Booster Seats For Texas Kids: The New Law And The Real Need
New safety laws went into effect in Texas on September first that should help keep everyone safer on the road. Now everyone is required to wear safety belts in cars, no matter how old they are or where they are sitting. Cell phone use is prohibited in school zones for everyone and anywhere on the road if the driver is under eighteen. Most importantly of all, however, Texas has finally gotten a decent booster seat law.
The car seat law that we have had so far in Texas has been what vehicle safety advocates refer to as a 4/40 law. This means that children were required to be restrained in a child safety seat until they were either 4 years old or 40 pounds, 40 pounds being the minimum recommended weight that a child should be in order to switch from using a car seat with a five-point harness system to a belt-positioning booster seat. 4/40 laws are widely seen as the weakest regulations for child passenger safety as seatbelts alone provide little protection for children who weigh less than 80 pounds and/or are shorter than 4 feet and nine inches tall. Some states have 6/60 laws and many states have 8/80 laws. Even that is not the gold standard as few children weigh 80 pounds or are four feet and nine inches tall by the age of eight. My daughter was a fairly early bloomer and she was well past ten before she was that big. There are places with booster seat laws up to the age of twelve and those are the laws that really do the job, but 8/80 laws are most common across the country.
Texas legislators like Judith Zaffirini have been trying to get Texas something like an 8/80 law for sometime, but had little success until the feds singled us out in 2008 as one of only seven states without a good booster seat law on the books. Now we have a better law, one that compares favorably to national child safety standards, although those standards still leave room for improvement.
The new law requires that children who are under the age of eight be restrained in a belt-positioning booster seat (when they have outgrown their car seats at the age of four or at forty pounds) when riding in a vehicle. If the child is younger than 8 years of age but has already reached the height of 4 feet and nine inches (very few children under the age of eight are that tall), then they do not have to be restrained in a booster seat. This protects the many, many Texas children from the ages of four through seven who were not protected when riding in vehicles under our previous booster seat law, many of whom did not survive the lapse. This law is a huge leap forward.
I am personally ecstatic about the changes in the law, but I do feel compelled to point out that few eight year olds have reached the height of four feet and nine inches and the weight of 80 pounds. In order to be safe in an adult seat belt alone, that is how big a child needs to be. Some years ago in Corpus Christi, an eight-year-old child was thrown from a car and killed while buckled into an adult seat belt – her parents were following the law and thought she was safe in a seat belt, but a booster seat might have saved her life. Most children will be around the age of eleven or twelve when they are truly big enough to be safely restrained in an adult seat belt and should use booster seats until they are that big, no matter what the law says. It is, of course, extremely hard to convince an eleven-year-old of this necessity, but hopefully it will become easier now that the law extends further. And it’s worth it.
Please keep your kids restrained in booster seats until they weigh at least eighty pounds and are at least 4 feet and nine inches tall. Car crashes kill more children than almost all the things we worry about as parents combined. Keeping kids safer in the car is the number one thing we can do to protect them in this world.
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