Seat Belts Risky For Young Kids

Strapping young children into seat belts instead of car booster seats significantly increases their risk of death and serious injury, a study shows.

The results bolster the federal government's safety campaign promoting booster seats for youngsters who have outgrown child safety seats. That category includes children about four- to eight-years-old, weighing 40 to 80 pounds, and those who are less than 58 inches tall.

"Correct seat belt fit is not usually achieved until a child is nine-years-old," wrote the authors, whose study appears in the June issue of Pediatrics, the medical journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

At that age a child is usually tall enough to sit against the back of the car's seat and of sufficient height to have the car's own shoulder belt fit snugly across the shoulder and chest.

Car crashes are the leading cause of death and disability for children older than age one, the authors noted. In 1998 alone, 697 child passengers under age six died and nearly 100,000 were injured in crashes, government data shows.

The new study suggests that using booster seats could have prevented a sizable portion of those deaths and injuries.

The authors, led by Dr. Flaura K. Winston of The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania, examined data on car crashes involving children reported to State Farm Insurance in 15 states and the District of Columbia. They focused on 2,077 youngsters ages two to five.

Overall, nearly 40 percent of the two-to-five-year-olds were restrained in seat belts, which by age 4 was the most common restraint. Less than one percent of children older than age five were in booster seats during the study period, Dec. 1, 1998 through Nov. 30, 1999.

"This inappropriate restraint resulted in a 3.5-fold increased risk of significant injury and a more than fourfold increased risk of significant head injury" for the two-to-five-year-olds, the authors said.

Putting young children in seat belts puts them at risk for "submarining or sliding out of a lap belt during a crash," they wrote. "Rapid, jackknife bending about a poorly positioned vehicle seat belt increases the risk of intra-abdominal and spinal cord injuries, also known as seat belt syndrome, and brain injury resulting from the impact of the head with the child's knees or the vehicle interior."

The authors noted that their data involved insured 1990-model and newer cars and said the findings may not apply to crashes involving older, uninsured cars.

By Lindsey Tanner