'Car Seat Lady' knows her stuff

Anyone who has sweated or sworn while struggling to install a child safety seat understands why Debbi Baer gets desperate phone calls.

Baer is one of roughly 30,000 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-certified Child Passenger Safety Technicians. She's a graduate and instructor of a four-day course — and if you can't believe it takes four days to learn how to buckle a safety seat in a car, you've probably never installed one — at least not properly.

When the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration studied car-seat installation, in 2001, it found about 73 percent were being used incorrectly. A small cadre of trained seat installation professionals — a group safety advocates say isn't nearly large enough to meet the need — has grown thanks to word of mouth among parents. Most work for free; a few charge a nominal fee.

Working from her Pikesville, Md., driveway with a fanny pack of tape measures, levels and tools and a closet full of towels she rolls up and wedges under seats to achieve the correct angle, Baer, an intense, petite woman "gets in these car seats, she's jumping up and down on them, she's doing contortions," said David Kramer, a Baltimore father of three and a repeat customer.

"What she does to get these seats tight, it's almost comical," he said.

Everyone in the industry agrees that it shouldn't take a trained professional to install a safety seat. While manufacturers insist that each year's model is easier to install than the last year's, the profusion of car and seat models and the variety of backseat-belting systems is enough to confuse a trained engineer.

Nicole R. Nason, NHTSA's administrator and mother of two, said in an interview that she and her husband struggled for hours to correctly install a car seat when her first daughter was born.

"It had a terrible slant to it, and we couldn't get it level," Nason said. "It drove us crazy." Eventually they bought a second seat.

Complicating matters is that almost nothing about car seats is standardized, and their fit is different from car to car.

"I do this every day of my life, and I can't tell you how many combinations there are, because, as we speak, there's a new combination being born," said Lorrie Walker, training manager and technical adviser of nonprofit Safe Kids USA, online at www.safekids.org/.