Washington state’s revised car-seat and booster-seat law begins on Wednesday, Jan. 1.<\/p>\n
The Legislature adopted the changes during the 2019 session.<\/p>\n
Under the revised law:<\/p>\n
• Children under age 2 must use rear-facing car seats. Children should remain in a rear-facing car safety seat as long as possible, until they reach the highest weight or height allowed by their seat.<\/p>\n
• Children ages 2 to at least 4 years should use a forward-facing, age-appropriate child harness seat – and do so as long as possible, until they reach the seat’s height and weight limits. Many seats can accommodate children up to 65 pounds.<\/p>\n
• Children older than 4 but shorter than 4 feet, 9 inches who have outgrown the child harness seat must use booster seats. Most kids will need a booster seat until 10 to 12 years of age.<\/p>\n
• When children are old enough and large enough to use the vehicle seat belt alone, they should use lap and shoulder seat belts for optimal protection.<\/p>\n
As with the previous law, drivers can be ticketed ($124) if a passenger under 16 is not using the correct car seat, booster seat, or seat belt based on their age, height or weight.<\/p>\n
“These changes will help parents protect their children on the road,” said Dr. Beth Ebel, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine and member of the Washington State American Academy of Pediatrics, in a UW Medicine news release. “This change brings us in line with current best thinking about keeping kids safe.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Booster seats required for children 4-9 or shorter <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":43708,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-43707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43707"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43707\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43707"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=43707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}