To be shocked people are actually rear-facing their primary age kids

[EmsandPens]

My DD is 4, 5 in December and we swapped her from rear facing to forward facing in January this year. She started primary school recently and I noticed one of her classmates is still rear facing. I know the family from around town but had never seen them putting their kids in the car before and I know this child is already 5 and has pretty long legs for her age.

I know on Mumsnet it’s quite common to hear people saying rear facing until 6/7 is best but I had never actually seen anyone around here doing it.

AIBU to be shocked people actually rear face their primary age children?
Did you rear face your child past 4?

If adults had to rear face i would never go anywhere. #travelsickness 🤮🤮🤮

Dd reAr faced until 4 as per the advice and tbh I don't know anyone who didn't. Yabu. Rear facing is safer

I was told by a health visitor when mine was 9 months that it was time to get her out of the baby seat and into a forward facing one, which would be “so much easier”. This was 13 years ago and rear facing was definitely a thing then.

disregarded that along with almost everything else that came out of her mouth

DS is 7.5 and still rear facing.

He’s far more comfortable, and more importantly he’s safer.

I constantly get hassle from my DF about how it’s going to “bend” his hips.

mind you this man is a qualified - albeit retired - nurse.

He should know better, but also unfortunately also thinks he’s the authority on the subject 🙄

I’m baffled! My kids are now 16 & 17 but in their day rear facing ended at about 2! As soon as you were too big for the baby carrier you went into a forward facing car seat? Same with all my friend’s kids. When did that change?!

If that was true, whiplash wouldn’t be a thing.

A car hit from behind moves forward in the first instance

There’s definitely a dichotomy between online, where everyone rear faces, and RL, where no one does past eighteen months.

I think rear facing is good but the safety aspect of it is massively exaggerated and any increased safety is negated by eg screaming, sickness or similar. I also think some people can do it as a way of suggesting that they are better parents than those who do not, and I dislike that.

Can I ask what seat you used and what car you have? My DD is only 2.5 but will soon outgrow her rear facing car seat. We have a hatchback - same size as a Golf/Focus so limited space inside, especially considering we're tall. Wondering if there's one that will be suitable for her to move on to.

Interested in this too! We only managed til age 3 in our Focus- the issue wasn’t leg room for my daughter but for my husband in the passenger seat, as he had to keep moving his seat forward to accommodate the RF car seat as she grew.

So did I. Both of my kids were front facing from 18 months old. They were both very tall for their age and it was not comfortable for them to be squished in rear facing

I think we should have a competition to see who can rear face their children longest.
Anyone gets to 18yo and I’ll send a prize.

I'm more shocked that despite ALL the evidence proving that rear facing until 7 is safer so many people don't! My youngest was rear facing until 6, my older ones went into booster seats at 3, that is terrible looking back but if you know better you do better!

I'm not particularly shocked what people do either way but I am a bit puzzled, that a person who has chosen totally against the national trend, perhaps buying a specialised seat to do so, to RF past their own child's fourth birthday is surprised or shocked to realise that some people do it even longer.

That is no judgement from me, I am just surprised and find it a bit amusing mainly I suppose because I primarily see the "RF until 4!" message coming from very insistent pro ERF spaces where seats are advertised which last until age 6/7 and it's not uncommon at all to find people using them to the max.

Yeah, I don't think I've seen a rear facing child above the age of 2 in real life. Also, despite the number of very tedious conversations I've had with other parents over the last few years, car seats isn't something that's come up at all. Even the more anal types I've met who aim to cut all grapes into quarters until their child is in secondary school just have their school aged kids in regular booster seats.

Out of curiosity... has anyone found the evidence behind the "4x safer" statistic? Its often quoted but I've never found out what exactly they mean.

My eldest is 16 and I don't remember anyone RF until age 2. Most people switched at about 9-12 months. I remember a friend's daughter was 16mo and she wasn't quite 9kg yet but they put her in a forward facing seat because they thought at her age it was ridiculous.

But anyway, things really changed when spin seats became popular, about 2016 I'd say. The big thing ~15 years ago was those 123 seats which converted into a high back booster. Today almost everyone goes for a rotating 360 degree spin seat for their second stage. It means you can keep them rear facing as long as you want and turn them forward facing when ready, which means most people now rear face up to about the age of 2, and about 1 in 5 children are still travelling RF at ages 3-4.

There was a bit of a shift/awareness earlier in the 10s but 2016 was when ERF seats (at least up to approx age 4) became widely available and affordable and "the norm".

We had our now 14 year old rear facing until around age 6. I looked and found a picture of him from his first day at school in his rear facing seat, he was the only kid in school that I noticed was still rear facing. He was half way through senior infants before he had outgrown his seat

Why would you be shocked at a parent choosing the safest option ? Mines nearly 4 and 5.5 both still RF

My son is going into year one and still rear facing. Planning to keep him that way until he grows out of his chair, which I imagine will be a while as he’s small for his age. Don’t see anyone else doing this at his school though

@BertieBotts a baby FF honestly makes me feel sick imagining the damage in a crash, poor thing

I use a Joie spin safe. My son is 5 and got lots of room left and I haven’t had to move my passenger seat forwards

It's 5x and it comes from this study which was actually retracted in 2018, because the findings weren't as robust as originally suggested.

https://partnerspediatrics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/CarSeat-Henary-Study.pdf

TBH I have never been able to make sense of the numbers they have in that study anyway.

Rear facing is definitely safer, but to say it is 5x safer is not correct. You can't put that specific a number on it. Forward facing child seats work, otherwise child seats would never have got very far as an invention at all. The main benefit of rear facing is that it is foolproof - you can get a lot wrong with a rear facing seat, and the fact that the shell of the seat is doing the bulk of protection is incredibly failsafe even if the seat has multiple installation errors. The same is not true of forward facing seats, which are prone to allowing far too much movement if the straps are loose or wrongly positioned, or the seat is installed incorrectly.

You appear to have misunderstood the crash test data. The key point is the forward motion of the car being hit, not the location of the impact. The only way FF is safer is if the car is travelling in reverse. It doesn't matter if a car is in a frontal or rear impact collision, assuming the car being hit is travelling forward.

@Poetnojo is that a Two Way Elite or a Hi Way?

@mrssunshinexxx The problem back then was that rear facing seats past the baby seat simply didn't exist in ordinary shops. All the second stage (9kg plus! DS1 was 9kg at 4 months old!) seats were forward facing only.

If you did find out that ERF was a thing and wanted a seat which did that, you had to order them from specialists, imported from the Nordic market, and internet shopping felt a bit strange and new to lots of people as well, it wasn't like it is now where I probably buy more online than I do IRL. I had a Britax First Class Plus for DS1, which I had bought at a high street chain store, and this was rear facing up to 13kg, forward facing 9-18kg. That allowed you a few more months RF - he outgrew his baby seat at 18 months, but could have continued to RF in the First Class up to about age 2/2.5. There were a few seats like this, but to order the specialist rear facing seats even up to 18kg (not necessarily 25kg like the more specialised ones today) was hundreds of pounds, they were known to be complicated to install and you probably wouldn't know anyone IRL who had one. The In Car Safety Centre was one stockist, but their ERF seats were hidden away in the special needs section until 2013.

I’m SHOCKED that you haven’t researched as a parent that it’s SAFER to rear face your child as long as possible and age 4-5 is prime time to still be rear facing!