would you stop on a hard shoulder for this?

[eeniemeenieminiemoe2014]

say you know the next services isnt for 8 miles on a motorway and your houdini of a toddler manages to undo her harness and stand up in her seat.. eould you stop on the hard shoulder? or carry on the 8 miles?

But how do you factor in a distracted driver? OP is going to be paying more attention to her children in this case than the road.

I wasn't in the car. As I said upthread, I am not having a go at the OP - only she can tell how distracted she was. All I am saying is that stopping on the HS is the riskiest thing most of us will ever do. It is millions of times more dangerous that driving without a seatbelt. Don't do it if you have any other option.

I wouldn't - but that may be coloured by having known someone who died on a motorway hard shoulder (in their stationary car).

I don't want to labour the point but I have literally today at work received this on a safety alert.
A lorry veering onto the hard shoulder recently hit both a crash protection vehicle and a traffic management crew's truck. These would both be covered in flashing lights and showing a huge illuminated blue arrow sign. Clearly without the protection vehicle the pickup or a family car would have been wiped out.

I'm not having a go at anyone and before I started working on roads and seeing these reports I'd have just stopped on the hard shoulder too. It does change your perception of risk.

Stop!!!! I had to do that when my DS unbuckled his car seat down the motorway. I stopped on the emergency lane. He got a big telling off!!!!!

Good grief NotMe - a car (and its occupants) would have been flattened

You could climb out over the passenger side seat. This is what DS did when he had a blowout and had to pull over.

Yes she could have math, but her dd was on the driver's side and she couldn't reach over her ds to get to her. Her ds had been unbuckled by her dd.

If she'd put dd in the front, she wouldn't have been able to get out of the passenger side.

There is no configuration in a normal 4/5 seater that could allow op to avoid being at some point outside of the car and a hair's breadth from traffic.

I think stopping would be less risky, as a loose child is distracting as well as dangerous.

Duct tape should do it. On the car seat not the child!

Where I live, it's illegal to put a child under 12 (iirc) in the front seat. This is because the airbag will seriously injure the child if it deploys, especially if the child is in a rear facing carseat.

If the OP got out on the passenger side and entered the back of the car on the passenger side to tackle DD she would have avoided the danger of standing on the road side. It might have been possible to get to DD even with the baby seat on the passenger side.

Firesuit, the DD was standing up in her seat and had unbuckled the baby too. She could have lurched forward or backwards or over on top of the baby from a standing position in the carseat.

math I said earlier - you can disable airbags - some cars you can just flick a switch. Apart from children not being as 'strong' to take the force of an airbag, their car seat makes them closer to them. There was a 'safe' distance - and my passenger seat went back far enough to allow my (ADHD) 4 yr old to sit in a forward facing seat in that seat. (I put her in the seat and measured the distance from her chest to the dashboard). Like I said I spoke to a police safety officer about it.

It isn't ideal but better than being distracted trying to keep an eye on them in the back - even when she wasn't undoing her belt, bored she would start kicking things, opening and closing windows, throwing things around etc...and a sudden bang behind you makes you look - even if it is only for a second or two at 70mph if that is the moment someone brakes suddenly in front of you....

Definitely stop.

Definitely don't stop, hard shoulder is crazy dangerous. Have you tried maybe putting some gloves on DD? My DS went through a phase of unbuckling and gloves sort of impaired his motor skills enough to dissuade him.

I would continue to the next exit. The hard shoulder is so dangerous to stop on and also to rejoin the traffic. I would drive at the slowest legal motorway speed limit with my hazard lights on and then swap to the indicator when the exit was approaching.