Despite of recent progresses in occupant safety, the protection of children is not still optimal. To offer a better understanding of child injury mechanisms, the present study proposes a human-like finite element (FE) model of a three years old child's neck. If model validation against scaled experiments involving adults is still under discussion it is today the only way to perform a validation of a children model. The developed neck FE model has been driven with dummy responses coming from experimental real world accident reconstruction using the Q3 dummy in the framework of the EU- CHILD. A number of intra-cervical parameters have been computed and best correlation with the occurrence of injury was found to be the force transmitted to the odontoïde.