Kids, at Risk and Neglected

When a pickup truck rear-ended a minivan in Tennessee on June 30, 2001, none of the adults in either vehicle was seriously injured. But Joshua Flax, an 8-month-old baby in a car seat in the minivan's second row, was killed.

That's because the 1998 Dodge Caravan's seats were designed to collapse backward to absorb the force of such an impact. The passenger in front fell back and hit Joshua's head, fracturing the baby's skull. Joshua's family -- the minivan was being driven by his grandfather -- recently won a $101.75 million judgment against DaimlerChrysler from a jury in Tennessee.

The company is appealing the award, arguing that the seats exceeded federal safety standards and that almost all vehicles are designed to do the same in such an accident. But the case illustrates how hard it can be to keep kids safe in cars even today, when technology and seat-belt laws are aimed at making driving safer than ever.

"The very first thing I think people need to understand is that when vehicles are being designed, they're not even thinking about kids," said Janette Fennell, founder of the advocacy group Kids and Cars. "That's just the way it's been and people work around it, doing different things to try to make [the car environment] more flexible."

New cars and trucks are loaded with devices to help occupants survive crashes or even avoid accidents, from air bags in ceilings to seat belts that grab harder before impact, to cruise control that senses vehicles in the roadway ahead. Most of those innovations are aimed at adults, and some -- such as air bags -- actually pose hazards to children.

Even some measures aimed at protecting kids can have dangerous unintended consequences. A generation ago -- when today's parents were kids -- children rolled around freely in the backs of station wagons and sometimes sat up front next to the unbelted driver. Now they're strapped into the back seat in high-impact plastic cocoons. While that protects them in most cases, it isn't perfect, as shown by the death of Joshua Flax. And the practice of confining kids to the back seat has coincided with a sharp rise in incidents in which parents forget their children and leave them locked in the car.

Overall, the rate of highway fatalities for adults and children alike has declined over the past 20 years, but experts say there are still many child deaths that might have been prevented.

The number of children 15 and younger killed in traffic accidents nationwide rose last year to 2,570 from 2,550 the year before, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. With Americans driving more than ever, though, the rate of child deaths per miles traveled declined slightly.

Motor vehicle accidents remain the leading cause of death for U.S. children over age 1, as they have been for years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In fact, traffic accidents are the top killer of Americans through age 34.

In addition, children fall victim every year to incidents in driveways, garages and parking lots that the government doesn't officially count. When a child is hit by a car backing out of the driveway, that's called a "non-traffic, non-crash" incident and is not reported by state police to NHTSA and therefore not factored into the federal government's annual tally of highway fatalities.