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Carpooling parents don't always use booster seats

Reuters Health News, 2012

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Parents use booster seats inconsistently when carpooling with young kids, according to a new study.
Laws on when the seats must be used vary by state, but guidelines from groups including the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend boosters from the time kids outgrow their car seats until they hit four feet, nine inches tall -- the height of the average 11-year-old.
The new report suggests that most parents of four- to eight-year-olds have a booster seat for their kids in their own cars, but don't always make sure boosters are used when they carpool.
"Until children reach a certain size, the seatbelt doesn't fit them properly enough to maximize the protection that seatbelts offer when you're bigger and taller," said Andrea Gielen, head of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.
Booster seats, she told Reuters Health, position smaller bodies to get the most benefit from the seatbelt in case of a crash.
"The study shows that parents are missing opportunities to protect their kids in the car on every ride," said Gielen, who wasn't involved in the research.
Along with a range of questions related to kids' health and family dynamics, parents were asked about their own use of booster seats and how they felt about the seats when it came to carpooling.
Parents of younger kids, and those that lived in states that required the use of booster seats, were most likely to use boosters.
The majority of survey participants also said they either frequently or occasionally carpooled with another family.
Among parents who used a booster seat in their own car and said they carpooled, 79 percent reported that they would always ask another driver to put their kid in a booster seat.
Just over half of them said they would make sure their kid was always in a booster when in the car with friends who didn't use the seats, according to the report, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.