Airbag Safety for Children: Has Your Child Been Crushed by an Airbag?

The force of a deployed airbag can injure or kill a young child even in at a slow speed or in an otherwise survivable crash. Children ages 12 years and younger, including infants, should never be placed in a seat in front of an airbag. Riding in the back greatly eliminates children’s risk of such injury.

Isolated head injuries occur more frequently in the infant population compared with neck and torso injuries. This is not surprising because the infant is usually seated in a rear-facing car seat, which places the head nearest to the deploying airbag. Older children appear to receive cervical spine as well as head injuries, perhaps secondary to whiplash effect. Injuries in older children occurred when they were not restrained in such a way that pre impact braking brought their head near to the deploying airbag.

Children are safer in a rear seating position, with or without an air bag. In more than 70 percent of the cases where a child in the front seat was killed in a crash, there was a vacant rear seating position available. If you are looking for a new car, select one with enough rear seating positions to hold the maximum number of children you drive.

Has your child been suffered a personal injury caused by an airbag? Has your child died from an airbag wrongful death? Contact Anapol Schwartz for a free consultation. We can help!

Seatbelt Safety and Children – Parents or guardians who did not wear their seatbelts most often did not enforce or teach their children by example to wear seatbelts. Almost 40 percent of children riding with unbelted drivers were also without seatbelts. In 2005, 1,451 children ages 14 years and younger died as passengers in motor vehicle crashes, and approximately 203,000 were injured. Of the children ages 0 to 14 years who were killed in motor vehicle crashes during 2005, nearly half were unrestrained.

Child Safety Seats - Child restraint systems are often used incorrectly. 72% of 3,500 child restraint systems were misused in a way that could increase a child’s risk of injury during a crash. Child safety seats reduce the risk of death in passenger cars by 71 percent for infants and by 54 percent for toddlers, ages 1 to 4 years.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recommends booster seats for children until they are at least 8 years old or 4'9" tall. For children ages 4 to 7 years, booster seats reduce injury risk compared to solely using seat belts alone. All children ages 12 years and younger should ride in the back seat. This eliminates the injury risk of deployed front passenger-side airbags and places children in the safest part of the vehicle in the event of a crash.

Occupant protection technology that was due to be introduced by 2003 had not been thoroughly proven to work as designed and could conflict with the advice automakers have given for years to parents about where to place small children in cars. The NHTSA required that automakers introduce systems that can tell whether an adult, a child or an infant in a carrier is in the front passenger seat of a vehicle and decide whether to set off the air bag in a collision. The systems, which would also decide how air bags should be deployed depending on an individual's weight and body position, would be phased in over a number of years, and would be standard by 2008.

Although credited with saving nearly 7,000 lives, air bags have also been blamed for 175 deaths, mostly children and small women in relatively slow-speed crashes.

Airbag Lawsuits: Please fill out the form below to see if you have a case!

Generally air bags save lives but air bags can also cause serious injury and can be fatal. If you have been seriously injured or a family member has been seriously injured or died due to a faulty air bag, consult with Anapol Schwartz, Pennsylvania and New Jersey law firm, about filing a fatal air bag lawsuit or serious air bag injury lawsuit. Don’t wait forever. Each state has statute of limitations for fi ling lawsuits. The last thing you want is to regret fi ling a lawsuit in time.

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