Evaluation of a child passenger safety class in increasing parental knowledge

•Motor vehicle collisions continue to be a leading cause of death and injury among children, despite studies demonstrating the effectiveness of child restraints in reducing death and injury.•Lack of knowledge has frequently been cited as a barrier against the use of child restraints.•A total of 491 parents/caregivers attended our child passenger safety class. We found an increase in knowledge post-intervention among class participants.•The increase in knowledge was slightly higher among English-speaking participants than Spanish-speaking participants. Child passenger restraint systems have been found to greatly reduce the risk of injury and death among child passengers. However, nearly half of the children who died in 2009 as a result of motor vehicle crashes were completely unrestrained. Our global hypothesis is that parents and other caregivers failed to restrain children due to a lack of child passenger seat education and practice. In this report, we postulate that a car seat class will improve the basic understanding of child passenger safety. The objective of the study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a car seat class in increasing parental knowledge about child passenger safety. Car seat classes were held at a Level 1 pediatric trauma center every other Tuesday for ten months. The curriculum consisted of: child passenger safety laws discussion, a 21-min video on the use of child safety seats followed by a 15-min discussion about the video, 15min of discussing the different types of car seats, and hands-on training on how to properly install and use child restraints. Free car seats were provided to eligible parents. The pre-test was administered at the beginning of class and the post-test at the end of the class. McNemar's test and a paired t-test were used to compare pre- and post-test scores. Test scores were also stratified by language spoken. Forty-four classes were held and a total of 491 parents/caregivers attended the classes. An increase in knowledge was found for all survey questions. Mean knowledge score for the post-test was 3.10 points higher compared to the mean knowledge score from the pre-test. Mean difference in knowledge scores for English-speaking participants were higher than Spanish-speaking participants. Lack of knowledge and low risk perception have frequently been cited as barriers for the use of child passenger restraints. Our intervention attempted to eliminate these barriers. We found that this intervention was effective