“It’s just a 10-minute drive! Do you really need to strap the poor thing in?”
“Come on! You’re just being over-protective. Nobody goes over 50km per hour here!”
“It’s not KL, you know! We don’t get major accidents here so you don’t need a car seat.”
Do these statements sound familiar to you? If so, welcome to the club of debating the necessity of car seats. Conversations like these often occur with the older generation, who supposedly lived in a time of fewer cars with drivers that drove so slowly that accidents hardly ever occurred. After all, we’re still alive, aren’t we?
I wish I could say that I’ve always been a strict user of car seats for my baby (now toddler) but it really wasn’t easy at the start. My baby hated the car seat from day one (in the ride home from the hospital); the confinement lady almost took him out of the seat just so he would stop screaming and crying; we ourselves started taking him out of the seat when we were five minutes away from home, or just held him in the backseat if we were going somewhere that was just less than a five-minute drive away.
The truth was, every time we took our child out without a car seat, we were taking a risk. Many parents will claim that they are safe drivers but we often forget that other drivers who are careless may collide into us instead, and cause a horrific accident that still seems unreal to those of us who have never experienced such a terrible event.
There are parents who steel themselves to the screaming and crying and manage to buckle up their child no matter what. For me, it only got easier when my baby grew older and protested less at being strapped into the car seat.
Road safety in Malaysia
Road safety in Malaysia is a complicated issue. It was only in January 2009 that buckling up in the backseat became mandatory. For decades, it seems that I have been risking my life by not wearing a seat belt in the backseat. No wonder the older generation are perplexed by this new fear of injuries and fatalities in car accidents. What they fail to understand is that just because we hadn’t done it before doesn’t mean we were right then. We failed to understand the importance of seat belts and other child-safety equipment in the car.
Despite the mandatory ruling on rear seat belt-wearing, it’s noteworthy that there are exemptions made for pregnant women, people with health issues, and even toddlers who are seated on a passenger’s lap, which is mind-boggling. More info here.
Have mindsets improved?
Back in 2004, Daphne Lee, reporter and mother of three, wrote a comprehensive investigative article in The Star on the importance of car seats for babies and toddlers. Ten years on, have mindsets improved? “I think there’s certainly more awareness,” she said. “One reason is people who’ve lived abroad during their undergrad or postgrad years being exposed to the use of seats.”
When asked the why some Malaysians do not use car seats for babies or toddlers, Lee believes that it’s a combination of factors, “including the high cost of car seats, the inconvenience, especially if there are two or more young children in the family, and a general lack of awareness with regard to the dangers of not using seats.” Lee suggests that renting car seats might be an option (Automobile Association of Malaysia, AAM, does rent out car seats) if parents cannot afford to purchase them.
On car seat policy, Lee thinks it definitely needs to be enforced by law in order for it to be taken seriously, although she also says it may not be fair to make the usage of car seats mandatory unless some sort of subsidy is given to make the seats affordable.
To belt or not to belt
The following are 2010 statistics from the Malaysian Institute of Road Safety Research (MIROS):
Encik Yahaya Ahmad, research officer at MIROS, states that during Ops Selamat, a road safety operation conducted during the Chinese New Year holidays in 2013, overall CRS (child restraint system) use was low, at around 11%.
“Unbelted children between the ages of zero and three are 5.8 times more likely to be seriously injured compared to a child restrained in a car seat. Children between the ages of two and five who are restrained with an adult seat belt are 3.5 times more likely to suffer a serious injury and more than four times more likely to suffer a serious head injury than children who are restrained in a car seat,” says Yahaya.
According to Yahaya, while usage of car seats is not mandatory, the government has been promoting road safety and educating the public on the benefits of using car seats through the Jabatan Keselamatan Jalan Raya. There is, however, regulation on the minimum safety requirements of car seats that is underway and is likely to be implemented after 2015.
The introduction of laws and regulation alone may not be adequate to address the problem of a lack of road safety knowledge and implementation. Attitudes are vital in ensuring child safety on the road, says Yahaya. For example, on the use of rear seat belts, the public were resistant and response was tepid. A law that states that car seat usage is mandatory will only work if mindsets change and people cooperate.
Although punitive laws may not change the mindsets of parents who still do not understand the importance of road safety, they might at least function as a deterrent until children in car seats become a habit, and later a norm. No doubt a large, daunting task, financial assistance from the government as well as other bodies or campaigners concerned about child safety on the road is much needed to make car seats easily affordable and available to people from all income groups and also to create more awareness about the consequences of not using proper child restraint systems.
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Janet Tay was a freelance writer and editor before becoming a stay-at-home mum. She has published short stories, book reviews and articles on books and the literary world in MPH Quill and The Star. She current juggles her time between writing and running after her toddler around the house.
Image Credits: Flickr user minishorts
Illustration by Myra Mahyuddin & NHTSA
