To consider putting 14mo in front seat of car?

[CulturalBear]

Genuinely looking for guidance here - I'm making a long journey with DS (14mo) at the weekend, a good 2 and a half hours each way, by myself.

DS is still in a Group 0+ rear facing car seat. Car is a three-door with an ability to switch off passenger airbag.

Would it be unreasonable to have him in the front next to me? I've had a couple of very bad journeys with him which have ended up being very dangerous due to distraction and not being able to assist (in a long, long stretch of sodding motorway roadworks where he would inevitably get very upset as we passed the services and been 20 minutes away from the next).

I have a mirror on the back of the seat, but it is not very helpful as the Group 0+ seats are still very low.

Thoughts, MN massive?

Don't do it. My friend lost her nearly 2 year old on what was supposed to be a short 20 minute journey when she put him in the front to stop him whingeing. Biggest mistake of her life.

very interesting link about rear facing safety in front seats in sweden

5-point harnesses aren't dangerous George - they're required for adults by the governing bodies of most forms of motorsport.

Fireman was she rearfacing him or forward facing him? were the airbags on?
not having this information in your post makes it completely unuseful. it's like saying "don't do it, I know someone who died crossing the road" without further information we don't know the risks that were taken.

George Of course 5 point harnesses aren't dangerous!
He's only just 4 (last week in fact) and his maxi cosi seat goes up to 40lb but he's only 34lb. He'll go into a high back booster in the next couple of months.

I didn't question her on it. I do know she had to swerve, hit a tree and her son and car seat went through the front window. She was told, I think it came up at the inquest, that if he had been in the back then he probably wouldn't have died. That enough?

Yes, but there are probably very sad cases also where a car is broadsided and a child in the back dies or is seriously injured, and the verdict is the child would not have died if he or she had been in the front. Anecdotes are really not helpful in debates of this kind.

how does a carseat go through the front windscreen? maybe not correctly fastened? surely that shouldnt happen?

Have you all lost all sense of sensitivity?

I think she means that it wasn't an issue so much with being in the front seat but more that if the seat wasn't fastened in correctly then that would have been the main factor in the fatality rather than the positioning in the car.

I know, but really? Is it fair to question a particular incident? How one accident happened is not something you can extrapolate from anyway, even if you could pin down exactly what went wrong. Can't you see it's insensitive to ask things like "Was it strapped in properly?" as though it's the person's fault? You would be better off looking for crash tests or speaking to police officers who attend road accidents to find out what happens and why car seats might behave in different ways during a crash.

Sorry to hear about the little boy.

Geeka that's a vey interesting link, thank you. Although to be fair, their reasoning is a bit skewed as a couple of the points wouldn't apply if you were planning on ERFing in the back anyway. Does make me feel a bit better about my husband having to out my 12mth old in the front seat of his van though.,

OP, FWIW in your situation I would out my boy in the front, but mercifully he can be placated nowadays by having a dummy chucked at him from the front seat ;)

well obviously if it was the mum posting i wouldnt be pointing out that car seats dont tend to go thro windows unless something has gone wrong somewhere

but to use it as an example of why it is unsafe to use a front seat does lead into further questions

Bertie I see do see your point, and I'm terribly sorry to hear about that little boy and his poor mother, but I do agree that if we aren't given at least most of the relevant facts then an anecdotal post is not very helpful and only confuses the OP further.

To the poster who said that a five point harness is dangerous for a four year old - can you please post the reasoning/evidence behind that? Thanks.

I carried my third in a rf seat in the front until he was 14 mths old. I drive an A6 with a very long bulkhead so as a pp said with their Range Rover it would take some crash to get to the child. I personally think it's safer than having him in the back with a distracted mammy.

My DH works for Audi and I asked him about the possibility of an airbag deploying if turned off and he said it just doesn't happen.

Re the 5 point harnesses, I use a Multimac which consists of 4 5 point harnesses for my kids. They are much safer than a 3 point. The risk of the spinal cord snapping comes from a child taking their arms out of the harness (so they are only secured at the belly/crotch) and the force from the impact sends the child's upper body forward snapping the spine. This won't happen if they are properly in the harness.

YANBU

It is not a big risk at all.

There'safireman's friend was a literally "1 in a million" tragic accident where it sounds like the car seat failed.

4 out of 4million children aged 4 and under died as passengers in car accidents in the most recent year data is available. I don't have the data but I would expect most of these were cases where seats failed or no carseat was used rather than a sub-optimal car seat placement. As others have said, the type of car will matter more than the placement of seat.

If you play the lottery, you are far more likely to win it than have a young child die in a car accident.

Or it's possible that the accident was so catastrophic that the car seat wouldn't have any effect in that instance anyway.

I will never forget reading a comment on a forum where posters were arguing about forward vs rear facing and the poster said that her mother was a police officer in a country where car seats are not legally mandated and not everybody uses them. She said that the accidents she attended where children were not in car seats, they generally died or were seriously injured. Accidents where children were in car seats, be they old, new, rear facing, forward facing, 3 point or 5 point harness etc etc - mostly lived and escaped injury.

Use a car seat - that's the most important thing. Little details like where to place the seat in the car are probably more down to luck than anything else.

It's sort of incredible to think that there are countries were car seats aren't mandatory, isn't it? Actually sorry Bertie, you haven't said when that comment was made, so I guess it could have been a good while ago. I watched Three Men And A Baby recently and watched in horrified fascination as they placed her baby carrier (no restraints) in the back seat of a convertible and drove off. Admittedly they were the baddies, but you get my point.

So to sum up, OP, you nave to do what you feel will be safest for your family, and it sounds as though in this instance that's rear facing in the front seat :)

There are lots of countries where they aren't, usually less developed countries, but even China I don't think mandates them. In mexico car seats are seen as horrible things because babies should be in arms all the time.

It's the same in parts of Africa. I have friends in Uganda who were horrified to learn that my dd travels in a car seat, and not in my arms. They were worried the seat would damage her in some way! These are well-educated people who've travelled a lot in the Western world too.

What am I missing? How is it riskier in the front, with airbag off, than in the bag?

My LO always rides upfront with me, rear facing. Our journeys are calm and peaceful as he can see me singing, and doesn't scream himself hoarse while I get stressed out and upset.

Back

I did this with DD1 in my little KA a few years ago. Not just for long journeys, for every journey. It gave me so much peace of mind to have her next to me rather than in the back looking at a seat!

I had my DS in the front from day 1. He could see me which always made him calmer. In traffic i could touch him, sort him out etc. I could talk to him or sing to soothe him and he'd watch me. Loads better, if he'd have been in the back i'd have panicked when he was crying making me a dangerous driver. I didn't move him into the back until he went into forward facing. Airbag off, rear facing seat fitted properly, i don't understand why it's unsafe?