Kids are 1st is a non-profit 501(c) organization working hard everyday to help save lives through our community safety day events, educational workshops and seminars. We address how to change distracted driving behaviors, are certified child passenger safety seat technicians and address all potentially dangerous safety situations including drowning, leaving kids in cars and motor vehicle safety.
Did you know that car crashes are the #1 source of injury and death to our children and teens? Car crashes kill more of our children than any of the major diseases.
We are on the front line to save lives every time we initiate or participate in a safety event which features a child passenger seat check up event, and other potentally life saving services and information. Kids Are 1st will use donations to continue our life saving programs, the funding will make it possible for us to hand out more child safety seats to those who cannot afford one and are putting their children in harm's way everytime they are traveling in a motor vehicle and are unprotected by not being properly restrained in a child safety seat.
Texting and other driving distractions have become a major cause of motor vehicle crashes. With proper funding we will be able to demonstrate using computers how to avoid and change bad driving behaviors.
The photo below is an actual crash which was the result of texting while driving. When you answer or send a text at 55 MPH your eyes are off the road the length of a football field which is 100 yards or 300 feet!!!
Do you know what other distractions kills and injure the most teen drivers?
Lattes and make up. Yes, it is true. You can help by donating to Kids Are 1st. All donations are tax deductible, a 501 (c) (3) non profit tax letter will be issued for your donation. It is urgent that we all work together to educate and provide services to save lives. Too many children, teens and adults are being injured and killed. We must lower these alarming statistics. Each donation will help provide a child passenger safety seat to a family in need or help pay for a safety event where scores of car seats can be checked and installed properly. Nine of ten children are not restrained safely while passengers and are at risk. Your donations will provide education to teen drivers about how deadly distractions are while driving and other safety issues that endanger all of us everyday.
You can contribute via a secure connection on Paypal at KIDS ARE 1st
or contribute by mail (bottom of website page). Contributions of any amount are always deeply appreciated.
Washington, DC (NAPSI) - U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood recently announced the launch of a series of new public service announcements (PSAs) released in partnership with the Ad Council that promote child car safety among parents of children ages newborn to 12.
According to the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for children ages 1 through 12 years old. From 2006 to 2010, 4,028 children ages 12 and younger were killed in crashes and another estimated 660,000 children were injured in crashes involving a passenger vehicle. However, NHTSA reports that child restraints in the vehicle saved the lives of an estimated 9,611 children ages 4 and younger from 1975 to 2010.
“While safety is our top priority for everyone on our roadways, we’re calling on parents to do everything they can to protect our most vulnerable passengers,” said Secretary LaHood. “These new public service announcements will encourage parents to choose the right seat for their children and properly secure them every time they get behind the wheel.”
Working with the Ad Council as part of an ongoing campaign to ensure child car safety, NHTSA unveiled new PSAs that will air on television, radio, online and in outdoor advertising nationwide. “The Right Seat” effort aims to make sure all parents and caregivers are properly securing children ages 12 and under in the right car restraint (rear-facing, forward-facing, booster, seat belt) for their age and size. Targeting parents and caregivers who think their children are already using the right car seats, the key message of the PSAs is “Parents who really know it all, know for sure their child is in the right car seat.”
“The proper use of a child seat is the most effective way to keep a child safe in a moving vehicle,” said NHTSA Administrator David Strickland. “Parents and caregivers should always use a child seat and, based on NHTSA’s updated guidelines, should keep their children in their current seats for as long as possible before moving them up to the next type of seat.”
Coinciding with the release of the new PSAs, NHTSA also launched “Parents Central,” a new one-stop-shop website with tools and resources for keeping children safe in and around cars.
For more than 25 years, the Ad Council and NHTSA have worked together on consumer safety PSA campaigns. Previous campaigns targeted individual stages of child passenger safety; i.e., the LATCH system, booster seats and seat belts. The English-language PSAs were created pro bono by advertising agency Gotham, Inc.
“We are proud to partner with Secretary LaHood, Administrator Strickland and NHTSA to extend our more than 25-year partnership with NHTSA by releasing new PSAs that address the absolute importance of child car safety,” said Peggy Conlon, president and CEO of the Ad Council.
Below is a copy of an email we received from the NLPOA- East Los Angeles Chapter (National Latino Peace Officers Association). It is a wonderful feeling to find out that the child passenger safety that we teach works so well to save lives.
Good Morning Everyone
Just want to share how important and life saving our car seat events are. This young lady (Christine Lopez) is a Pico Rivera resident who attended our car seat event on Saturday.
She sent me a message yesterday to thank the Chapter and CHP for putting on car seat events. Yesterday she was in a accident in Montebello and her daughter was in the car with her. She is truly grateful for the CHP techs who properly secured her daughters seat which kept her safe. Although her daughter had to be taken back to ER last night Christine and Leilani walked away with sprains and bruises.
Charmaine, please thank the technicians, who assisted this family. I have attached photos.
Thank you.
Sonia
Chapter Secretary
NLPOA- East Los Angeles Chapter
Please check our calendar and have your car seats checked and installed properly. The above crash may have had fatalities if the children were not restrained properly.
After hitting road debris, their car slid into a guardrail and spun across the highway before flipping over and landing upside down on rocks.
Emergency medical technicians later told parents Jeff and Anne Hamilton that when they see cars as crushed as theirs was in March, they assume any children inside are dead.
Anne Hamilton, however, is trained to install child seats and had each of her three children in the best possible seat and position for their ages. She's convinced it prevented what could have been life-threatening injuries to the three girls, then ages 2, 4 and 6. The worst injury was a broken leg suffered by the 4-year-old.
Most parents aren't using child seats correctly, research released Thursday from the non-profit group Safe Kids USA shows. Only 30% are using the tether straps that keep the tops of child seats — and children's heads — secured in crashes, and many are not using the safest seats for their children's ages.
In what is believed to be the largest study ever done of child seats, Safe Kids reviewed 79,000 car seat checklists collected at inspection events the group held in 2009 and 2010. Because parents voluntarily take their vehicles to checkups, the rate for proper usage is likely even lower, Safe Kids says, which underscores the need for more education.
Although the death rate has declined, car crashes remain the leading cause of death for children ages 3 to 14, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data. Properly used child safety seats decrease the risk of death by 71% for infants and 54% for toddlers, NHTSA says. Children are 59% less likely to be injured in a booster seat than if they were using seat belts only.
"As a parent, if something ever happened to my child when I was driving, I'd have to know I did everything possible right or I wouldn't be able to sleep at night," says Lorrie Walker, Safe Kids' child passenger safety technical adviser and co-author of the report.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, Safe Kids and other safety organizations recommend that children stay rear-facing in vehicles until they are 2. Safe Kids said that parents were "doing a better job" keeping kids rear facing, but that more needs to be done to educate parents about the importance of doing so longer.
Top concern: Tether straps
Safe Kids spokesman Kyle Johnson says it was impossible to quantify how many kids had moved out of the right seat for their age, but many showed up at checkpoints in the wrong seat or none at all. That was especially common for children ages 7 or 8, who should have still been in booster seats.
But the low rate of tether strap usage was the biggest concern.
Tether straps and their in-car attachment points have been on child seats and new cars for more than a decade. They are part of the LATCH (Lower Anchors and Tethers for Children) system that was required as part of a $152 million federal rule that was phased in starting in the late 1990s. LATCH was supposed to make child seats easier to install by eliminating the need to wrestle with seat belts to secure them. And the more snugly installed seats would save lives and prevent up to 3,600 injuries a year, NHTSA said.
Child safety advocates say several factors are contributing to the disappointing showing. One is a lack of public awareness.
"As always is the case when you make a significant breakthrough, people forget if you do not have a good maintenance level" of publicity, says Stephanie Tombrello, founder of the child safety group SafetyBeltSafe.
And although the attachments dangle from all new child seat models, many parents simply resort to the seat belts they've always used or seen used. Even people trained to install child seats correctly are largely eschewing the system: Safe Kids says only 30% of the cars that drove away from checkpoints were using the lower anchors located where seat backs meet seat bottoms.
NHTSA chief David Strickland and safety advocates say that it's OK if belts are used correctly.
"Ultimately, both the LATCH system and seat belts are effective ways to secure a child seat," Strickland says. "What's most important is that parents and caregivers know how to properly install and use the right seat for their child's size and weight."
Still, the in-car options can make LATCH less alluring. Vehicles are only required to have the lower attachments in two back seat positions, so many small and midsize cars have them in the seating positions closest to the doors. The middle seat, however, is typically considered the safest as it is the farthest away from the doors in a crash. Many vehicle manufacturers also warn against using the LATCH anchors for children who weigh more than 48 pounds.
NHTSA has a research program underway to examine issues raised by consumer and safety groups, including LATCH use in the rear center seat, ways to improve tether anchorages, and the need to better educate consumers with heavier children, Strickland says. NHTSA's latest public service advertising campaign ended in July, and the agency plans another child-seat campaign later this year.
Gloria Bergquist, spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, says the LATCH acronym can be confusing. She says the message needs to be more memorable and suggests: "Children should be tethered at all times in cars."
There was good news in the report. About 99% of children under 13 years showed up at the checkpoints in back seats, which safety advocates recommend whether or not a car has air bags. Fewer than 1% of children were unrestrained.
Safety advocates warn against using second-hand child seats because they might have been involved in crashes — which could make them less effective. Safe Kids says more than 90% of people knew the history of their child seats and only 2% had been involved in crashes.
The progress should pay off for years to come, Walker says. "When kids are properly restrained and trained at young age, as they get older they are more likely to use seat belts," she says. "It's an education process."
Crash is a powerful lesson
To those who think it's impractical — if not impossible — to keep toddlers rear facing or older children in booster seats, Hamilton's crash experience is a powerful cautionary note.
The family was driving from their home outside Los Angeles to visit friends in Phoenix in March when her husband, Jeff, hit what he thinks were truck tire treads on an unlit highway. Bridget, a month shy of her 5th birthday, was in a forward-facing child seat against the driver's side window in the third row. When the car hit the guardrail, she told her mother her "leg went up to the sky." She had the worst injuries in the family: A cut that sliced through most of her foot and a broken leg. But she's fully recovered now.
Anne, who was sitting in the second row of seats, got severe cuts on her arm and face; her husband was also badly bruised and cut up. Emma, now 7, had been using a booster seat, but her mother put her back in a forward-facing seat with a harness, knowing it would be better protection for the long ride. She was sitting in front of Bridget and sustained only cuts and bruises from what's called "road burn." Maggie, who turned 3 the following month, was riding rear facing in the third row of seats. She didn't have a scratch on her.
"I know that their properly used child seats really did save their lives," Hamilton says. "If we were going by the bare minimum of the law, I don't want to think about what would have happened."
Nearly 100,000 children, most of them under the age of 5, have been injured after falling from a window during the past two decades in the United States, new research shows.
Surprisingly, the risk of being injured after falling from a window wasn’t limited to children who live in high-rise apartment buildings. Falls from first- or second-floor windows accounted for 94 percent of the falls, according to data published Monday in the medical journal Pediatrics.
Although many cities, including New York, require protective guards to be placed on apartment windows, most owners of houses don’t take such precautions.
“This is actually a common injury,’’ said Dr. Gary A. Smith, senior author of the study and director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. “I just don’t think it’s on the radar screen of many parents. Not only are these injuries severe, but we know they are preventable.”
The findings are based on data collected from 6,100 hospital emergency rooms over a 19-year period ending in 2008. On average, nearly 5,200 children a year — about 14 a day — are admitted to hospital emergency rooms after falling from windows. Dr. Smith noted that the data collected for the study understate the real toll of window falls because they reflect only children injured and treated in emergency departments. Children who are seen by family doctors and those who die at the scene are not counted in the emergency room data, he said.
Risk for falling out a window peaks between the ages of 1 and 2. About two-thirds of the window falls involved children under 5.
“That’s the age group that are exploring,’’ said Dr. Smith. “They see the open window and don’t see the danger, and out they go.’’
About 60 percent of the falls involved boys. One out of every four children involved in a window fall treated in an emergency department required admission to the hospital. Half the injuries were to the head and face.
“A typical admission rate for young children in the emergency department is about 5 percent; this is five times higher,’’ noted Dr. Smith. “These injuries are commonly severe and can lead to a lifetime of disability.”
Dr. Smith said the data should prompt parents to look anew at the windows in their homes — even those on the first floor — and take precautions to make sure children can’t fall out of them. One of the biggest mistakes parents make is to assume that a window with a screen is adequate to prevent a child from falling. In the study, 83 percent of the falls were from windows with screens.
“Screens just pop right out, and that’s not enough to keep a child in,’’ said Dr. Smith.
Homes with small children or those who have friends or family members with small children who might visit should equip windows with window guards. Parents should also move furniture away from window areas. In the study, many children climbed on furniture to gain access to a window, Dr. Smith said.
As the economy struggles to rebound and households continue to scale back on spending, there is an increasing trend in the business world toward investing in corporate social responsibility. Even in these tough economic times, companies realize the importance of supporting local communities and philanthropic causes. Supporting a cause that positively reflects on a brand and its core values demonstrates a commitment to making a difference. Today’s #E2sday looks at “The Business of Giving” and how companies are making an impact on philanthropies.
KIDS ARE 1ST SAFETY FESTIVAL HOSTED BY BUNNIN CHEVROLET IN CULVER CITY CA Sponsored by STATE FARM, co-hosts SENATOR CURREN PRICE & UNITED INDEPENDENT TAXI
The basic fine for not wearing a seat belt is $142, but other costs such as court fees can sharply raise the final total.
The fine is up to $445 for not properly restraining a child under 16. If the parent is not in the car, the driver gets the ticket, a CHP spokeswoman said.
The enforcement effort, - dubbed California Occupant Restraint Campaign II - runs until Sept. 30, she said.
The enforcement push is part of a federally-fund campaign to try to reduce the number of deaths and injuries from motorists not wearing seat belts.
In addition to the statewide enforcement efforts, CHP personnel are conducting community outreach to educate drivers about seat belt and child-restraint usage, according to a CHP news release.
"Seat belts and child safety seats are the best defense against impaired, aggressive, and distracted drivers," said CHP Commissioner Joe Farrow. "The two seconds it takes to buckle up can be the difference between life and death and can help prevent serious injuries from a collision."
Of the 1,891 vehicle occupants killed statewide in 2009 (the latest year figures are available for), there were 544 who were not using safety equipment, making up roughly 29 percent of all vehicle passengers killed, the release states.
In 2009, CHP officers issued nearly 163,000 citations to for not wearing a seat belt. More than 16,000 citations were issued to parents, guardians or drivers who failed to properly secure children inside the vehicle.
Comprehensive traffic safety seminars and classes; child safety-seat inspections; and free safety seats distributions are part of the campaign.
Laura Yurs