BURRILLVILLE – Kids 12-years old and younger should always ride properly restrained in backseats.
I’m on the road a lot traveling back and forth to classic car shows, cruise nights and community events, and witness way too many young children riding in front seats and not wearing seatbelts. Driving a big truck allows me to see inside lower vehicles easily and notice if kids are riding in backseats wearing seatbelts or boosted up in booster seats. It is not always the case. When adults are not wearing seatbelts while driving, it happens more often than not that kids are not wearing seatbelts while riding in that same vehicle. A woman was driving an open door Jeep with two kids not properly restrained and she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt herself. One wrong move or an unexpected occurrence would send all three of them out of that vehicle putting them in harm’s way. It is dangerous in these types of open door vehicles to ride around unrestrained. It’s dangerous enough surrounded by a vehicle with closed doors, much less no doors.
Please properly restrain children in backseats. It’s the safest place for them to ride in any vehicle.
The Buckleupallofus Child Passenger Safety Campaign is an award-winning traffic and vehicle safety effort that creatively helps keep kids safer in all vehicles throughout the year with these useful coloring cartoons and articles. Please drive and ride safely.
Jim Weicherding is a Burrillville resident, and the founder and creator of an award-winning traffic safety effort Seasons of Safety. Weicherding contributes kids’ coloring cartoons, which can be printed and used to help parents discuss safety issues with their children. He has a long list of police officers and firefighters in his family and has worked with law enforcement and firefighters in a creative public safety capacity for more than two decades.
