Everyone riding in a car or van needs a safety belt or safety seat, but even properly restrained, some places in a car are safer to sit in than others. The U.S. Department of Transportation National Highway Traffic Safety Administration offers the following advice to help you decide which is the safest place for your child:

• The back seat is usually safer than the front since head-on crashes are the most serious and the most common.

• Many new cars will have right-front passenger air bags. Air bags work with lap/shoulder belts to protect older children and adults who ride facing the front of the car. But air bags do not work with rear-facing safety seats that infants must ride in.

  Even some forward facing seats may place a child too close to an inflating air bag. Children are always safer in the back seat, but if they must ride up front make sure the shoulder belt crosses the collarbone (not the face or neck), the lap belt rides low and snug on the hips (not the stomach), and their feet touch the floor.

  In a crash, air bags inflate quickly and could hit a rear-facing safety seat hard enough to seriously injure or kill a baby. Always place healthy infants in the back seat, facing the rear. Never turn a baby to face forward until he/she is over 20 pounds and at least one year of age.

• Children who have outgrown safety seats are better protected by lap/shoulder belts than by lap belts alone. Most younger children who have outgrown their convertible child seat at about 40 lbs. still need a booster child safety seat to help the shoulder/lap belt fit properly. Booster seats with shields can be used where only a lap belt is available. If several children are riding in back, and there are shoulder belts there, let the older ones use the shoulder belts. Put the child riding in the car seat in the middle where there is only a lap belt.

• There must be one belt for each person. Buckling two people, even children, into one belt could seriously injure both.