Yet, a typical pamphlet from Boost America, a multimillion-dollar campaign financed by Ford Motor Co., tells parents that "a child's growing years are ... a time of added risk, especially on America's streets and highways." What are the added risks? The campaign invokes an ominous world where 5-year-olds are suddenly surrounded by danger. In fact, young people ages 16 to 20 are dying in car crashes at an astronomical rate 10 times that of the booster seat age group, and being injured more than six times as often; but there is not a corresponding outpouring of initiatives and legislation for this less compliant demographic.
The brochure from Boost America warns us that more than "500 young lives [are] lost each year." These emotional appeals foster the illusion that boosters could have saved all these lives. Some crashes cannot be survived no matter what safety equipment you are strapped into. It is tempting to place blame on a factor that we can control -- like children being improperly restrained. Yet some of these children died because a car's brakes failed or a van careened out of control into their vehicle. Our defense against this tremendous vulnerability is to blame, legislate and punish.
You would never guess it, but in traffic safety, we are dealing with the consequences of a wonderfully successful public health campaign. There are six times as many people driving, and 11 times as many cars on the road, as there were in 1925, yet the number of Americans killed in motor vehicle crashes (per vehicle mile traveled) has declined by more than 90 percent, according to the National Safety Council. Eighteen people died per 100 million vehicle miles traveled in 1925; that number dropped steeply to 1.7 deaths (per 100 million VMT) in 1992, where it remained steady through 1999.
This extraordinary improvement in driving safety can be attributed to a landmark public health campaign that began in the mid-1960s, with the founding of the agency that became the NHTSA. Major changes in vehicle and highway design followed, things that most of us take for granted like headrests, lap-shoulder seat belts, crumple zones and collapsing steering wheel columns. Factor in other social campaigns, like the fight against drunken driving, and you begin to see why we are safer now.
Child car seats were introduced in the late 1970s, and by the mid-'80s all 50 states had passed laws requiring their use. Motor vehicle deaths for children under age 5 have decreased 34 percent since 1974. However, the bulk of that drop had occurred by 1985; over the past 15 years, though car seat technology has improved and rates of use have almost doubled for infants and quadrupled for toddlers, the number of children under 5 dying in car crashes has dropped just 7 percent.
In risk management, when you get to the far end of any bell curve, eliminating the last bits of risk gets increasingly difficult. That initial 34 percent reduction in fatality rates is a remarkable accomplishment, but our very success requires that we lower our expectations for future improvements. At the tail end of a successful risk reduction campaign, we face more and more expensive and intrusive efforts to save fewer lives.
One rationale often given for the new focus on booster seats is that school-age children's accident rates have not improved as much as infants' and toddlers' in the past 25 years. What you don't hear is that the school-age children have lower risk to begin with, making a similar rate of improvement almost impossible to achieve. What you don't hear is that this is good news.
None of this is to say that any family that chooses to shouldn't be encouraged to use booster seats. However, mandating the use of this product with a marginal safety benefit diminishes our lives in several ways.
As they are now, car seats impinge on neighborly and community-minded activities by reducing flexibility and spontaneity. I can't let my cousin or friend pick up my son from school in her car to help me out in a pinch. Our children need logistical help just to get a friend to come home with them after school.
And the complications and hassles that families face now will only increase as the number of required car seats climbs. A mother dropping off three children under the age of 6 on her way to work would have to uninstall three car seats and leave them at day care or school in order for her husband to pick up the kids in his car on the way home from work.
What's more, the more child restraints you have to use, the less likely you are to fit into one car. Booster seat laws affect all those group trips in the past where we squeezed into one car for the fun of it, to save money or gas or to give one of the potential drivers a break. Those were all opportunities where parents could spend time with each other while the kids played or, more often, fought. Now, we are more and more likely to each take our own cars, further isolating parents who are already raising children without extended families or neighbors in their daily lives.
Next page: Retrofitting seat belts is not an option when even the cost of another car seat is daunting