Every year thousands of children suffer brain damage from not belting up. It's a national crisis, so why aren't alarm bells ringing?

Listen to this article 11 min Listen to this article 11 min It might be uncomfortable to hear this, but because so many parents are failing to buckle up their kids, you need to know. When a car travelling at a mere 60km/h crashes to a stop, a 10kg child in your arms becomes a 600kg projectile.

There's no way you will be able to stop them going through the windscreen. Anyway, your instinctive response in a crash is to throw out your arms and stop yourself.

Compared with adults, children's heads are proportionally larger than their bodies and their necks are weaker. Unrestrained in a car crash, their heads become cannonballs, with disastrous effect. At only 50km/h, a collision without a seatbelt is the equivalent of falling from a three-storey building.

South Africa has the highest child brain trauma from accidents in the world because we're not taking seatbelts seriously. Every year a single hospital in Cape Town - Red Cross - admits about 1,000 children with severe head injuries, 80% from car crashes. Nearly all of those were not wearing seatbelts.

Arrive Alive quotes a paramedic who said they very seldom have to unbuckle a dead person after...