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Booster Seat and Seat Belt Safety Reminders!
Children prematurely moved to seat belts are four times more likely to suffer serious head injuries during a collision than children in child safety or booster seats. Safety belts are designed for adults, and children under 4'9" tall should ride with a booster seat.
The booster seat safety message is a crucial one, NHTSA estimates that up to 90% of children in the U.S. who should be using a booster seat are not. Their ongoing goal is to educate parents of children who have outgrown their child safety seat to understand that a booster seat is a life-saving transition to an adult safety belt.
NHTSA produced a special series of PSAs with the Walt Disney Company, featuring Cinderella and her Fairy Godmother to educate the parents of young children who have outgrown their car seats that a booster seat is a must for any child under 4'9" before transition into an adult safety belt is safe. The campaign was designed to create awareness among parents of young children in an effort to reduce the number of avoidable deaths and serious injuries from car accidents each year.
According to NHTSA, research indicates at least 80 percent of children who should be using booster seats, are not. Without this extra lift, in a car crash, a safety belt alone can cause fatal or disabling abdominal, head and neck injuries. In fact, the use of booster seats lowers the risk of injury to children in crashes by 59 percent compared to the use of safety belts alone.
Do You Remember the initial Safety Belt Education Campaign?
The Safety Belt Education campaign began in 1985 and starred the always entertaining -- but often injured -- Crash Test Dummies. Do you remember them? Believe it or not, those loveable Dummies, Vince and Larry, have been enjoying retirement for TEN YEARS! But thanks to their entertaining method of raising awareness, seat belt usage increased from 14% to 75% between the campaign launch in 1985 and 2003, saving an estimated 85,000 lives!
Online Resources
Go to www.boosterseat.gov for more information about booster seats.
Visit the Buckle Up America Online Headquarters for news, tools, and research about safety belts and other passenger safety issues.
To learn more about what NHTSA is doing to help promote safety belt education, check out their site at www.nhtsa.dot.gov.
For safety belt tips and other important information on how to protect yourself and your family on the road, visit the National Safety Council.
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Over the years the automotive industry has taken massive steps in vehicle safety. The only problem is that even with all these advancements there is only one safety device which allows all the others to work. At this point, society has basically created crash seats for the public through crumple zones, airbags and abs brakes. Even with all these devices the one thing that allows them all to work, the way they were intended, is a properly worn seatbelt. State governments have passed laws making seatbelts mandatory, and have even placed heavy fines on offenders, yet still today there are people that refuse to wear them, and this is especially true with teenagers. Over the last decade more then 418,000 people have died in automobile accidents. Of those, more then 60,000 of them are between the ages of 16-20. These numbers don’t include the millions of seriously injured passengers from accidents as a result of not wearing their seatbelts. According to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration your chances of surviving an automobile accident increases 63% just by wearing your seatbelt. Knowing all of this, people still don’t wear their seatbelts. Finally, one man has done something about this. Robert Allison, a Las Vegas based inventor, created a device that insures your loved ones are buckled in every time they get behind the wheel. Robert has created a product he calls LIFEBELT, “when installed the engine will not start unless the driver’s seatbelt is buckled. If the driver, the passengers, or children unbuckle while the engine is running, the power to the radio will be disabled and a 50db alarm will sound until all unfastened seat belts are refastened. THE SAFE OPERATION OF YOUR VEHICLE IS NOT EFFECTED IN ANY WAY.” He goes on to say that the LIFEBELT device helps to remind people of all ages to wear their seatbelts at all times, and by using his device, wearing your seatbelt will become a subconscious event just like breathing. I commend this man for creating this device, and I can only imagine the thousands of live that will be saved from this great piece of equipment.
Posted by: Bryan | April 16, 2009 at 02:56 PM