Car Seat Requirments for Different Countries

We are planning our RTW trip with our (will be) 2 year old. Does anyone know if a car seat is required in Europe, Australia or New Zealand? We will also be in Asia/Southeast Asia, but I'm assuming it's not required there...

New Zealand requires a car seat. We were there for two months with our family of four kids. Wonderful experience. By the way, I don't know if you are planning to rent or buy (and then resell) but we found a really good rental place for cheap and yet with nationwide service. It made a lot of sense to be able to simply drop off the car at the end.

Yep - you need one here in NZ.
Had you considered something like this?

http://www.stork-to-chalk.co.nz/thepod.html

http://www.flyingwithkids.com/sit_n_stroll_flight_car_seat_stroller.htm

Or just hire one with your car!

quote:

Originally posted by Kids-to-go:
... we found a really good rental place for cheap and yet with nationwide service. It made a lot of sense to be able to simply drop off the car at the end.

Would love to find out where you rented! Please let me know!

If you travel with one from the states, you are most likely safe. The one thing that you might look at is the different countries that require the seat to be turned facing the back. In several countries, it is an age thing, not by the size of the child.

I have a really skinny kid who still needed to be in a regular car seat when we left as she only weighed 30lbs at 5, but we found this:

http://www.showeryourbaby.com/risatrvebkid.html

And it was one of our best investments of multi year RTW trip. It is very light and you can bring it with you ( we took it all over Morocco).

It works really nice in a camper van as well as a car so gives you lots of flexibility and very easy to deal with.

YES you will need some kind of car seat in most of Europe. Good thing too I think, as even a sudden stop could send a little one flying into something hard.

Car seats are required, if not just wise, in most European countries. In fact, most taxis in Vienna will not drive with a small kid in the car unless s/he is in a car seat.

If you plan to rent a car, you can request a childs/baby's seat. We have always been able to rent a car with a seat. The quality of the seats have been mixed.

Anyone know about whether car seats are required in Mexico? Or California? Or of a website that lists all the car set laws in different countries? (Or is that asking too much??) I've got a friend who's asking, my cats (so far) aren't interested in traveling.

quote:

Originally posted by JessieS:
Anyone know about whether car seats are required in Mexico?

No.

We also went to Cabo last Spring, and they chucked my daughter's car seat into the back of the van with our luggage, apparently because they try to pile as many people in there as possible. My 1 1/2 year old (at the time) had to sit on my lap.

It would be great if there was some place where you could check for requirements, but I haven't found that yet. Of course, I'd love to use the car seat for safety purposes, but if I'm not going to be able to use it, I don't want to lug it there.

Gloria
riolatravels.blogspot.com

A couple of car seat requirement websites:

US, by State
UK

I've never seen much emphasis on them in Mexico through Central/South America, but I'm not sure what the laws are. We spent last winter in Paraguay "crossing our fingers" with our five year old - certainly not the ideal scenario, but it was the reality of life there.

As a pediatric trauma nurse, I cannot say strongly enough that the legal requirements of a country isn't the issue - it's about what is the safest for your baby. I spent 3 days last month with a mom trying to come to terms with her 16 month old being a parapalegic all her life because she chose not to put her in a car seat. I've also seen children disfigured and/or seriously brain injured from going through glass windshields. Of course, I only see the kiddos that survive. Going through this hellish experience at home is horrifying enough - imagine in, say, Thailand....

Sorry for the graphic post, but I've seen it way, way too many times.

Penny Lane
I've been thinking about your post on and off ever since you posted it.
What would you do.......we visited family in Malaysia and they picked us up in vans and took us everywhere - only seat belt in the van was devoted to our baby in the carseat, but the rest of us didn't use belts. There weren't any. WOuld you feel strongly enough about this to hire your own vehicle? And even if you did, could you be assured there would be seat belts?
This is bothering me with regards to our upcoming trip.

I think this says it well ( from the sixintheworld blog a family of 6 who did a one year RTW trip last year):

quote:

Safety Schmafety
By Anne
After you’ve been away from the developed world for a while, you forget the degree to which safety has become entrenched in our lives. Seat belts, handrails, crosswalks, disinfectants, and strict codes and regulations punctuate our experiences in every means of transport and almost all settings. Much of the world has neither the ability nor the inclination to enforce such conventions. Anything with wheels is loaded with as much cargo–human, animal, and otherwise–as it can carry and sometimes more. People ride on rooftops, hang from bumpers and siderails, and cram themselves with sweaty masses into putrid, filthy spaces in an effort to get from one place to another. Anything that can be eaten is eaten, even if spoiled or tainted, because when you’re desperately hungry, such distinctions are irrelevant. Any structure that provides protection from the elements is inhabited even if it’s in danger of toppling, collapsing, or exploding because short-term survival outweighs long-term safety.

We’ve learned to adapt to the local conditions as we’ve traveled, understanding that a certain level of risk is required to experience the world. So far we’ve stayed both safe and healthy even though we’ve gone months without seatbelts and days without clean clothes. We’ve ridden unpredictable creatures through treacherous landscapes, eaten more than a few cockroach-riddled entrees, and hurled down sand dunes on flimsy plastic mats. Somehow our combination of common sense and good fortune have carried us through everything we’ve encountered.

Even in Europe the safety standards are FAR BELOW what we expect in the US. ( I know you are not from there but I can not speak yet of the differences with your country as I have not been yet). They think nothing of lighting fire crackers right next to kids, many restaurants on cliffs have no barriers to stop kids or toddlers from falling off to their deaths, almost no stairs have railings etc etc etc.


I was scared to death for my daughter in Morocco because mostly we could not find any transportation without seat belts. We lugged our little travel vest all over the country, but only used it once as most of the seat belts are taken out of the cars!!

It is a risk, probably a big risk, but we have had no choice but to take this risk sometimes. We try to avoid it, but we have not always been able to do that. All you can do sometimes is pray.

If you are taking your children around the world, you will run into risks that you do not have at home. That is frightening for a mother at times. Each must make their own decision on how to handle this. Anne let her 14 year old bungie jump in Africa, which is not something I would do and this entry goes on to describe another very dangerous event when they decided to do some para sailing with the little ones in Tunisia.

The lack of safety measures around the world will amaze you, but you get used to it after a while. Do what you can, but know that there will be risks along the way.

Mama-to-many:
I don't know what I would do if I was in the situation of really really dreaming of going RTW somewhere where I couldn't be assured of car safety standards. I think that personally I would wait until my kid were big enough not to need a car seat if renting cars without belts or getting a car seat was impossible. But it is a really difficult decision. Because, it doesn't (thankfully) happen that often. But when it does...

I think I am so close to this personally on an almost daily basis, it makes the decision easier for me. It is so very devastating and heartbreaking when your child is irreperably harmed. If you haven't seen that horror or had to live through it, you simply cannot imagine it. I think taking risks is important if it means living a quality adventurous life. But if your kid gets a brain or spinal cord injury, the likely hood of their taking an amazing journey around the world as an independent adult becomes a moot point. Their quality of life is impacted enormously. Is it OK to take that kind of risk for another person who can't make that choice for themselves? And for me, that's what it fundamentally comes down to. I cannot make those decisions for my child. I cannot make a decision for him to risk being able to walk again for the rest of his life so that we can go do xyz, no matter how gorgeous and enriching xyz is.

I also think that there is a romanticized idea of how other cultures experience risk and the repercussions. I mean, look at them, look at their kids riding in the back of the pickup! Nothing happens to them, right? Unfortunately, their kids get injured and/or die a lot more then ours do. Kids fall off cliffs. Kids get their fingers blown off. We visit the beaches and the markets, but don't really ever see the local trauma hospitals.

But I think that if someone is resourceful enough to figure out how to do a RTW with their 2 year old, with all the other logistical issues at hand, getting to a car seat is probably small beans.