No, California Doesn’t Let All 13 Year Olds Ride in Booster Seats – Jalopnik

It is a time-honored tradition for young teenagers to run to a car to shout “Shotgun!” to shout. to determine who gets the honor of riding in the front passenger seat. A proposed version of California Assembly Bill 435 would have put an end to that by banning children under 13 and teens up to 16 who were too small from the front seat, according to CalMatters. It would also have changed the current law to increase the age requirement for mandatory car seats from eight to 10, and to 13 for smaller children.

However, many people, including lawmakers, believed the original bill was too restrictive, the report said LAist. The version of the bill that was passed maintains California’s current requirement for a booster seat up to age eight or four feet tall, but adds a five-step test to determine whether children between eight and sixteen years old are safely restrained wherever they sit. From LAist:

If the driver of a vehicle cannot answer “yes” to all five of these questions about his child passenger wearing a seat belt, the driver could be ticketed and fined from $490.

1. Is the child sitting all the way back against the seat?
2. Do the child’s knees bend comfortably on the edge of the seat?
3. Does the strap cross the shoulder between the neck and arm and rest on the collarbone?
4. Is the lap belt as low as possible and does it touch the thighs?
5. Can the child remain seated like this for the entire journey?

The new law, which comes into effect on January 1, 2027, does not require a booster seat. It only requires that these five conditions be met, with or without a booster. If a child does not meet these criteria without a booster, adding a booster should remedy this, but make sure you use a safe one.

This may seem like an extremely complicated list of requirements, going well beyond the federal standards that California is familiar with from time to time. In this case, however, I think California is right, basing safety and legality on a good match rather than arbitrary age limits. Let me explain.

A while back I was one NHTSA Certified Child Safety Technician as part of my work for a local transport authority. (My training and certifications are out of date, so I’m not speaking in an official capacity.) The first four steps of the California Five-Step Test are quite similar to the adjustment criteria I used to check. Compare this with NHTSA’s guidelines for a good fit in a booster seat:

8 – 12 years
Have your child sit in a booster seat until he or she is tall enough to fit properly in the seat belt. For a seat belt to fit properly, the lap belt must fit snugly across the thighs and not across the abdomen. The shoulder belt should fit snugly over the shoulder and chest and should not cross over the neck or face. Please note: your child should still sit in the back seat as it is safer there.

NHTSA doesn’t say you have to remove the booster seat at a certain age, but when the seat belt fits properly without it. Children come in all different shapes and sizes, so the right time to throw away the booster depends on the child. California’s Five-Step Test teaches parents how to properly determine this for themselves, rather than following arbitrary age requirements in state law, which I believe is the right way to do this.