It’s a casual Sunday, and you’re taking your kids to the grocery store. The road is familiar, and you’re not in a rush, cruising at a smooth 40 miles per hour. But as you move through the intersection, you notice the car to your right isn’t slowing down. You see it coming for only a second before you instinctively jerk the wheel to the left to avoid impact, crashing into a light pole. Air bags deploy. Glass shatters. The engine bay is crumpled.
The next thing you hear is sirens. You see flashing lights. And as you gather yourself, head throbbing and adrenaline flowing, you immediately turn around to look at your children.
At this moment, what do you want to see?
The most dangerous thing we do with our kids is drive together in the car. Period. Driving is complicated, and humans are not very good at it. Thankfully, car manufacturers have created mechanisms to protect us from our own negligence and human error. Air bags, seat belts, crumple zones and lane change alerts are all designed to protect us from ourselves.
These safety systems, however, are exclusively built for adults. When our kids travel with us, we use tools to modify the adult-centric safety structures in our cars. Most commonly we modify the seat belt system by using infant car seats for our smallest children, moving to convertible and booster seats as our kids age. Each car seat tool serves one purpose: to retro-engineer the existing safety belt mechanism to work with small bodies.
For elementary-aged kids, booster seats are the tool needed to optimize the functionality of a seat belt until a child is of proper size. In my community, I’m seeing way too many kids getting out of booster seats before their bodies are ready. Moving out of a booster seat too quickly puts young children at risk for life-threatening injuries that can be prevented. We need to work together to change the negligent narrative that booster seats are “baby seats,” and acknowledge that our responsibility to our children is to enforce and promote safe riding.
[Read: Car Seat Safety: Avoid These Common Mistakes.]
Keep kids in a booster seat until they are 4 feet 9 inches tall.
A common misperception is that the only utility of a seat belt is to keep us from getting ejected from the vehicle at the time of a crash. Although it’s true that it does this, the most important role of the seat belt is to distribute the force of a collision over the strongest parts of our body, namely the hips and rib cage. If the belt is not positioned correctly over those critical areas of the body, it can’t do its job.
While moving from 40 miles per hour to 0 at the time of a crash, an 80-pound child creates 1.3 tons of force. This force will be distributed throughout her body. Thank you, physics.
Collision force needs to be distributed throughout the strongest parts of the body’s skeleton to protect internal organs from injury. Seat belts are designed and tested to provide this protection for average adult heights and weights. What is more critical to understand for child safety is that the lap belt is the anchor the body needs for correct force distribution. Even if the shoulder belt happens to be in the correct place over the shoulder, a young child is still at risk of “submarining” or riding under the seat belt during a crash because of improper lap belt positioning
Submarining occurs when the force of the crash causes a child’s body to slide downward, moving the lap belt placement from the powerfully protective hip girdle to the vulnerable abdominal cavity. This can cause internal organ lacerations and spinal cord injuries at points of hyperflexion. Mature hips with angulated anterior ischial spines (the “pointy part” on the front of our adult hips) are necessary for correct placement of a lap belt. The ASIS is a physical structure in our body that keeps the seat belt from riding up and over hips during a crash. It’s the ASIS that holds everything in place. In an immature body, there is no ASIS. Through the elementary school years, children do not have this body part. A booster seat, therefore, is essentially creating “artificial” ischial spines, holding the belt in place and preventing submarining during a crash. That is why even a backless booster helps protect the entire body of a child against accident injury.
[See: The 11 Most Dangerous Places in Your Home for Babies and Small Kids.]
Decades of research have supported the use of booster seats until a child reaches an appropriate height. Research finds a 45 percent reduction in injury in kids who experience a collision in a booster seat versus without one. Canadian data shows that a child is three and a half times more likely to suffer a serious injury and four times more likely to have a head injury if not properly boosted. Eight of the 10 states with the highest crash fatality rates are ones with the least strict booster seat laws.
Despite this data, surveys suggest only 20 percent of 8-year-olds travel in booster seats and that only 3 percent of children are kept in booster seats until 4 feet 9 inches. This is lunacy. Motor vehicle collisions are one of the leading causes of death for children. We must get this right.
You have the authority as a parent to dictate where collision force is going to be applied to your child.
It doesn’t matter if you feel like your child is old enough to ditch the booster, or if your child thinks boosters are not cool. That doesn’t change the physics. Regardless of local laws, keep the decision to protect your child simple and easy by using your child’s height as the marker of when to get out of a booster seat.
[See: 10 Concerns Parents Have About Their Kids’ Health.]
When you turn around, you want to know you have done your very best to protect and defend the safety of your children when it matters most.
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Your Kid Should Probably Be in a Booster Seat. Here?s Why. originally appeared on usnews.com
