and horsepower.

So before you scroll down to read the messy FAQs I threw together below, I need you to put your coffee down, walk out to your driveway right now, open your back doors, and physically check that those little manual child locks are flipped down to the locked position.

Messy Car Safety FAQs from a Tired Mom

How do you get a screaming toddler into a car seat without losing your mind?

Honestly, you don't. You just sweat, apologize to anyone walking past your car in the Target parking lot, and wrestle them in like you're wrestling an alligator. There's no graceful way to do it. I just remind myself that their temporary anger is vastly preferable to them being unsafe, and then I bribe them with a fruit snack the second the chest clip clicks.

Did your mom really say car safety is a modern invention?

Yes, bless her heart, my mother firmly believes that because I survived riding in the bed of a pickup truck in the 90s, my anxiety about door locks is just "millennial nonsense." I just completely ignore her advice on this topic. Parenting rules have changed because we seriously have crash data now, so I let her make her comments and then I lock the doors anyway.

At what age do you stop using child locks on the doors?

I've absolutely no idea, and given my oldest child's recent highway stunt, I'll probably keep them on until he's old enough to pay for his own car insurance. I think technically you can turn them off when you trust your kid not to pull the handle while the car is moving, but my trust issues are currently through the roof.

How do I talk to older kids about car safety without sounding preachy?

I don't have a teenager yet, but since I'm already dealing with boundary pushing, my strategy is usually just blunt honesty. I tell them exactly what Dr. Miller told me: bodies fly out of cars if they aren't buckled, and the car doesn't move an inch until I hear the click. No exceptions, no debates, no moving the car.