the best car seats {by review.com}

Car seats. Ugh. Almost no other kids’ item gives me more anxiety than car seats.

If you know me, I am a bit of an anxious person and can keep myself together, but I am close to neurotic about car seats. There are so many choices and so much information, it is overwhelming, even to a non-anxious person. I tried to be pragmatic, but when I was pregnant, I spent hours and hours poring over blog posts, websites, books, articles, Consumer Reports, etc. about car seats. And then I asked every single parent that I knew what car seat they had and why they chose it. Every one is different and has different needs, but I got a lot of good information.

The first decision that Aaron and I made was that we would start with an infant seat. For us, it felt like a no-brainer because our stroller (ours is the Bugaboo Bee 3) had the ability to adapt to a car seat. Even before we were parents we knew the convenience of leaving the baby in the car seat (if possible) was worth it! For our infant seat, we settled on the Chicco KeyFit 30 (which we also used for Daphne) and I would highly recommend it!

But then, we had to start thinking about another car seat less than a year after Eloise was born because infant seats have such a short life (it is one of the cons of this type of seat) and babies get bigger, and in this case, longer. We moved Eloise into a convertible seat (rear-facing) just shy of her first birthday. And after hours and hours of research, we settled on the Britax Boulevard. Again, we highly recommend this seat and even bought another one (but with the Click-Tight feature) when Daphne grew out of the infant seat.

Enter: reviews.com. Specifically, the reviews on Best Infant Car Seat and Best Convertible Car Seat. Reviews.com is a local Seattle company that researches household items and goods and then posts reviews on the BEST products in any given category. Guys, this is life-changing! Imagine the hours you could save not googling or scanning 10,000 Amazon reviews. This is the information that I wish I would have had when we were buying car seats or really any household good!

Top Picks for Infant Car Seat

{image via reviews.com}

In each article, there is a quick synopsis about what product is the best so you don’t have to scroll and scroll to find the answer, and then there are highlights of the best two products, followed by a much more in-depth review of why and how the best products in that category were picked.

As the articles both state, all car seats have to meet the same minimum safety requirements, so when you are choosing a seat, it is features you are really shopping (and paying) for. And because incorrectly using a car seat is extremely common, the best car seats are really the ones that are the easiest to use. For example, most infant seats have a separate base that you leave buckled into the car so that you can easily take the seat in and out without having to secure it each time. And even convertible seats are getting upgraded features that help ease use, like the Click-Tight feature on the Britax seat that allows for much easier installation.

Featured Image for Convertible Car Seat

{image from reviews.com}

The emphasis on these easy-to-use features is a great way to simplify car seat shopping and help narrow down the options. And while you don’t necessarily have to buy exactly the seat that is recommended in the article (we have different versions/models of two of the seats recommended) it does save you from having 25 open web browsers to compare and contrast car seat features. (Yep, that was totally me!) I wish I would have had this basic guidance when choosing car seats for my kids!

Be sure to go check out the Best Infant Car Seats and the Best Convertible Car Seats!

And be sure to check out all of the reviews over on Review.com!

Disclosure: Review.com reached out to see if I would share these car seat reviews to my blog readers. I was not offered any compensation and all thoughts and opinions are my own.

This post contains affiliate links.

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