Following a slew of new child restraint laws in the past couple of months, we have observed a fair amount of skepticism regarding the necessity of booster seats. The NHTSA website has a number of informative studies, though you have to wade through quite a lot of statistics to find what you are looking for.

To keep things simple, we are posting just one graphic here today. From a 2005 report analyzing motor vehicle fatalities from 1998 to 2002, we have extracted the statistics on injuries among 8 to 15 year olds. This particular report does not distinguish between different types of restraints, and we will cover these in a future post. The chart below shows the relative risk of death for a number of different vehicles:

Conclusions: children tend to be safest in trucks as long as they are restrained. Unrestrained, passenger cars are the most likely to result in fatalities. Across all four categories of vehicles, children aged 8-15 are 50% less likely to die in an accident if restrained. Taking responsible steps to reduce the likelihood of fatalities is not being over-protective.