Play it safe with car seats

The rules are out of date, exposing our children to danger because they are not in appropriate car safety restraints, Fiona Surtees warns.

Many Australian parents are unwittingly risking their children's safety by putting them in ill-fitting car seats or allowing them to use seatbelts before they are tall enough.

According to the most recent Australian Transport Safety Bureau statistics, 53 Australian children aged 0-15 died while travelling in a car last year. Monash University Accident Research Centre advises that from 2000 to 2003, an average of 850 Australian children were seriously injured each year while travelling in a car. And the Transport Accident Commission says that in the year to November 2005, 149 Victorian child car passengers were seriously injured.

Road safety experts and child advocacy groups argue these statistics could be significantly reduced if restraint systems and baby seats were used properly.

If recommendations being considered by the National Transport Commission are adopted, infants may be forced to stay in rear-facing seats for longer, toddlers may be required to remain in forward-facing seats with a five-point harness until they are four, and older children may have to travel in purpose-built booster seats with a five-point harness until they are 140 centimetres tall. For most, that's close to their ninth birthday.

These proposals are unlikely to appeal to many parents or carers who have to wrestle three and four-year-olds into a car seat almost daily.

Cajoling image-conscious kids back into car seats may pose challenges, but road safety lobbyists, researchers and critical-care physicians argue that as things stand, we're exposing infants and young children to unnecessary risk. More often that not, our most precious cargo is sitting in the wrong-sized seat or in a poorly fitted restraint, wearing an adult seatbelt too early and even travelling in the front passenger seat.

"Parents gamble with their kids' safety," says Professor Mark Stokes, president of Kidsafe Victoria and professor of psychology at Deakin University. "Children are frequently overlooked by parents unaware of the danger. There's no malice; they do it because they assume that because nothing's gone wrong before, it won't now. But when things do go wrong, it's a disaster."

Trauma surgeon Professor Danny Cass says Australian children are far more vulnerable to injury in a car crash than children in Sweden, where it is standard practice to keep toddlers in rear-facing seats until their third birthday.

A 2003 study presented to a conference sponsored by the US-based Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine found that where booster seats were used by four-to-seven-year-olds, the risk of injury to the head, internal organs, spinal cord and for fractures was reduced by 59 per cent, compared with the risk for children in the same age group who were wearing seatbelts.

Dr Judith Charlton, an associate professor at the Monash University Accident Research Centre, says children who move into seatbelts too early are far more vulnerable to serious internal injury in a crash and to slipping out of the seatbelt.

For these reasons, Australian experts are pushing for legislative change and an extensive public education campaign to promote the proper use of appropriate, lifesaving child restraint devices.

While there is little doubt we understand the importance of child safety restraints - the RACV says usage rates for very young children exceeds 95 per cent - parents simply don't know which restraints provide the best protection for a child at each height or weight milestone. A common perception among parents and older children is that car seats are for babies, mirrored in last year's NSW Motor Accident Authority study that found the likelihood of a child being optimally restrained appeared to decrease after their second birthday.

Existing Australian laws only require infants less than 12 months old to be restrained in properly fitted and approved child restraints. In Victoria, infants are only required to be in the safer, rear-facing position until they are six months old or eight kilograms.

After their first birthday, children are supposed to be in an appropriate child restraint or, for older children, an adult seatbelt. But it's really been left to parents to decide what's "appropriate" for their child, Dr Charlton says. Continued...