To think you can’t actually get car seat advice from anywhere?

When I once needed a car seat very urgently, within an hour or two (supplied and fitted) I found Halfords extremely helpful.

I hope it was ok to summon you Bertie!! I’ve had good advice from you and seen you offer the same to others.

I’ve also posted before that when I had 2x ERF seats in my car, I had a note on the windscreen left telling me how great I was. I mean nice, but batshit 😆

I rear faced DC until four years old and and everyone I knew thought I was bonkers. You're babying them, why would you do that when the law says it's safe to FF, ooh mine would never put up with that! it's expensive, the seats are too big, why do you have to make a big deal of this etc etc.

So I'm a bit sceptical of PP (not saying you're doing this OP) who make out that they're shunned and disdained for FF (n real life at least. Obviously there's no accounting for FB groups as social media is poison and best avoided). I always suspect it's similar to the feeding debates where supposedly bottle feeding is looked down on, but in reality anyone who e.g. EBF for six months is treated as a weirdo for not shoving rice cakes down their gob from about 12 weeks.

OP the seat you have is fantastic and very safe.

Which does review and test car seats ( actually crash tests them) so if you want solid reviews you could get a trial membership and see what they say.

It’s not you, it’s them.

Harassing someone with DMs about their child being forward facing is just people scratching their activist itch, trying to feel like they’re doing good in the world when there are obviously many more productive ways to do that.

They have problems, ignore them.

Ask ChatGPT, it will give you advice summarised from the internet and take cues from you as to the responses, so if you tell it not to have a go at you about being forward facing it will just give you useful advice.

Haven’t read all the messages so this might have been posted already, but the German company ADAC, which I think is like the AA, does very comprehensive third party testing of carseats and publishes the results each year. It’s really useful! You might need to translate the site to English.

https://www.adac.de/rund-ums-fahrzeug/ausstattung-technik-zubehoer/kindersitze/kindersitztest/

Cariad Babi do online car seat consultations. I've used them for baby wearing advice and would recommend.

cariadbabi.com/

TBF there are also multiple of the FB car seat groups, and one of them is notoriously worse than the others. From the fact everyone apparently jumped on you for having a 5yo in an excellent HBB, I would assume that you were on that one. Don't ask me what it's called, because I don't want to be deleted but also, I honestly don't know - the ones I have been in previously have all changed their names multiple times and I've lost track of which is which. TBH the one I was in which I left because I felt as though I was contributing to something toxic was not the group in question, the "notorious" group is quite harmful IMO. There are others which are more reasonable though barely ever have posting open. But all of them suffer from the same FB problems of lack of nuance and circular groupthink. Sometimes this is because it's just hard to have a nuanced discussion on this kind of topic and some of the mods were very anxious about mixed messages getting out so they wanted a very clear line, but I struggled with this because I disagreed with the other mods about where the clear line is.

To me the clear line is the law, and everything over and above that is parental decision and I am very happy to share as much info as I can find in order to help parents make a decision that works for them. I'm happy to fight myths about RF but I'm also happy to add realism about the fact many people do choose FF, and I don't find it helpful to completely ban any discussion of the topic. Many ERF advocates have a different line which is RF at all costs for as long as possible. So we were just coming from a different place.

Agree the lady who runs Car Seat Ninja was always lovely and kind IME. Also Little Peas and Rear Facing Toddlers/Margaret always tend to give reasonable advice.

My dd was in a forward facing but belted seat when she was in an accident aged 2 just as well there was extended rear facing then because the car crushed into the boot and was touching the back of the seat which was pushed into the car seat, the police said the car seat prevented the car behind going any further, if there hadn’t been a rigid back because it was rear facing I don’t want to think what would have happened. She walked away from the accident with zero injuries because it was fitted correctly and was made to a good standard. Fitted correctly is number one, a poorly installed erf is no good

Try Car Seat Ninja! She is amazing and gives great advice, think she only works in a certain radius but would probably do phone advice and can send seats in the post

Erm hello I have been summoned

I left the FB groups because the competitive safetyism and insistence on adherence to a very rigid, narrow, not always correct (IMO) line became unhinged.

Cybex high back boosters are some of the highest performing on the market and tend to give a very good fit as long as you follow the guidance which IIRC was that there should be two fingers' width between the child's shoulder and the bottom of the headrest. And it's a perfectly acceptable seat for a 5yo.

I have no idea what people are objecting to. What kind of advice are you looking for? Often the manufacturer is a good place to ask, or the retailer where you bought the seat, as they are generally trained by company reps who come out and show everyone how all the seats work. Admittedly some of the chain stores seem better than others at making sure all their staff receive this info.

There are a some independent companies who offer a variety of services; I’ve relied on this one in the past.
(hopefully the link I’m trying to attach will actually work, in all my years here I’ve never tried to do this before!)
https://www.childseatsafety.co.uk/

I find @bertiebottsoften pops up on car seat threads and gives great advice.

The study which supposedly showed that RF is 5 times safer than FF has been debunked

This, when it was retracted from some magazines one of the points noted was that the very small numbers of children injured in car accidents combined the very small (statistically insignificant) difference between RF & FF meant you could need decades of data to prove any benefit.

Uk has good car seat regulations. A good quality FF HBB is absolutely fine for a 5 year old.

I consider myself pretty hot on car seat safety. I've always done a lot of research when buying a seat and my now DS5 rear faced until recently. A good high backed booster at age 5 is definitely not an outrageous decision!

ADAC are a useful resource for seat safety. Some HBBs perform really badly in testing and some very well. I asked chatgpt to provide me with a list of all HBBs that performed well in ADAC tests over the last few years and picked one of them.

I'm glad rear facing (other than for tiny babies) wasn't a consideration when DDs were little and to see more moderate comments on here now. I remember only a few years later people howling about rear facing on MN.

This is where it’s helpful to be able to apply some critical thinking of your own. I have a 5 year old who created merry hell in the back facing backwards. So DH and I decided it was far safer to have non-distracted drivers than fight her to stay rear facing. But for a long time we did use a seat with a five point harness, rather than switch to just a HBB with the car seat belt at a younger age. That felt like a good compromise for us.

As pp said, as long as you’re using the correct size seat for her, in this country it will have a good level of safety.

For some reason the ERF mob behave like a cult.

I have a big age range of children and only did rear facing for the youngest stage because that’s all there really was 20 years ago. Forward facing apart from that. My kids lived. No biggy. Don’t stress OP.

Quite.

The study which supposedly showed that RF is 5 times safer than FF has been debunked.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5740505/?fbclid=IwAR2cMJq2ATbm-0Fc65r6k1I3XuoTFuCkThqUNjFYt9HnKrnTQwNwHvm7trQ

Even if it were true, relative risk is a much less helpful measure than absolute risk.

I did rear-face for longer than legally required, but we forward face now (my kids are 7 and 5) and turning my children forward-facing really helped with their behaviour in the car (which in turn made us safer as the driver wasn't distracted).

The subject is a massive echo chamber of unverified information. So many facts are repeated again and again but it's virtually impossible to get links of anyone with actual data. When someone does post a link, it invariably doesn't contain whatever evidence they say it does. I tried quite hard for a while to properly research it and just couldn't. Thankfully my children are very nearly out of that stage.