My oldest daughter is 4, and we’ve moved her up to a booster seat despite the fact that current recommendations are to keep her in a conventional child seat until she physically can’t fit anymore. There’s a growing trend, it seems, not to give height or weight recommendations for transitions anymore. The advice basically boils down to “Keep your kids in the back seat in the most protective seat they can still physically buckle into.”
My guess is that this basically boils down to the fact that 5 point harnesses are safer than 3 point harnesses, and the back seat is safer than the front seat, and none of these recommendations have anything to do with the fact that they’re children. If I really wanted to be concerned about safety, I would fashion an adult sized 5 point safety seat and harness, put it in the middle of the back of my car, and make my wife ride there when it’s just the two of us. I mean, it’d be safer, right? And I think that’s all that these safety recommendations for kids come from.
This is all well and good, except nobody bats an eye if my wife is riding in the front seat with me. But if I were to put my kid in the front seat (in a few years) with a booster seat and the airbag turned off, I’d be labelled a monster. Is this rational? Current recommendations are to make kids ride in the back until they’re 13, with the suggestion that they ride back there until they’re able to drive. This seems nuts. Can’t I assume a reasonable level of risk for my kids?
Children under 4 or under 40 lbs must use a child seat.
Children under 8 must use a booster seat, unless they are 4’ 9".
Children under 15 must wear a seat belt (specified because only drivers and front seat passengers are required to wear seat belts in my state).
The law makes no mention of the front seat at all, which is understandable given the dearth of pickup trucks here. I’m less concerned with the law, which seems reasonable, and more annoyed with the social stigma of front-seat kids.
Of course you can, but your state probably has notions about what’s “reasonable” (which I agree seem to be a lot more conservative than mine). We’ve (voters, that is) decided in many facets of life that the State has an interest in keeping children safe, and we empower them to hold pretty large powers in establishing what’s safe and in enforcing that. I don’t believe, for example, that you’re legally required to buy your wife food or clothing, either, or make sure she’s got adult supervision if you’re not home with her.
If you’re willing to pay the tickets, you can take a more liberal view of the risks. But the one thing not to underestimate is the danger from air bags. Your wife, unless she’s unusually short, won’t have her head smashed in by an air bag in the front seat deploying. Your child may. That’s not politics, it’s physics.
ETA: sorry, replies got in before I hit Submit. I think there is a quiet concern of very short adults and front seat airbags. Cars now have to have airbags which can be turned off, either with a switch on the dash or by your dealer, because of the danger to a short person in the front seat; they didn’t always.
Yes, the airbag thing is a valid concern, but I think it’s a separate issue that’s being dealt with via technology and awareness.
I had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to say in the OP, and having written that long winded thing, I can condense it to this:
The prevailing social attitude (and safety recommendations) for kids in cars is to do the absolute safest thing possible for the kids, regardless of convenience. Legally I’m not required to do this – if I pulled out of here today with my 4 year old in a booster seat in the front of my car with the airbag turned off, I’d be legal, but my neighbors would probably call the cops. However, nobody thinks twice about riding in the front as an adult even though the same logic applies. I think people either need to relax or start riding in the back themselves.
I think that’s because of something I don’t usually say out loud: we’ve got a weird aggrandizement of children thing, as humans. We treat the injury or death of children as a worse thing than the injury or death of adults. It’s not logical - logically, we should mourn the death of a productive member of society more than the not-yet-productive member of society, but we don’t.
It’s emotional, not rational. It’s probably based in every parent’s fear of losing their own child, which is hormonally hard wired in us as mammals.
It has been my observation that many people are not clear on the child safety laws in their state. Much of their understanding is based on word-of-mouth which confuses the law with suggested-practice. It is not uncommon for parents to think that there is a law disallowing children under 13 from being in the front seat.
This:
supports my observation since there would be no reason for your neighbors to call the police unless they thought it was illegal. Although some fraction of these neighbors may not realize that you can disable your passenger-side airbag.
Part of the reason this confusion continues is that many parents are more than happy to take the safest course for their children, regardless of whether it is law or just suggested-practice. As a result, the parents don’t need to investigate the law because they are going to do the absolute safest thing anyway.
There is surprisingly strong evidence that a 4 year old in a seatbelt is at much greater risk of harm than a child in a car seat or a booster.
As to the op - kids are not just small adults and the differences go beyond mere ability to consent in a fully informed manner: they are biomechanically built differently. Not just height and weight, but where the weight is: kids are relatively head heavy and the brain is much more vulnerable.
Actually it is quite rational. Saving the life of a 4 year old child potentially saves an average of 74 years of life. Saving my life, age 51, would on average save only 27 years of life. Even limiting to “productive to society” years I’ve got only 14 more years until the typical retirement age of 65 and the kid will be productive from 18 to 65, or maybe longer by then, so 47 years. Okay, discount some for the investment to be made in the kid to get him up to productive speed, but still it’s many more years of life saved.
Of course you are right that the evolutionary hardwiring is the greater reason, but that still amounts to a logic of sorts. I’ve done my evolutionary job, passed my genome on and assured that the carriers of those genetic packages are well assured of surviving to reproductive ages themselves and with the resources to attract mates of some quality. (Well okay, the three bio kids are all of reproductive age; the mates of quality is yet to be determined though!) My parents’ investment in me has done its job from the evolutionary perspective. The 4 year old has not yet achieved that potential and if they die before then then any investment that was made in them was for naught.
The thing is, part of what makes us as adults safer in cars–the airbags–really are dangerous to children and small adults. But since the car overall is much safer (anti-lock, stability control, crumple zones, etc.), I’d say that if I had a child in my current car the way my mother occasionally had me ride in the mid-to-late 80s in her Pontiac the kid would be safer than I was as long as the front airbags were off. Mom, when carpooling, put me in the passenger front seat with this little gizmo that turned a 3-point seatbelt into a lap belt, or even occasionally in what was a tiny front middle seat to get four adults and two small children into that car, all with belts. Now, that is not to say that the kid would not be even safer in, say, a booster seat, but I think in a pinch the kid would be much safer now than we were when we were kids.
What is with the whole deal with booster seats these days? Is it a reaction to the move to standard 3-point belts for almost all seating positions?
I don’t actually understand the safety aspect of the “booster seat” part at all (that is, the kind of booster seat which is simply a hard cushion raising them up, I get the safety aspect of big child seats with a high back and side impact protection - though only for side impact crashes)
It seems like the major safety improvement is in having the three- or five-point harness holding them down. What does raising them up a few centimetres do for them? That seems to be all the actual booster seat bit does for you. I would have thought it would be just as good (and far more straightforward) to attach the harness straight to the seat.
Again, the issue is that adult seat belts, including three point ones, are not sized and shaped for children, even for relatively tall and heavy ones. In side impacts kids fly around the shoulder harness or have it go into the neck and the lap belt often does not line up against the hip bone but against the abdomen - better a liver or spleen injury than a head one but still avoidable by being in a booster … those “few centimeters” do make that difference.
Indeed however cars are overall much safer today even those much much smaller than that old Pontiac of Mom’s. The again, kids are driven around in them lots more.
I have a 5 year old son that sits on a booster seat and rides in the back of the car. Doesn’t the booster seat keep the belt that would go across the chest of an adult off of a small child’s neck?
A booster seat is intended to make the seatbelt, particularly the shoulder belt, fit properly. You don’t want the shoulder belt across the neck or otherwise fitting poorly. Also, boosters don’t necessarily just just raise the child. Many have both a platform (booster) plus a high back with a clip/guide that you put the shoulder belt through that also helps it fit properly across the chest and shoulder.
Many modern cars allow adjustment of the front shoulder belts to improve fit for a particular driver or passenger as well. My car allows you to raise or lower the upper anchor point of the shoulder belt to accommodate adults of different heights. A booster seat is the same concept implemented differently and for people of a smaller size.
As has already been said (but when did that ever stop me from chiming in?) the booster boosts the kid to a safe height for the seat belt.
Last week, we inadvertently left the booster seat at home when we went to pick the 5 year old up from school. Not wanting to leave her to go home and get the booster, I mentally shrugged and put her in the back like I was when I was a kid only…the cars I rode in as a kid had all lap belts in the back. When I put her in her spot, the lap-and-shoulder belt went right across her face! Due to the shape of the seats, there was no shifting the shoulder section behind her like I did as a kid riding in the front seat. I quickly improvised a “pincher” with a blood pressure cuff I happened to have in the car (what, doesn’t everyone carry around a spare bp cuff? :p), securing the shoulder part to the lap part at the side of her belly so it wouldn’t be in a dangerous spot, then white knuckled it the 1.5 miles to home, hoping no cops spotted me. Not a fun ride, and I felt like Bad Mommy the whole way.
Funnily enough, my daughter was nervous and jittery without her booster. She acted much like a dog without his collar after a bath - it just felt WRONG!
Something I didn’t know until a few weeks ago: NEVER use a lap only belt with a booster. It’s safer, if you have a booster and you have only a lap belt available, to put the kid straight on the seat of the car and put the lap belt on without a booster, just like we used to do. Boosters are not designed for lap only belts, and the angle they’re forced to obtain to make it poses a serious innards rupture or spinal injury risk.
I have heard this recommendation thrown around, too. I think it’s absurd to expect a 13 year old kid to sit in the back seat. Like you said, the height/weight is barely taken into consideration. If it were, the 30 year old, 4’10" 85lb. wife of one of my friends would probably sit in the back seat her whole life.
There’s no doubt that kids should be using kid-sized safety devices as opposed to adult-sized ones. But it’s not like the basic mechanics are different for kids vs. adults. If sitting in the back seat with a 5 point harness and some basic lateral head protection is good for a toddler, that means it’s also good for an adult. Yet the front seat and 3 points are considered “good enough.” Also, if my wife were to die in an accident, 3 kids would grow up without a mother, so the “think of the children” rule should still apply.
