Why is there a seat belt law

Life as a parent is full of compromises, but seat belt safety is never up for negotiation. Follow these pointers and set the example of buckling up every time you get into the car.

And remember: Never give up until they buckle up! Research shows that children whose parents buckle up are much more likely to buckle up themselves. Learn tips to motivate your tweens to buckle up , and make it a rule in your family that everyone follows the same practices as you: Always buckle up before moving the car, no matter how short or routine the drive, and make sure all children are buckled up properly. Learn about the proper seat belt fit for your child and why your children may not be wearing their seat belts correctly.

All children under age 13 should ride in the back seat for maximum safety. The back seat is the safest place for your children because most crashes occur in the front of the car and the back seat is farthest from this impact. We know life as a parent is full of distractions and often hectic, making it easy to forget or forego buckling up altogether.

See if any of these excuses for not buckling up sound familiar, then do whatever it takes to buckle up and make sure your kids do the same:.

Getting your kids to properly buckle up and stay buckled can be a battle of wills. There are several reasons why children 8 to 14 may forget or not want to wear their seat belts. Tweens are going through several developmental stages—social, cognitive and emotional—which offer helpful insights into what makes sense to them and what motivates them. Learn about the developmental stages and motivational messages get your kids to buckle up properly, the whole ride, every time.

We know you make every effort to keep your kids safe. However, parenting can be a hectic job. The daily routine of getting your kids to and from school and other activities can be hurried and chaotic, creating an environment where insisting on wearing a seat belt is not top of mind.

See if you face these five challenges to getting tweens to wear — and stay in — their seat belts. As a parent, sometimes you let your kids have their way. Think again. Set the example by always wearing your seat belt, and remind your teens buckling up is the law. Your seat belt is crucial to surviving a crash.

Make it a habit to always buckle up every time. Skip to main content. Risky Driving Drunk Driving. Drug-Impaired Driving. Distracted Driving. Seat Belts. Drowsy Driving. Overview One of the safest choices drivers and passengers can make is to buckle up. Seat Belts Save Lives. Additional lives that seat belts could have saved in if everyone had buckled up. Consequences Adults Tweens. The Issue Consequences. The consequences of not wearing, or improperly wearing, a seat belt are clear:. Buckling up is the single most effective thing you can do to protect yourself in a crash Seat belts are the best defense against impaired, aggressive, and distracted drivers.

Guidelines to buckle up safely The lap belt and shoulder belt are secured across the pelvis and rib cage, which are better able to withstand crash forces than other parts of your body. Place the shoulder belt across the middle of your chest and away from your neck. The lap belt rests across your hips, not your stomach.

NEVER put the shoulder belt behind your back or under an arm. States wishing to increase enforcement and publicity to magnify the effect of the law change will incur additional costs: see Chapter 2, Section 2.

In most States there is substantial opposition to changing a secondary law to a primary belt use law. Opponents claim that primary laws impinge on individual rights and provide opportunities for law enforcement to harass minority groups. Studies in several States have found that minority groups were ticketed at similar or lower rates than others after a primary law was implemented Shults et al.

When Michigan changed from a secondary to a primary law, harassment complaints were very uncommon both before and after the law change. The proportion of seat belt use citations issued to minority groups decreased under the primary law. In a telephone survey, the vast majority of people who actually received seat belt citations did not feel that they were singled out on the basis of race, age, or gender.

However, some minorities and young drivers reported perceptions of harassment [Eby, Kostyniuk, Molnar, et al. Studies in States that changed their law from secondary to primary show that belt use increased across a broad range of drivers and passengers.

In some States, belt use increased more for low-belt-use groups, including Hispanics, African-Americans, and drinking drivers, than for all occupants Shults et al. However, seat belt violations may be issued at license and registration checkpoints to drivers cited for other offenses.

Motor Vehicle Safety. Section Navigation. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Syndicate. Minus Related Pages. On This Page. Get Email Updates. To receive email updates about this topic, enter your email address: Email Address. What's this? Links with this icon indicate that you are leaving the CDC website. And New Hampshire still does not have a law requiring adults to wear seat belts. The same baffling approach applies to other public health interventions, such as the introduction of motorcycle helmet laws.

In the US, there are three states Illinois, Iowa and New Hampshire where helmets are not mandatory for motorcyclists of any age, but they border states where all riders must wear one.

The modest fine was supposed to reassure motorists that the law was not to be strictly enforced. Instead, police officers publicly announced they would issue the fine only if there were other offences worthy of pulling the motorist over. The statute even went one step further by stating that violating the seat belt law could not be considered negligence, which meant insurers would still have to pay out if a driver had injured themselves while not wearing one.

And yet, four motorists who were charged under the new law tried to challenge its constitutionality in court. There was precedence: when Illinois introduced laws requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets in , the Illinois Supreme Court ruled it an unconstitutional restriction of personal liberty — a ruling which still stands today.

On this occasion, however, the court ruled against the motorists who brought the case. Although the majority of people now face masks, some still see it as an infringement of their civil liberties Credit: Alamy. And the protests against seat belt laws did not mean that Americans as a whole ignored them, even if they did object to them on principle. When the laws in both countries were updated in the early s to include back-seat adult passengers, the effect was less noticeable.

In other countries there were fewer protests, but adherence was much lower. In the late s, Serbia then Yugoslavia had one of the highest rates of road deaths in Europe. But, Yugoslavians still rarely wore their seat belts. It is clear that the level of protesting and the number of legal challenges did not necessarily equate to adoption of the new law or regulation. Something else was going on.

The general practice for drivers and passengers in Yugoslavia, according to studies at the time , was to drape their belts over their shoulders without clicking them in place. While it meant they often avoided a fine, they were not wearing the belt for its intended purpose. If there was no intention on the part of the drivers to wear the belt properly then why go to court? And there was no restriction on their personal liberties if the belt could be worn incorrectly.

While courts were widely used in Yugoslavia, they were used for personal benefit not to pursue political or symbolic point-scoring. In the US, the reverse was true. Challenging a fine in court would have been far more expensive than paying the modest fee, and few people were fined anyway.