PETALING JAYA, May 11 — Poor attention to road safety in Malaysia is due partly to the lack of effective campaigning, particularly where child safety seats are concerned, according to Asia Pacific Paediatric Association president Datuk Dr Zulkifli Ismail.

He said billboards along highways and major roads were one of the effective ways to make adults realise the importance of road safety.

However, most billboards were just advertisements instead of conveying useful road safety messages.

“We used to have television commercials on road safety. That is all gone now. What happened?” Dr Zulkifli, who is also the Positive Parenting Management Committee chairman, asked.

“It would be meaningful if these companies and corporate bodies include useful safety messages with pictures and reduce the size of the products they are trying to market.”

He said commitment from companies and advertising agencies could include messages such as “Have you bought your child safety seat yet?”, or “Kids are precious, protect them” with photos.

“In the meantime, we can start teaching our children in schools to teach their parents about child restraints and driving etiquette,” he said.

“At least we have taught our future parents about road safety and safety of children in moving vehicles.”

Although Dr Zulkifli felt legislation should be the last resort, he said these traffic cases needed to be brought to court for the message to get across.

As a paediatrician, he said, he had seen a family in a car involved in a highway accident where one older child, who was buckled up, only injured his toes while the youngest strapped into an infant seat survived without a scratch.

He said another child sitting unrestrained in the back seat was killed.

“Usually, paediatricians advise young first-time parents to get child car seats,” he said

“Unfortunately, they do not see what we see and hence, cannot understand why we are so passionate about this.”

He said cost was a major deciding factor so exempting taxes and making child car seats affordable would make more parents willing to buy them.

Road Safety Marshall Club president K. Balasupramaniam said the government should make the first move to ensure smooth implementation of the law.

He said making sudden changes to it may cause the implementation to be flawed, which may result in desperate parents resorting to desperate measures.

“The government should waive taxes for child car seats so it would be cheaper and easily available for parents,” he said.

“There should also be a grace period for the law to be implemented, otherwise some parents may take drastic measures like finding ways to avoid police checks or hide their children under the seat.”

The safety activist said the use of child car seats must be taken as a collective idea and not just due to recent isolated incidents.

Academy of Asian Parenting founder Ko Teik Yen said road networks had expanded and consequently, the number of vehicles on the roads, which made it necessary for child restraints to be used.

“The roads these days are no longer like in the kampung... safety measures have to be taken into account by parents,” he said.

Ko said although it was natural for children to be restless when they were restrained, parents should train their children from an early age.

They must must be firm but gentle when introducing the children to restraints.

“Parents have to be strict but also respectful for the children to adjust to being restrained in the car from an early age,” he said.

Ko said there were many ways to distract children from the discomfort or restlessness, such as providing games or bringing toys on board.

While the cost of child restraints may be one of the concerns for parents, he said “if anything was to happen, the price of life is much higher”.