Page 24 - Mobility Management, September 2018

Pediatric Series
The Measure of a Child
with clinicians’ recommendations for specialized seating and positioning. Ultimately, that overall impact can mean the differ- ence between, for example, parents using a mainstream stroller purchased at a big-box store or instead using an adaptive stroller with optimal positioning components.
Everybody wants to put the product through and just shrink it, and they think that’s enough
— Gabriel Romero
“Think about structure and positioning and infants,” Romero said. “[Infancy] is when they can start to develop some of these deformities. Imagine riding in a stroller and not having that structure and positioning. What starts to happen with the body? This is where it’s really important to have those points of posi- tioning for an infant that’s growing into a youth and hopefully continuing as they become adults.”
Getting infants and young children into adaptive strollers with positioning components is critical enough, Romero said, that he would like to see RESNA standards on the subject.
“I’m okay with having a [standard] stroller to put your
child into so you can quickly go to see the doctor,” he said, “as long as their daily-use [vehicle] is a positioning stroller. If their daily-use device is just a non-positioning stroller, then
I have an issue. I see this at Abilities Expos: strollers they got at Costco and makeshift [positioning]. It’s still not specific to what their needs are.”
That’s a point of education, Romero added, that still needs to be strengthened.
“I learned a long time ago not to judge families who have chil- dren with disabilities,” he said. “A lot of times, we can do a better job of education. We can say, ‘If you’re not addressing [the child’s needs] through early-intervention positioning, this is what we’ve seen can happen.’
“I look forward to us working harder on this as an industry. If we know the journey, if the journey is clear early on, we need to go with preventive solutions from the beginning.” m
Editor’s Note: “An Overview of Anatomical Considerations
of Infants and Children in the Adult World of Automobile Safety Design,” Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine, can be found at the U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health: https://tinyurl.com/ pediatricanatomy
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22 SEPTEMBER 2018 | MOBILITY MANAGEMENT
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