Car seats required for kids under 4

Shanghai drivers will have to start buckling children under 4 into car seats next month to comply with the first local regulation in China to require child safety seats, local media reported Wednesday.

The new regulation aims to overcome the reluctance that most parents and drivers in Shanghai have shown toward using car seats.

Besides requiring all parents in the city to install child safety seats in their vehicles, the regulation also prohibits children under 12 years old from sitting in a car's front seat, the news portal xinmin.cn reported.

Although the new regulation puts Shanghai a step ahead of other regions in China, the city still lags behind many developed countries in child passenger safety, said Xie Peng, a senior staff member of a nonprofit project sponsored by Autohome Inc. The project advocates for child passenger safety.

In 2012, researchers from the School of Automotive Studies at Tongji University spent some time outside a toll station in Shanghai looking for cars carrying children who appeared to be under 12 years old, said Wang Hongyan, an expert at the school who led the project. Wang's team found that only 1 of every 1,000 of those vehicles was equipped with a car seat.

"The number of cars equipped with child safety seats has been on a rise as several major accidents have been reported by the media over the last two years," Wang told the Global Times. "But only a small proportion of parents actually put their children in car seats."

Last April, a 6-year-old boy who was riding in a van on his grandfather's lap was thrown from the vehicle's front seat during an auto accident, the Oriental Morning Post reported. The child died after he was rushed to the hospital.

Many parents believe it's safe to plop their young children down on the seat when they're not driving on the highway, Xie said. "However, it is very difficult for parents to hold or protect their children during an accident, even when the car isn't going very fast," he told the Global Times.

To demonstrate this fact, Xie asked 10 adults in 2012 to go through a simulated car crash while holding a child-sized test dummy. He said few of the adults managed to hold on to their 8-kilogram dummies, even at 25 kilometers an hour. Three of the dummies ended up thrown from the car.

Wang doesn't expect that the new regulation will make parents recognize the importance of car seats overnight, especially considering that many drivers still scoff at wearing seat belts. She said Chinese people won't strictly follow the regulation until they grow more aware about passenger safety.