There is no excuse for not strapping kids in

This is an open letter to a lady I have never met, but with whom I feel the urgent need to communicate.

Dear Lady, I see you some afternoons, when I drive past the child day care centre in Florentia, Alberton.

I spot you when you pick up your child with your white Audi. She is a remarkably pretty little girl, with a mop of curly hair, sturdy little legs, a sprinkling of freckles and plump little arms, which she throws around your neck when you carry her between the centre’s gate and your car.

I figure she must be around three years old. I also figure she will never see the age of four.

Before then, she will probably be a bloody little corpse on a mortuary slab. You will be her killer.

If the above shocks, offends and disturbs you, I am glad. It is meant to do that.

Enough so, that you will stop letting your little girl stand on the front passenger seat of your car when you drive away from the care centre.

In order to do that, I think you are ignorant of some basic physics.

Or, you are spectacularly stupid. Either way, I would like to explain a few things. If you drive your Audi at a totally legitimate 60 km/h and run into the rear of another vehicle, everything inside your car will instantly be subject to more than 12 times the force of gravity.

That means, while your car stops, your little girl will continue to travel forward at 60 km/h, weighing 12 times what she normally does.

Until something like the windscreen or front fascia of the car stops her – violently enough to kill or horribly injure her. If you think you are going to grab her, you are even dumber than I thought.

I see you wear your own seatbelt. Thus, if you hit something solid at 60 km/h, your head will continue to travel forward at that speed, leaving you hanging helplessly in the seatbelt while your daughter flies past you.

Either that, or you will lose a violent altercation with your Audi’s right hand front airbag, preventing you from watching the maiming of your child.

Both options are terrible, and to be avoided, right?

So, please strap your daughter into a child seat, or at least put her in the rear seat strapped in with the seatbelt there. Maybe she does not like to be strapped in.

My guess, she will dislike growing up in wheelchairs even more. And, she does not deserve to die or become a paraplegic just because she has a stupid mother.

Sermon over, but hopefully it will make you think.

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