NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Properly installing your car seat can be difficult. With safety in mind, Northern Berkshire EMS held a free car seat check on Friday.

Child passenger safety technicians and some trained officers helped check car seats to make sure they are safely installed, and not recalled, becoming broken, or been through a crash.

“They don’t realize that they need to check so that’s why we’re here!”

“Usually in any motor vehicle accident a properly secured child is the safest and least injured person. I’m fortunate enough that I have never seen any improper use of car seats in any major accident, but everyone has second-hand accounts and horror stories, absolutely.”

Paramedic and child passenger safety technician Anthony Brait says even if you read the manual, it’s a good idea to get it checked with an expert either way.

“Even if you have a keen attention to detail, it’s still always recommended if you have questions and even if you think you don’t to come and get your car seat assessed by a child passenger safety technician because a huge number of people are improperly using their car seats and they didn’t even know,” said Brait.

Child passenger safety technician instructor Michaela Brait showed me how to properly install a seat and what they look out for when checking for people.

Some of the biggest concerns they see are when car seats are flipped too soon. 

“We see that’s a major misuse is really just flipping your child too soon we really like to stress age 2 is a minimum age 1 is the state minimum but age 2 is really we just want to give them a little extra time to let their spines fuse their bones harden up," said Michaela.

They recommend to keep your child rear facing as long as possible because forward facing seats can cause more harm if your child is still developing strong bones.

“When a child is forward faced too soon the bones in their neck haven’t ossified and any kind of even minor impact can cause, that’s a scary term, internal decapitation, which means their spinal cord separates. It's almost always fatal and such an easy thing to avoid,” said Anthony.

Some of the other issues they see often are counterfeit seats, loose straps and they caution not to add anything of your own to the car seat.

“We don’t want to add anything to the seat that didn’t come with it. Your manual's going to say this explicitly, do not add any after-market products, no strap covers, nothing like that, because we don’t know how that product works with the car seat in the event of an accident,” Michaela said.

To find a child passenger safety technician near you, you can go here for Massachusetts or check here for around the country.