To think my brother's wife is a lunatic

[acornfed]

So far around the enforced family dinner table I've heard she thinks car seats are largely unnecessary and are a result of intense lobbying by the car seat manufacturers. She regularly will pull out her 1 year child from the car seat and feed them in the back seat..on the motorway..she seems very proud of this

She also dismisses the Health Visitor advising her about finger food as "middle class advice " due to the waste generated with food being thrown on the floor. Safe to say SIL is the epitome of "middle class", living in a very "middle class area" and undertaking a very "middle class" job. Weird.

MissBax's post of around 9.30 was her apology. The one where she said, "Ah sorry, my mistake."

Apologies MissBax I missed that.

OP's SIL is unbelievably irresponsible as is MissBax. I can't think of any situation when you would take the child out whilst the car was moving - if the child were having a fit you would pull over with full hazards on and get up the bank as quickly as you could. The idea of risking the babies life just to feed her or stop the crying is totally and utterly bonkers.

Just the once? 50mph? 25 miles/15 mins?

One problem with this 'justification' is what are your parameters for safety? What will you do next time your child is crying and you can't immediately stop? What if you were travelling at 30mph but in heavy traffic with multiple cars changing lanes/joining/leaving? What about on country roads with no other traffic? What if it was only ten mins to the services, would you wait? Or think well she'll only be out of the seat for ten mins so we may as well get her out now? How will you make those decisions and does your DH agree them?

One reason it's a legal matter is so that children don't have to rely on adults to make the decision for them - it has been mandated that children should be in car seats. Of course there are lots of aspects of parenting where lobbying and marketing has pushed a certain way of doing things, not necessarily in the best interests of children, but I really don't think car seats is one of those areas to get het up about.

I was going 30mph in great driving conditions, in a lime green people carrier when another car drove into the side of us, forcing my car into a spin and a complete 360 from wheels, roof, back to wheels again. If my 1 and 3 year old hadn't been in car seats they probably would have fallen through the side windows and crushed as the car rolled over them. It was a completely unpreventable accident for me and I am extremely glad I always keep my kids in proper seats.

we weighed up the risk of a crash (minimal) to the distress it was causing her to sob uncontrollably for another 15 mins (a significant time for such a little one)
But the distress caused to her by crying for 15 minutes would not cause her any long term harm.

There are not many places in the UK where there are 25 miles of motorway without any junctions.

Rather than take the baby out of her car seat, you could have left the motorway and found somewhere within 5 minutes drive.

I can't believe that in this day and age people still do things like this.

There was a story in the news recently about a baby girl who died because her parents made the exact same decisions as Bax and it ended tragically for them
www.google.co.uk/amp/metro.co.uk/2017/12/12/baby-died-mum-got-distracted-sat-nav-crashed-lorry-7154298/amp/

You do all realise that it's legal for us to hold.a baby in the back of a taxi right?
Yes but a lot of taxi companies refuse to take babies without car seats.

Also, back of a taxi going at 25-30mph is a lot different to a motorway at 70mph.

Where were you sat in the front of the car when you got your baby out of the car seat??

You must have been because had you been sat in the back, you could have just soothed your baby while it was in the car seat.

MrsBobSylan what an awful experience for you all
And your story highlights exactly why a driver cannot risk assess for a 15 second journey, let alone a 25 mile one - no-one can ever predict what other drivers will do around them.
There was a case recently where a SD left his 5yo non-swimming son to wander around a water park unsupervised for several hours. The child drowned and the SD eventually admitted negligent manslaughter - I think there are parallels with failing to keep your child safe in a fast moving vehicle.

Can I retract the word "lunatic" ?
I think that you will be lucky now if your original question gets answered OP.

I think that it is a good thing that people are trying to get the "car seat non-believers" to understand the consequences of their actions.

If you take a child out of a car seat for ten mins then the risk is low. Most people drive for hundreds of hours a year without anything untoward happening.

The issue is that whilst the risk is low, it is entirely avoidable and that's what makes people perceive the risk as greater.

DH has a relative who takes her DD out of her car seat frequently. It backs me off no end because she wouldn't dream of travelling without a seat belt, yet endangers her DD without a thought.

I think too many people are blinded to the dangers because children do tend to survive crashes now. It's similar to the fact many don't realise how dangerous measles is because so few children die of it now. Totally misses why the numbers have changed so much.

Willow what a ridiculous statement it could be 10seconds or 10minutes it only takes 1 second for a crash to happen.

Not a chance in hell I'd take my baby out of it's seat while moving. I'd rather he screamed for 15 minutes than went flying through the window.

I would say barmy rather than a lunatic!

How anyone pre car seat legislation survived into adulthood is baffling
The babies and children that died aren't here to tell us their stories but there was a lot of them.

Also more journeys than ever before are travelled in cars some children have never been on a bus, in the 1980s most children had at least been on a bus at some point.

Not forgetting that there were far fewer cars on the roads and cars were not capable of such high speeds.

Another thing, today many younger drivers have their own cars whereas in the 70s/80s/90s, this was nowhere near as common. Unfortunately no matter how discriminatory this will sound, young people are statistically more likely to cause an accident.

Here’s the thing, we all think we’re all fantastic drivers and the only danger is other drivers. But to 99.999% of the population we are the other drivers. Anyone can make a mistake, get distracted and brake too late, not check their blind spot properly or waterplane.

Yes we need to worry about other drivers, but none of us are perfect either.

I don’t hsve a car seat for my Godson and I would rather see him and his mum walk in the rain or take a train than risk anything happening to him. I’m happy to take public transport with them over risking it anytime.

Seat belts became compulsory in the front seat in 1983 and in the back seat in 1989. Not in 1923 and 1929!
When my mother bought a new car in 1984 rear seat belts were an optional extra, just like metallic paint.

praisebe I don't think you understand the concept of risk do you?

It is literally the probability of a defined event occurring. So of course it is true that it can only table a second for something awful to happen but the actually likelihood and therefore risk of that thing happening is extremely low.

As someone said above, risk does not just involve the likelihood of an event happening. You also have to factor in the potential extent of any possible injury that could be caused. This is how we calculate it on Risk Assessments for school trips.

I was driving up those hairpin bends on a cliff on the Amalfi coast last year. I was appalled to be overtaken by a woman who'd been sitting on my tail for a while, on a blind bend, and she had two young children bobbing about on the back seat unrestrained.

Care to provide statistics for that? I don't recall many of my peers perishing on motorways because of a lack of car seats
Here are the USA figures for Youth Mortality from Motor Vehicle Accidents per 100,000 in 1950 and 2005.

I suspect that some people will say that car seats have nothing to do with the drop in fatalities but considering there are more cars and higher speed accidents, what else could cause such a change in child fatalities??

People are ridiculously precious about car seats, and there is definitely a certain amount of scaremongering by the industry (never use a second-hand one, ooh no, keep buying more and more...)

There was a case recently where a SD left his 5yo non-swimming son to wander around a water park unsupervised for several hours. The child drowned and the SD eventually admitted negligent manslaughter - I think there are parallels with failing to keep your child safe in a fast moving vehicle

If the worst happened and an unrestrained child was killed in an accident, the driver can be convicted of death by dangerous driving.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-39575575

^A driver whose car hit another in a head-on crash, killing his five-year-old stepson, has been jailed for six years.

Joseph Smith was not in a booster seat and suffered multiple injuries when the car he was in smashed into oncoming traffic on Cardiff's Western Avenue^

Thing is, as PPs have said, it's not likely to be "just once", is it? If a baby having a screaming fit on a journey is enough to warrant bring removed from their car seat, the likelihood is that it will happen several times, increasing the risk.
And several posters have now given their own examples of times when those risks were fully realised - thankfully while their children were in car seat.

Also, it's not just the risk of a crash. You might never have crashed, but how many times have you had to brake suddenly because some moron cut you up, or swerve to avoid debris etc?

She sounds not very bright. Not a lunatic though.

I think there is an argument for saying finger food is middle class advice, as anyone really poor can not afford to waste food in this way.