Children at risk from seatbelts

Have you ever played dress-ups with your kids? Seeing your 5-, 8- or 10-year-old in dad's trousers or mum's stilettos is a laugh, isn't it; they just don't fit.

Yet New Zealand law lets you sit your 5-year-old in a three-point seatbelt designed to safeguard adults. It also doesn't fit, and that means your child will not be adequately protected in a crash.

Starship paediatric intensive care specialist Liz Segedin, a mum of three, is frustrated by our law.

She treats the children who make it to hospital; those with massive internal injuries, or spines broken by incorrectly fitting belts.

The law says children aged 5 to 7 must use a restraint if one is fitted, otherwise they use the adult belt. "That gives parents who want to do the right thing the wrong information. But you want the law to reflect the right information to good parents."

Her advice is to put kids in a rear-facing seat to at least a year old, and preferably 3. Sit them in the rear seats. Always use a booster seat from the age of 5, until your child is 148cm tall..

Segedin says there's a seven-fold increase in risk of severe injury for under-12s not in a booster seat, and 148cm is about average for our 12-year-olds.

She questions the Government's suggestion booster seats might be mandatory for under-8s only, given international experience that risk is still high above that age.

In Britain, all children under 135cm tall or age 12 must be in a booster seat, with a few exemptions, such as for taxis. As a result, deaths and serious injuries in the affected age group have dropped 17 per cent.

Segedin says: "Tell parents their kids have to be tall enough to use an adult belt." Enforcement is simple; "The height of a new police car is 1476mm. So the child must be as tall as a police car."