California and the West : Will Car Seat Measure Fit the Bill? : Safety: Legislation sent to the governor last week would require children up to 7 to be in a booster seat while riding. Some parents wonder if it’s practical.

It was sort of like the story of the Three Bears. For Tatiana the seat was “OK,” for Vincent the seat was “pretty good,” but for 68-pound Gregory it was “too small!”

Those were the reactions of 6- and 7-year-olds in an informal survey on a Sacramento soccer field, just a few miles from where the Legislature this week passed a law requiring children to sit in car booster seats until their seventh birthdays.

As of Friday, Gov. Gray Davis had not decided whether to sign the bill.

The legislation, by state Sen. Jackie Speier (D-Daly City), would be a giant step beyond the 1983 law that required children to use car seats until age 4 or 40 pounds. Beginning in 2001, it would fine offending parents $100 for a first violation and $250 for a second.

Speier says the change is needed because regular seat belts are not safe for children until they are bigger.

On the soccer field, most prototypes for the pending legislation, asked if they would obey a new booster seat law, nodded yes. If they had to.

But what would Vincent’s older brother say? “He’d say I’m a baby,” Vincent replied, no longer so sure about the whole thing.

Their parents were quicker to pass judgment.

The idea is “a little extreme for me,” said Esteban Zacarias, father of Tatiana, age 6. She hit 40 pounds and left the car seat era two years ago. A Velcro contraption pulls the shoulder seat belt down to where it fits her just fine.

“If I had to, I would do it, but that looks kind of uncomfortable,” Zacarias said as he surveyed Tatiana’s squished thighs.

Gregory, 7, was unwilling to even consider the plan.

“I don’t want to . . . I just don’t,” he said. Gregory, the tallest in his first-grade class last year, was also inches too wide for the only older-kids booster seat sold at the nearby Target store. Perhaps, his dad suggested, he is the kind of exception that the bill’s authors anticipated in allowing judges to waive all fines if children are too big.

Have lawmakers lost touch with reality, he and other parents asked.

The governor “doesn’t have kids, so he might not know how it really is,” suggested Gregory’s dad, Curtis Earnest.

Here’s how it really is, said others: Seat belts themselves are so hard to keep strapped around restless kids that parents resort to scare tactics.

“I tell him, ‘There’s a policeman in that car next to me and he’s going to arrest me,’ ” said Joan Ware, grandmother of squirmy 7-year-old Christopher Lathe.

“When Vincent asks his grandma how she lost her leg, she tells him, ‘By not wearing a seat belt,’ ” said the fidgeter’s mother, Lisa Schiro.

And that is just the beginning. There are the logistics of three-child families with compact cars that will no way accommodate three car and booster seats in the back. (And the front passenger seat has an air bag, another child no-no.)

As he gathered up the balls and line flags for the evening, coach Earnest--a lobbyist who knows a bit about Sacramento politics--summed up the consensus out there on the soccer field.

“I just want this moderate governor to be a pragmatist,” he said.