The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety recently evaluated 83 booster seats. They found that around half of them do not fit children properly. It might be time to check and see how well your child’s booster seat fits, and what the IIHS thinks of it.
Booster seats are a slightly more “grown up” version of “infant seats”, or “convertible car seats”. All are designed to safely restrain babies and young children with a five-point harness. It helps to ensure the physical safety of infants and small children in case the vehicle they are riding in is involved in a traffic accident.
Usually, children who are between the ages of 4 and 8 years old need to use actual booster seats. This is for two reasons. These children have outgrown the seats designed for infants, so they can no longer use those. The seat belts that are in cars, vans, and trucks, are designed to safely harness adult bodies. The booster seats are supposed to raise a child up so that the adult seat belts fit them correctly.
There is something called “seat belt syndrome”. This is the name for what happens when a lap belt rides too high on the shoulder of a child, or if it doesn’t properly restrain the child’s torso. If a crash occurs, the child can suffer serious injuries to his or her hips, spine, or internal organs.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has evaluated 83 booster seats. This study reviewed 62 different models, but 83 actual seats. This is because some models were able to be used in full-back and backless positions. The IIHS tested them in both of the ways that the model can be used.
They found that about half of them, (41 of the 83 seats in the study), do not fit children properly. This is rather frightening news for parents! There is a list you can check to see how well your child’s booster seat was ranked.
The IIHS created three different categories that a booster seat could fall into. Those categories were: “Best Bets”, “Good Bets”, and “Not Recommended”. A total of 31 booster seats were placed into the “Best Bets” category this year. This is the highest number of seats to receive that ranking from the IIHS in four years. Only five booster seats were placed into the “Good Bets” category. Six were put into the “Not Recommended” category.
Some state laws may be encouraging parents to move their child out of a booster seat, and into a “regular” seat in the family vehicle, before it is actually safe to do so. In many states, kids are required to use a booster seat until the child reaches eight years of age.
Parents need to realize that the child’s age is not as important a factor as is the child’s size. Other states do not use an age requirement. Instead, they allow children to “graduate” from the booster seats when that child is at least 4 feet, 9 inches tall, or is at least 65 pounds. If your nine year old is smaller than that, then he or she should still be using a booster seat.
Image by Dave Tanchak on Flickr