Safety is Kids’ Stuff

You have to sit up and listen when an automotive company who has a reputation for building the safest cars in the world talks about child safety in cars. And when you do sit up and listen, it’s sobering to note just how little most of us know about the matter.

Viking Cars, Inc., the country’s distributor of Volvo vehicles, held late last week in their Pasong Tamo, Makati City showroom a lecture on child safety. Flown in to speak in the affair were experts from the Volvo Cars Safety Center — Birgitta Trommler and John-Fredrik Gronvall.

Trommler, a mother of two young children, is a crash analysis engineer whose specialty is automotive safety in children. She is credited with the development of Volvo’s first child seat in 1998 and 1999 that introduced Isofix, the international standard that simplifies child seat attachment in cars. Gronvall, meanwhile, is a senior research engineer who specializes in rating legal requirements for crash safety matters. At present, he plays a major role in Volvo’s recently inaugurated Traffic Accident Research Center in Bangkok, Thailand. Which means his knowledge on safety issues are adapted to peculiar Asian conditions, as Viking Cars’ assistant vice president for marketing Lyn Buena, a new mother herself, points out.

The statistics on car crashes resulting to injury or death to children are staggering. In the US — since searching for any sort of local statistics on the matter is moot — vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among children aged 14 and under. In 2002, 2,545 children in this age group died in car crashes. A full 24 percent of this figure is made up of kids aged four years and younger. Meanwhile, 305,000 children aged 15 and under were injured in car crashes, 21 percent of which were those under four.

More chilly statistics: 75 percent of all crashes occur within 40 kilometers from home, and mostly on roads with maximum speed limits of 60 kph or less. Which means these accidents happen just when most of us think we’re safe. That’s according to the National Safe Kids Campaign, an international advocacy group on child safety.

Now why the focus on child safety?

That’s because children are especially prone to injuries in the event of crashes, the foremost reason of which, obviously, is due to their physical dimensions and characteristics. According to Stephen Wang of the University of Michigan, it is critical to note that children are not merely scaled-down versions of adults.

Their heads, for instance, are proportionately larger compared with their bodies than in adults are. The situation is compounded, Wang says, when this oversized head is supported by an underdeveloped neck, making them truly vulnerable. Now add to the equation good old physical laws and the circumstances all go against them.

By simply citing the formula for Force — Mass multiplied by Acceleration — Volvo illustrates how a child can turn into a thousand-pound projectile. In the event of a sudden frontal crash, an unbelted 60-pound child, thanks to physical laws that multipliy it by about 45 times upon rapid deceleration, becomes approximately a 2,700-pound object hurling itself through space. And we’re only talking of a 50-kph collision here. That 2,700-pound child can impact the windshield or the front seat occupant. To think most of us have junior sitting in between the driver’s and passenger seats where he has a direct path through the windshield.

So what to do then?

For starters, children should always be seated at the back. Secondly, it’s a fact that seatbelts do save lives, so buckle the kids in the backseat up however short the trip may be, Volvo safety experts recommend. Obviously, the proper use of the seatbelt is equally important. This means the diagonal belt should go over the shoulder and over the chest with a minimum of slack, because the less slack there is, the greater the protection. The lap belt, meanwhile, has to go across the hips and above the thighs. It can’t restrain a child across the pelvis, as his pelvis is still underdeveloped. For children around four years of age, a booster cushion with a backrest is the way to go, with the seatbelts worn as recommended. And the child should use a booster cushion for as long as possible.

Also, the rule for seatbelt use is to wear it not too far out on the shoulders and never under the arm, Volvo’s child safety manual exhorts.

Of course, a child’s safety in cars should begin in the womb. And Volvo recognizes this fact by offering instructions on proper seatbelt usage for pregnant mothers.

The diagonal belt must go in between the breasts and over the side of the tummy. The lap belt must be worn over the top of the thighs right below the pregnant bulge, and not across the bulge itself as this will hurt both mother and child in the event of a collision.

For infants and children below four, a rearward-facing child seat is the answer — which should be installed only in the backseat. A proper child seat will have a restraint system that secures a child well, and kids should use this seat for as long as possible.

Now why rear-facing? The idea is actually a Swedish one, Volvo says. In the 60s, a Professor Bertil Aldman took inspiration from the seats of the Gemini mission astronauts, which are especially molded to distribute enormous g-forces across the astronauts’ entire back. The principle behind the rearward-facing seats is exactly the same, where in the event of abrupt deceleration as in the case of a frontal impact, the whole of a child’s back cushions the strain rather than concentrating all the forces in the much more vulnerable neck area, which would be the case in a forward-facing seat.

Clearly in the issue of child safety in cars, facing backwards is a big step forward.