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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

to put DD in the front seat of the car?

58 replies

Bingtata · 04/08/2010 18:39

I need to do a long journey this weekend and it will be just me and DD (4) for the first time. She has always sat in the back of the car, but I'm wondering if it might be easier to have her in the front seat, but I truly don't know if there is any reason why I shouldn't do this. She has a Britax Evolva Booster seat which holds the seatbelt in the right position as it is a full booster seat. We have front airbags too. She never tries to get out of her seatbelt or anything she is really good in the car.

OP posts:
heymango · 04/08/2010 19:46

I have just been doing lots of research into the next stage of car seat, and thought I had read that NO car seats should be used in front seat with an airbag fitted. I was surprised as I always thought it was just rear facing seats that this applied to.

In answer to your question - no, I would not put DD in the front.

Another thing I was really surprised to read was that when they hit 18kg you need to use the proper seat belt with the booster seat, rather than the harness (as in the Evolva). Don't know how much your DD weighs, but it put my 2 year old into the booster seat category (he is a whoppper!)

Biobytes · 04/08/2010 19:46

If you have airbags the big answer is NO WAY. Otherwise, may be, it depends on the child. However, if I were you I wouldn't put her in the front for a long trip if she is not used to being in the front. Simply, she will be trying to find out what are all that buttons for and you can be easily distracted telling her off, perfect recipe for an accident.

By the way, regarding the airbags, I know of someone who had a small collision during a short trip, the airbags went off. His nephew was traveling in the front, what killed him was the impact of the airbag, not the crash with the other car.

thisisyesterday · 04/08/2010 19:50

1.) not all airbags can be disabled by a switch in the car. some need to be taken to a dealer to be de-activated

2.) most car crashes may not be head-on, i have no idea on the statistics. however a rear-impact crash is highly unlikely to involve the speed or energy that a head-on collision does. which is why rear-facing seats are safer

3.) many car seats, including rear-facing ones are compatible with airbags in the rear of the car, if they are curtain bags.
I do not know how ones that come out of the front seats would affect them, but it's something i would definitely be wary of if buyoing a new car

4.) isofix is no safer than a correctly fitted belted seat. All isofix does is take away any error in fitting. if your belted seat has been correctly installed it is just as safe

thisisyesterday · 04/08/2010 19:54

heymango, the weight issue depends on the seat

most harnessed highback boosters are only tested up to 18kg with the harness, so as you say you should use the seatbelt once they hit that weight

however, there are harnessed seats which are fine up to 25kg, using the harness. such as the britax 2 way elite

heymango · 04/08/2010 20:00

thisisyesterday - thanks, didn't find that bit of information while doing my ressearch!

tokyonambu · 04/08/2010 20:04

I'm surprised at the willingness of people to go into print with incredibly firm statements. I've tracked the primary literature over the past few years and it's all pretty tentative. Seatbelts are good. Rear facing seats are good for small children. Proper booster seats are good after that. Beyond that, the evidence is pretty shaky.

There are only about 25 deaths per year of children in the UK inside cars. It's incredibly hard to make hard and fast statements based on statistics that low. US experience is larger, but cars tend to be bigger, speeds tend to be lower, traffic densities are mostly a lot lower and very few states have had seatbelt laws for long enough to make a difference. Most studies are based on retrospective matched cohorts dating back to what is in car safety terms the dark ages (1990) using subjective reports both on injury and severity of the accident (how fast was the car going when the impact occurred? how on earth do you know?)

thisisyesterday · 04/08/2010 20:08

children have died or been severely injured after being internally decapitated due to being in forward facing seats

that IS a fact.

it is not a risk that i am willing to take with my children

tokyonambu · 04/08/2010 20:21

A swift literature search for isofix throws up only 25 papers, most of them speculating, one of them about responses to dirty bombs (Evaluation of sprayable fixatives on a sandy soil for potential use in a dirty bomb response, no, I haven't looked at it) and a couple doing some sled testing. There's no "field" experience, probably because of the rarity both of isofix and of child deaths in cars meaning there hasn't been any significant number of accidents involving children is isofix seats.

The most plausible paper is Performance of booster seats in side impacts: effect of adjacent passengers and ISOfix attachment in Annual proceedings / Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine. Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine. 51:155-167, 2007.. I can't get the full text, but the abstract says:

" Overall, the findings confirmed the superior performance of the rigid anchorages in reducing lateral motion of the booster as well as the two adjacent CRS. However, the expected benefits of the rigid attachment in reducing head accelerations were not uniformly observed across the three occupants/seating positions and also appeared to be influenced by seating configuration (3-abreast versus no adjacent occupant). Further research is warranted to explore the applicability of the findings for different CRS types and seating configurations." which is hardly ringing endorsement.

Looks like "it reduces installation error" is the best we can say...

tokyonambu · 04/08/2010 20:35

The survey of rear-facing seats is Advise use of rear facing child car seats for children under 4 years old Elizabeth A Watson, Michael J Monteiro BMJ 2009;338:b1994, doi: 10.1136/bmj.b1994 (Published 11 June 2009).

It's an interesting exercise to work out where the additional research is needed. The problem with "my child was in a rear facing seat and would have died in a forward facing seat" is you don't know how many children died in rear facing seats who would have survived in forward facing seats, and you're only speculating if the children killed in forward facing seats wouldn't have died in rearward facing ones.

A lot of past experience says rear facing seats are safer. But I've not been able to find compelling statistics to back it up. For example, given children are under-represented in fatalities, are the accidents children are involved in representative of accidents in general? A good study would certainly be a bloody good way for either a mechanical engineer or a trauma surgeon to make their reputation.

thisisyesterday · 04/08/2010 20:59

i think one of the key things is that crash tests clearly show that in a forward facing seat the head of a child is flung forward with quite some force (obv dependant on age of child/speed of crash etc) whereas in a rear-facing seat that does not happen.

that one issue in itself is really quite dangerous and is enough to make me want to keep mine rear-facing

you're right, we can never prove that children who survived crashes in a rear-facing seat wouldn't have survived in a forward facing one, or that those who died/were badly injured FF wouldn't have been RF. but there certainly have been several well documented cases where the "experts" have claimed this to be the case

ie, joel's journey
this little boy survived being internally decapitated. his parents were told that had he been rear-facing this would not have happened. this is backed up by results of crash tests

Original poster
Bingtata · 04/08/2010 21:04

Thank you for all the further replies. I have considered what has been said here and decided that I will keep her in the back. This is more because I hadn't thought about the novelty factor of her sitting in the front and I could certainly do without button pressing, although I'm fairly certain she wouldn't, I'm all for the easy life.

Interestingly her britax could be installed rear facing as the 5 point harness could still be used, but she would have her knees behind her ears.

OP posts:
thisisyesterday · 04/08/2010 21:19

do you have the 2 way elite?

Original poster
Bingtata · 04/08/2010 21:24

No its an evolva. I mean that she still fits the 5 point harness and it can be installed rear facing, but obviously doesn't have the leg room the 2 way elite has.

OP posts:
thisisyesterday · 04/08/2010 21:34

the evolva can't be fitted rear-facing

thisisyesterday · 04/08/2010 21:35

hmm i am googling as i type... have they renamed the multi-tech the evolva now???

BubsMaw · 04/08/2010 21:39

Hi this is interesting reading, I've been mulling over car safety recently as I need to buy a new car seat for DS. The studies you reference are all helpful. DS is a chunky 6 months old, and is bursting out of his group 0 rearfacing seat. He's obv. too young to go forward facing. I'm weighing up options, either to buy him something like a Concord trimax which is big enough for him to go rearfacing til 13kg (according to growth charts he'll be approx 20 months old then), or to go whole hog and buy him a proper scandanavian style rearfacing til age 4 seat. Latter option would involve a day trip to Milton Keynes as none of the local shops here sell those. Also things like isofix vs. belted, etc. etc. Any shop sales assistants we've spoken to have been unhelpful. It shouldn't be so difficult to choose.

thisisyesterday · 04/08/2010 21:40

hmm no, the britax site says it can't be used rear-facing.

Seona1973 · 04/08/2010 21:41

the evolva 123 is a forward facing seat - maybe you have a different one?

thisisyesterday · 04/08/2010 21:43

i would def take the trip to milton keynes bubs!
we went and they were SO helpful there. they sell all kinds of car seats, not just rear-facing, so if you do choose not to buy an extended RF seat you should still be able to walk away with something

Original poster
Bingtata · 04/08/2010 21:48

Maybe it is something different I have had it since she was very young.

OP posts:
BubsMaw · 04/08/2010 21:49

Hi thisisyesterday

what type of seat do you have?

One of my main constraints is space, my car is small to medium size and those rearfacing group 1 seats look huge.

sorry OP to hijack so blatantly...

thisisyesterday · 04/08/2010 21:54

we have a besafe izi combi for ds2 who is 2.5yrs
and a britax 2 way elite for ds3, who is 1

there is someone on the rearfacing.co.uk forum who has the 2 way elite fitted in her mini cooper!
and i think someone else got the besafe into a ford Ka.
they do look big, but i don't think most of them take up any more room tbh. they just look like they do because they're the other way round i think

ronshar · 04/08/2010 21:54

I cant bear seeing children in the front.
When I worked for ambulance service most RTC injuries were caused by the seat belts and airbags.
I remember a car with a child in the front who nearly had its head taken off in a 30mph front on crash. He would have walked away injury free if he had been in the back. Just like all the other passengers.
Airbags can cause bruising and chemical burns. I would do anything I possibly could to prevent my children being damaged by an air bag.

Also my oldest child, 10, is a pian in the front. She is always messing with stuff. On the very rare chance she gets to sit in the front!

BubsMaw · 04/08/2010 22:03

Thanks thisisyesterday,

Do you happen to know if the britax hi-way takes up less room than the 2 way elite? I've had conflicting info on this. Why did you opt for 2 way elite? I believe the Izi Besafe will be too big for my car (VW Polo).

Sorry for questioning you, but it's so hard to find this info, I may be able to save myself the trip to MK, and buy on-line.

thisisyesterday · 04/08/2010 22:07

i wouldn't have thought there was much difference between the hiway and the 2 way elite tbh

i think truthsweet on here has both of them tho, so will give her a shout and she can tell you more about them!

nicm (on here) has a KISS in her golf, and a 2 way elite i think