Let my children go!

Stricter car seat laws may bring incremental safety gains, but at the cost of a family's liberty.

By Miven Booth Trageser

Aug. 1, 2001 | How many car seats do I have to buy to raise my child safely and obey the law in this country? Too many.

Effective less than six months from now -- Jan. 1, 2002, to be exact -- a new law in California mandates that children ride in booster seats until they weigh 60 pounds or are 6 years old, a measure that adds 20 pounds and two years to the current law. If I violate the law once, I will be fined $100 and get a point on my driving record. For the second time, it's $250 and an additional point. And as California goes, so goes the nation: Washington and Arkansas have similar laws, and booster seat bills are in various stages in at least 16 other states.

Age 6 or 60 pounds isn't the end of the debate, either. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration and other safety advocates recommend that children travel in booster seats until they are 8 years old and almost 5 feet tall. State Sen. Jackie Speier, who authored California's booster seat law, jokes that her daughter, who is small-framed, will be in a booster seat "until her junior prom."

I want my child to be safe. I want him in the safest place in the safest car. But what's next, mandatory crash helmets? I get suspicious of any product that uses my fear as a foundation for its appeal. But I really object to fear, incomplete facts and individual horror stories being used to take the decision out of my hands, and criminalize me if I make a different risk assessment.

A booster seat does not guarantee a child's safety. Like a seat belt, it increases the odds of surviving a crash, but a booster seat does not provide enough of an improvement over a seat belt to justify making it mandatory for children until they are 8 years old.

We're raising children in a climate of vigilance about relatively small risks, and in the process we are losing sight of other values, like fun, independence and adventure. We're imposing a mandate that is cumbersome, intrusive and especially onerous for low-income people, car poolers and big families. Meanwhile, we're abdicating our responsibility to assess risks for ourselves and our kids, and turning over more power to the police and the courts.

We've also lost perspective on how safe American children already are. They are healthier, stronger, better nourished and better educated than children were 50 or 100 years ago. They also have a far lower risk of deadly accidents, especially on the roads. Yet reading a pamphlet from a booster seat campaign, you might also think that 5-to-9-year-olds were dying and being injured in car crashes at a higher rate than the rest of the population. What if the opposite were true?

NHTSA, the federal agency responsible for traffic safety programs, warns parents that "traffic crashes are the leading cause of death for children of every age from 5 to 14 years -- a fact that can be linked, at least in part, to the reality that most kids are unbuckled or improperly restrained in vehicles." While these statistics are true, they simplify cause and effect to promote booster seats as the solution to a complicated problem.

Traffic crashes are the leading cause of accidental death for all Americans, not just children who aren't in booster seats. Driving is the most dangerous thing most of us do in our daily lives; children are no more at risk than the rest of us. In fact, the NHTSA's own compilation of fatality and injury rates shows that 5-to-9-year-olds, the target population for booster seats, are actually the age group least likely to die in a car crash.

This age group, dubbed the "forgotten children" in a recent report on ABC's "20/20," is in fact the safest age group on the roads today. Infants and toddlers are the second safest, and then as children reach adolescence their danger increases and holds steady for most of the adult years. It is true that only 15 to 20 percent of elementary-school-age children use booster seats that put the seat belt exactly across their hips and shoulders -- where it should be. But this statistic should not cause us to lose sight of how relatively safe these children are.

There is no need to panic.

Next page: Our defense against this tremendous vulnerability is to blame, legislate and punish