Small Kids in Front Seat

Just thought I'd share a story. A lady I work with and her daughter were in a pretty bad crash a week or two ago. Her daughter was in the passenger seat. She is 15, but is only 4'11. The airbag deployed and, due to how short she is, has done serious damage. She has lost a lot of vision in one eye (the lady I work with was saying yesterday that with glasses, they think they can get her vision back to 20/70), has damage to her back, and has lost her hearing in one ear. She has had CAT scans and they can't find any damage inside her ear, so they are hoping the hearing will come back. She has to go to the spine specialists yesterday and I haven't heard how that turned out yet. But, they were told that all the damage was due to her still being too short to be in front of the airbag. She also had burns on her face, but that really had nothing to do with her height. This is so scary to me. The mom has begged some of the MDs we work with to put up notices in their office of the dangers of short kids being in the front seat. I don't think I'll ever let my kids ride in the front seat.

pmg. one of my friends is also tiny, and i saw her get in the car the other day and put the belt behind her back.. driving... maybe i'll be mean and grab her by the hair and smash her head into the steering wheel. tough love and all. (not hard enough to bruise... i'm not that mean..)

scary...

I am 4 11.

I so do not want to hear that.

Hopefully our smart airbags will make the right choice if we are ever in an accident.
I am pretty sure when I am driving that it would not go off as it knows I am too close to the steering wheel. Course then I would just smack into the steering wheel. And that is not good either.

I hope that in the end she gets her hearing back and recovers most of her eyesight.

That is so sad. I hope her hearing comes back and the glasses help. I yell at my sister all the time for letting my DN dit up front. I even tolder her about a girl DS went to school with getting severly injured from the airbag and missing 3 months of school.

That's horrible. I hope she makes a better recovery than they expect. I'm 4'11", too... I think I need a chauffer so I can sit in the back with my kiddos.

My BFF is 23, weights maybe 80lbs sopping wet and is only 4'8" I have been telling her forever I am going to get her a regent so she is safer when she drives. I wish I could find them but I have a great picture of her in DS's regent. She is so tiny, but it was just too funny that as an adult she still fit perfectly in my 4 year old's carseat.

How awful.

I see small kids in front of airbags a lot around here - kids so tiny and young they should still be in boosters. It really upsets me, probably moreso because I stopped to see if anyone needed help after there was a collision and there was a young girl maybe 7, who had been in the front passenger seat of a minivan that had airbags deploy.

The paramedics were obviously angry with the dad for having had his dd in the front seat. Dad & the girl had both left the vehicle after the collision and gone to sit on the side of the road, so no obvious serious injuries (I know people can walk around with big injuries, so that's why I say obvious,) but the paramedics immediately focused on the girl and started assessing her specifically for airbag related injuries as soon as they arrived & found out she'd been in the front seat. I'm hoping that dad was scared enough he won't put his young kids in front again, and that the girl was ok. One of those things I'll never know.

BudgieStew said:

I am 4 11.

I so do not want to hear that.

Hopefully our smart airbags will make the right choice if we are ever in an accident.
I am pretty sure when I am driving that it would not go off as it knows I am too close to the steering wheel. Course then I would just smack into the steering wheel. And that is not good either.

I hope that in the end she gets her hearing back and recovers most of her eyesight.

Click to expand...

I'm fairly certain (99%, but there is that 1% room for error, so someone correct me if I'm wrong,) that driver airbags do not disable regardless of weight of person in the seat. The driver airbag is always active, but the dual stage is meant to control the force of release - lower force impacts and higher force impacts are handled differently by the system that releases the airbag.

Adults who can't have 29cm's of clearance between the steering wheel and the vehicle when driving may want to evaluate the risks of having the airbags disabled vs. the close proximity they are to them if they were involved in a collision that caused them to deploy. The risk would definitely be evaluated differently for a driver who has a fist worth of room vs. one who has say 26cm's... and in Canada anyways, you have to get medical documentation and then get permission to have the airbag disabled, so it's not a simple process.

We were taught in class that airbags decrease fatality and serious injury by approximately 5%, but I'm not sure if that percentage changes based on the size of person driving the vehicle. In all honesty, I'd be inclined to look at vehicle modifications done by a company familiar with mobility issues, in order to extend the brake/gas pedals, and change the position you were sitting in the vehicle. (I know there are approved seat changes that can boost people higher.) My guess would be that the airbag is a greater risk than the risk of hitting the steering wheel, but it's nothing more than a guess.

(This might be a good topic to start a discussion on in a separate thread, as I'm sure that there are lots of people affected by this issue.)

I'm going to tell my sister about this. No matter what I tell her, she still allows my small 10 year old nephew to sit in the front seat. Half of the time he is unrestrained in the front seat.

That poor girl.

I hope she is able to recover as much as possible.

My sister just asked me last night if I thought it would be okay for her to let my 11yo niece ride up front in Grandma's car so she wouldn't be alone in the back seat. I hope you don't mind that I forwarded your co-worker's story to her!

snowbird25ca said:

(This might be a good topic to start a discussion on in a separate thread, as I'm sure that there are lots of people affected by this issue.)

Click to expand...

Great idea. And since I had comments to add about driver's seating position for small adults, I started a thread in Car Safety here http://www.car-seat.org/showthread.php?p=434573#post434573