Michigan Child Restraint Law Takes Effect Tuesday

After an eight-month struggle, Shailene Moore went back to using a booster seat in the car for her 6-year-old daughter, Faith.

"Try to tell a 6-year-old to sit down all the time," said Moore, a Detroit resident. "It doesn't always work."

Moore was partially motivated by a law that will become effective Tuesday. It requires all children between ages 4 and 8 and less than 4 feet, 9 inches to be secured in a booster seat while traveling in a motor vehicle.

The current law applies only to children younger than 4, but the new law will expand the age group and impact 500,000 additional children statewide.

Advocates say the new law will reduce child injuries and deaths resulting from motor vehicle crashes, the leading cause of death for Michigan children age 14 and younger. In 2005, 7,188 children age 15 and younger were injured and 84 were killed.

Some parents are grumbling about the new law, saying it should have included a weight restriction. Others say it will impede them from accommodating the number of kids they want to transport in one vehicle.

" This will save some children's lives, but also will protect many children from being injured," said Sue Smith, coordinator for Metro Detroit Safe Kids, a child safety advocacy group that helped push for the new law. "It's another tool that parents can use to protect their children."

In her work as a nurse and program manager of the trauma, burn and injury prevention program at Children's Hospital of Michigan, Smith often sees children with injuries linked to improper vehicle restraint.

"I will stand at the bedside of these kids and think, 'This didn't have to happen,' " Smith said.

Smith's experience is supported by data from Partners for Child Passenger Safety, the largest ongoing study of children and crash data in 16 states, including Michigan. Its reports, a collaboration of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and State Farm Insurance Cos., shows booster seats usage among older children reduces injuries by 59 percent.

That's because seat belts in cars and other vehicles don't fit young children properly, said Jeff Spitzley, coordinator of Safe Kids Michigan. When children ages 4-8 strap into a vehicle without a booster seat, the seat belt rests on the soft areas of a child's body, such as their stomach, which can lead to internal injuries in a collision. Seat belts can chafe a child's chin, prompting some to remove the shoulder strap and put it behind their head -- another move that leaves them less protected.

Booster seats "raise a child up in the vehicle so the seat belt fits them properly," Spitzley said. "It's a pretty simple thing."

Michigan will join more than 30 states that require older children to use booster seats in motor vehicles.

Parents who don't adhere to the law could face a civil infraction that could cost about $65, depending on jurisdiction. Advocates say the law is not designed to be punitive, but to keep kids safe.

Many parents already adhere to the law's requirements and won't be affected. Among them is Oxford resident Jennifer Nicosia, who routinely puts her daughters, Joelle, 5, and Joslyn, 8, in car seats.

"I never even once thought they shouldn't be in one," Nicosia said. "They are little. To me, common sense says they are too little to be floating out there in a car by themselves."

Jennifer Okroy, mother of three children ages 2, 5 and 8, isn't happy the government is telling her what to do.

"It's up to us to be responsible parents," said Okroy, a Macomb Township resident.

But Katie Kniss knows it takes only one time for a responsible parent to not buckle their child properly, and for tragedy to strike.

More than a year ago, she put her 1-year-old daughter into a car seat and buckled her 4-year-old son into the back seat of the family minivan. On the way, to picking up another child from school, a car hit the vehicle head-on, leaving Kniss and her 4-year-old son with massive injuries.

Kniss' son suffered a concussion from hitting the front seat and internal injuries from the improper placement of the lap belt. Part of his small intestine had to be removed.

"He's fine now, recovered and back to normal," said Kniss of Fife Lake, near Traverse City. "The doctors said that had the seat belt been any higher on his stomach it would have crushed his large intestine and he would have to have been on a feeding tube for the rest of his life."