Do 80-pound children need car booster seats?
I have a 4-year-old child whose rump is quickly outgrowing the width of her booster seat, yet the great commonwealth of Pennsylvania said she’s stuck there. At least until she’s 8 years old. Next year she can climb aboard that great, big yellow school bus, that she’s coveted for half her young life, and bounce around on the seats. Pennsylvania does not require school buses to restrain children, but it is now making parents of kindergarten, first- and second-graders spend money to install booster car seats in their autos.
Parting with the cash is the easy part. Finding seats that fit and then dealing with the fits of big kids forced to “ride like babies” will be the harder part. Couldn’t these kids be grandfathered in?
The theory behind booster seats is that children are too short to use safety belts designed for adults. Until they grow the shoulder harness hits in the wrong place and should an accident occur the strap can squish and harm internal organs.
Hence a growing national movement to “boost” younger kids.
One of outgoing Gov. Mark Schweiker’s final acts was to sign a smorgasbord transportation board that included on the menu the requirement that every child ride in a booster seat until his or her 8th birthday. Schweiker’s spokesman David La Toree said his boss “believes that it goes a little too far” and that he hoped that lawmakers would revisit this.
Existing law required infants and toddlers to ride in specially designed seats. This made sense, as did the 4-years or 40-pound rule that took into consideration that not all kids are built the same. Take a look at a preschool class. Most of the kids fall within a few inches and few pounds of each other.
The stuck-until-8 law fails to allow for growth spurts. Peek into a second-grade class and the sizes vary greatly. A booster seat makes little sense for a nearly 5-foot, 80 pound kid.
And unlike preschoolers, grade-schoolers are much more sociable, traveling often with pals to games and parties and practices. Booster seats will make car pooling out of the question.
There has to be a better way to safely transport kids.
Yet the government is not forcing car manufacturers to develop one. Take a look today as you go about your travels. How many adults do you find riding in the rear seat? Mostly kids ride in the rear; so why not design safety systems that adjust to fit their smaller frames.
Rather than a national movement to push car manufacturers into tackling new designs, the Beltway crowd decided to require more injuring-inducing shoulder belts. Car manufacturers must by 2008 offer shoulder and lap belts for the center position in the rear seat.
So states such as Pennsylvania are attempting to protect kids from the danger of serious injuries caused by high-riding shoulder harnesses. But the law as it stands does not allow for any parental judgment, and it might just lead to injuries for larger kids whose age dictates that they ride in seats that their bodies have outgrown.
Schweiker was right. Lawmakers need to take another look at this. Parents, after consulting with pediatricians, have long been deciding whether their kids have outgrown safety seats. Why not trust them to continue making informed decisions? Until lawmakers require school buses to come equipped with safety belts, why should they require those same kids to ride in a baby’s seat in their parents’ cars.