Next time you are looking for someone to drive around your children, ask their grandparents. A new study by Dr. Fred Henretig, emergency medicine attending physician at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, found that kids are twice as safe when their grandparents are driving than their parents.

Since older people get into more accidents than younger drivers, Henretig set out to confirm that grandparents would be more dangerous than parents behind the wheel, but was surprised by the opposite findings. The research published in the journal Pediatrics, looked at car crash data in 15 states from 2003-2007 involving 217,976 children. Researchers found that in the 10 percent where grandparents were behind the wheel, the risk of injury to children was 50 percent lower than the risk when driving with parents. This lower risk occurred despite the fact that grandparents had more inadequately installed car seats compared to the parents.

There is some speculation as to why the research yielded these unexpected results. Henretig, a grandfather himself, noted that grandparents could be more nervous driving “precious cargo” and drive more cautiously, which could offset the challenges older drivers face. Also, the median age of the grandparents in the study was 58 (compared to age 36 for parents), which isn’t very old as crash risk is notably higher for drivers over 65.

Even though most grandparents buckled up themselves (98 percent), the study pointed out that 25 percent of their young passengers weren’t restrained properly and were sitting in the front seat at higher rates than when they were riding with their parents. Among parents, 97 percent buckled up and 20 percent had their children riding in seats not installed or buckled properly.

The study notes that safety could be increased by grandparents following the latest child-restraint guidelines, which were announced in the spring.

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