Amber Rollins was on vacation with friends at a lake house, packing up to go home amid lots of chaos with adults and children, vehicles moving in the driveway and luggage strewn about when she suddenly realized that she did not know where her 2-year-old son was.
"I bolted for the door," said Rollins, director of Kids and Car Safety (KidsAndCars.org), a research and advocacy organization. "My 2-year-old was behind a car, and the driver would not have seen him. There is danger everywhere you turn. I was lucky enough to get there in time."
Not all stories have happy endings. More than 90,000 children under age 15 are injured in auto-related accidents a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control. About 400 of them are killed.
More can be done to protect our kids in and around automobiles. Technology plays a part in this, but so does good old common sense, starting with children's car seats.
"It's a no-brainer," Rollins said of having every youngster strapped in. It's also the law. "Make sure they are in proper restraint for their age and size and buckled in correctly on every drive."
And if you're in a hurry to get your growing kid to the next and often easier-to-use seat, pump the brakes.
"Parents are eager to move to the next stage, but it's actually a demotion of safety," Rollins said. "You can't keep kids in safety seats forever, but leave them in until they are maxed out with height and weight."
It's not necessary to buy the most expensive seat. All seats must meet federal standards. Just be sure to try them out in your car before you commit.
Other dangers await
Keeping children safe inside vehicles is only part of the task. Safety also needs to extend to the area around the car.
"We're aware of blind zones behind, but they are also in front where you can't see a kid up to 15 feet ahead," Rollins said. "We did an experiment where we placed 18 kids in front of an SUV, and the driver could not see them. People believe they can see what's in front of them, but they can't."
As our vehicles have grown taller and bulkier, the problem of "front-overs," or driving forward over an unseen child, has increased. You should walk around your vehicle every time you drive it, but technology like "bird's eye" camera systems also can prevent accidents. Many of today's SUVs offer a switch-activated front camera that can be used to check for children before driving away.
It's common for vehicles to have forward-looking radar to anticipate a collision and apply the brakes. These systems, commonly known as automatic emergency braking (AEB), are not created equal.
Older systems were designed to recognize another vehicle to avoid a collision but were not calibrated to detect a child, cyclist or pedestrian. The newest systems can. Parents should ask about the sophistication of the AEB system when shopping for a new vehicle.
It's not hard to find what you need. When the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety made pedestrian AEB a requirement for its safety ratings in 2019, 60% of vehicles had the technology available. By 2021, pedestrian AEB was available in 90% of models.
Childproof your ride
Dangers lurk inside your vehicle, too. Every summer, we learn about children who were either left in vehicles or accidentally locked themselves in them. In the hot sun, it takes only minutes for kids to suffer heatstroke.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recommends that you keep parked vehicles locked at all times, teach children that vehicles are not playgrounds and never leave a child in a vehicle while running errands. Rolling down windows does little to keep a vehicle cool, even in the shade.
There's technology to help parents remember their offspring in the back seat. But, like other safety systems, they are of varying levels of sophistication. The most common rely on door sensors to detect a door opened and assume a child entered the rear, while more advanced versions, like the latest employed by Hyundai/Kia, use seat sensors and motion detectors.
Going further, the Korean automakers commonly employ their Safe Exit Assist system that taps blind spot sensors to detect cars coming alongside the vehicle and prevents the doors from opening into traffic. Kids should be taught to exit curbside, but these systems provide an additional margin of safety just in case.
In the end, the best way to prevent children from getting hurt in and around automobiles is for their parents to remain alert.
"One thing to keep children safe is to focus on vehicle safety and make that a priority," Rollins said. "Tragedies happen in split seconds."
