Many states have ever stricter infant, toddler, and child restraint requirements.  Car seats are an expense that none of us can avoid.  Even grandparents need to fork over for the appropriate restraints if they are taking the grandkids out for activities.  Day care providers have to insure they have proper equipment if they are to be transporting children in any way during the day.  That being said....I just learned something (and I am a veteran parent) which had I known before, would have changed entirely the way that I viewed car seats and how I would shop for and purchase them.  Loving my kids, I spent big money on the state of the art car seat restraint systems available, with all the features making them convertible from infancy and rear facing through the toddler years and booster seat phase.  Well, recently, at a church garage sale (where there was a huge array of car seats in beautiful and clean condition, good repair) I was informed of something that I never knew and found out that most of us don't know.....Car seats come with an expiration date!  It is imprinted somewhere on the plastic-usually the bottom.  Any car seat that is involved in an accident resulting in child injury past that stamped date-well, the manufacturers are going to try to weasel out of any responsibility for those items failure based upon the stamped expiration date.  This means that even the gently used car seats handed down among family members who have taken excellent care of the items could potentially fall into this "expired" category.  The information came about, because our church had decided to donate all items left at the end of the sale to a Women's shelter, a homeless shelter, and Good Will.   Each group sent representatives to look at our leftovers for whatever might be useful and usable for their programs-and at the end of it all, the car seats were still out there all in a row....One of the Moms, who is also a nurse in an emergency room said she was on duty when a family was brought in as victims of an auto accident, and the young child had been thrown free of the car seat...this is where she found out about the expiration date thing, because one of the fire department paramedics (you know, the guys who hold the safety clinics to show you how to properly anchor your carseats into the vehicle) showed her where to look for these expiration dates on the seats and explained the potential liability limitations and problems....And theoretically, a car seat could sit on a shelf in a retail store, unopened and unused (brand new), and still carry an expired date on it.  The consumer might be paying full price for an expired car seat...So, when you buy a car seat, please insist on taking it out of the box in the store and looking for that expiration date, and knowing that the clock is ticking, and the car seat will probably expire long before your family outgrows its need of the device, it isn't necessary to get the most costly seat-rather just make sure that it is safety certified for your state regulations, and it probably would be best to purchase the least costly alternative that fits the rules, because as your child gets older and grows, odds are that you will need to replace it....especially with those kids who don't grow as quickly and spend a longer time in car seats and boosters.   For my daughter, she didn't get to shed the car seat until her she was a certain height and weight or her 8th birthday, and the 8th birthday came first.  Imagine how badly I felt to discover that the car seat she had expired somewhere around her 4th birthday.