How We Evaluate
Crib Lab is the most safety-sensitive site in our fleet, and we treat it that way. This page is our full methodology and editorial policy.
Source hierarchy
We cite only official standards and regulator sources: the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and its regulations in 16 CFR, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) (particularly FMVSS 213/213a), ASTM International standards, JPMA/Baby Safety Alliance certification program material, and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published guidance. We do not cite brand marketing, unverified blog claims, or forum consensus as a safety fact.
Every claim carries a source
Every specific safety number or rule on this site — a weight limit, a spacing measurement, a distance, a standard number — links to the regulator or standards-body page it came from. If we cannot find or verify a fact against a primary source, we omit it entirely rather than approximate it.
What we will not do
- We never give medical advice, sleep-training advice, or improvised safety guidance beyond what a cited source states.
- We never state a rule we cannot cite to a regulator or standards body.
- We never recommend secondhand car seats or cribs — a used car seat's crash history and true expiration date are often unverifiable, and pre-2011, drop-side, and recalled cribs remain in circulation despite being illegal to sell.
- We never publish exact prices or invent product ASINs. Amazon links are always tagged search URLs by gear category, marked
rel="nofollow sponsored noopener". - We never claim to have hands-on tested a product's crash performance or safety compliance ourselves — compliance testing is the manufacturer's and accredited labs' job, not ours.
The disclaimer we repeat on every page
Always follow your product's manual and current CPSC/NHTSA guidance; this page summarizes published standards and is not a substitute for them. This isn't boilerplate — a specific product's manual can set a stricter or different limit than a general standard, and it always governs for that item.
Corrections and versioning
Standards get revised — FMVSS 213a's side-impact requirement and the 2022 CPSC crib-mattress firmness rule are both recent examples. When a cited standard changes or we find an error, we update the affected page and our named dataset (The Baby Gear Safety Numbers) in place and bump the version/date shown on that page.
For hands-on help
For installation help, contact a certified Child Passenger Safety Technician (a directory is maintained via NHTSA) or your product's manufacturer directly. This site is a reference for published standards, not a substitute for individualized safety guidance.