To think you can’t actually get car seat advice from anywhere?

[carseatdramas]

Or can you?

DD is 5. She is in this car seat. I have the cybex for her younger sister who is a bit of a Houdini with straps so it works well. Dd1 seems to like it.

I mentioned it on a FB group and was annihilated (it was not even about car seats!) with PMs and messages telling me how awful it was she wasn’t rear facing / in a harness.

I keep reading that Halfords and the chain shops aren’t any good: fair enough. But the independent shops seem to just focus on RF as do FB groups.

So I don’t really know who to ask …

They are bonkers.

I suspect you know full well that this is a contentious subject and starting this thread is deliberately provocative.

Like so many parenting decisions, make the one that’s right for you and your family and leave it at that.

Online car seat mamas are nuts. Ignore, your car seat is fine.

I also feel like I can’t get good advice!

We don’t have a car but have a car seat for use in other people’s cars and rentals. I’m always so worried it’s not fitted correctly or I haven’t done the straps right. Especially as we only use it about once a month! I wish there was something like going for an MOT at a garage where you could get a lesson.

Ours is a Silver Cross and all their online videos are wordless.

You can't engage with FB car seat groups - they are very extreme. I couldn't get over the fact they think the that kids should miss school trips rather than travel on a coach without a car seat. I say this as someone who has used ERF seats for a small 8 year old and keeps using HBBs past 135cms. But I also think it's fine for you to put your 5 year old in that (good) HBB especially when you see people who use no seat or badly fitted seats all the time. The crazy groups should stop scaring caring parents who have enquired how to keep their kids safe away and focus on increasing correct fitting and use of car seats with advice on best brands and mention ERF is safer but understand there are plenty of reasons it wouldn't be practical after toddler years.

It’s a contentious subject on Facebook, certainly.

The whole point is you can’t make a decision based on ‘what’s best for your family.’

I don’t want to RF so Facebook / independent car seat shops are out which leaves me with the chains / reviews which by all accounts aren’t great.

But I am glad the car seat is OK - honestly I got so many messages telling me it was appalling!

What kind of person identifies as an “online car seat mama”?

As a basic, the seat will be legally compliant and this country has a higher H&S threshold than many. I’m sure you can always be that bit safer but sometimes you have to weigh it up with what’s realistic or whether a child constantly screaming because they can’t cope with being rear facing is more of a distraction for the driver and dangerous.

People who REALLY CARE about other people making the wrong parenting choices.

How much advice on one fairly trivial aspect of parenting do you need? As long as you are using an age/height/weight appropriate, properly fitted restraint in accordance with the instructions then you’re doing fine. If you want to maximise safety then rear face. There’s advice on the legalities online on .gov website. There’s advice from retailers on what product does what and manufacturers instructions on what seats do what, how to fit them and what cars they fit in. There’s online advice where people will tell you the safest thing is to RF, because it is. And then you filter all that, decide your priorities and what works for you, ensure you are acting in accordance with law and then don’t get drawn into ridiculous online debates.

@Applespearsandpeaches from my point of view, I posted what I thought was a fairly innocuous photo and got a lot of unexpected negativity so it obviously has got me questioning myself / my parenting!

Ive not had to use a car seat for many a year but always felt the same.
A relative used to work for Mothercare and was trained in car seat performance and fitting etc and would also ensure parents/carers knew how to fit and use properly before leaving the carpark.
All car seats have to meet a minimum standard but a few companies used to go well above the the expected standards ie crash impact at more speeds than required etc. I dont know what this is like now.

Would safety charities or Which, msybe give recommendations ?

I went with Cybex as dd2 just manages to get her arms out of the straps on the ones either that design and I’d heard it was really safe from that POV, and she can’t get out of it and also she seems to like it. So I just assumed (wrongly perhaps) the other one would be similarly good quality.

The subject is a massive echo chamber of unverified information. So many facts are repeated again and again but it's virtually impossible to get links of anyone with actual data. When someone does post a link, it invariably doesn't contain whatever evidence they say it does. I tried quite hard for a while to properly research it and just couldn't. Thankfully my children are very nearly out of that stage.

Quite.

The study which supposedly showed that RF is 5 times safer than FF has been debunked.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5740505/?fbclid=IwAR2cMJq2ATbm-0Fc65r6k1I3XuoTFuCkThqUNjFYt9HnKrnTQwNwHvm7trQ

Even if it were true, relative risk is a much less helpful measure than absolute risk.

I did rear-face for longer than legally required, but we forward face now (my kids are 7 and 5) and turning my children forward-facing really helped with their behaviour in the car (which in turn made us safer as the driver wasn't distracted).

I have a big age range of children and only did rear facing for the youngest stage because that’s all there really was 20 years ago. Forward facing apart from that. My kids lived. No biggy. Don’t stress OP.

This is where it’s helpful to be able to apply some critical thinking of your own. I have a 5 year old who created merry hell in the back facing backwards. So DH and I decided it was far safer to have non-distracted drivers than fight her to stay rear facing. But for a long time we did use a seat with a five point harness, rather than switch to just a HBB with the car seat belt at a younger age. That felt like a good compromise for us.

As pp said, as long as you’re using the correct size seat for her, in this country it will have a good level of safety.

For some reason the ERF mob behave like a cult.

I'm glad rear facing (other than for tiny babies) wasn't a consideration when DDs were little and to see more moderate comments on here now. I remember only a few years later people howling about rear facing on MN.

I consider myself pretty hot on car seat safety. I've always done a lot of research when buying a seat and my now DS5 rear faced until recently. A good high backed booster at age 5 is definitely not an outrageous decision!

ADAC are a useful resource for seat safety. Some HBBs perform really badly in testing and some very well. I asked chatgpt to provide me with a list of all HBBs that performed well in ADAC tests over the last few years and picked one of them.

The study which supposedly showed that RF is 5 times safer than FF has been debunked

This, when it was retracted from some magazines one of the points noted was that the very small numbers of children injured in car accidents combined the very small (statistically insignificant) difference between RF & FF meant you could need decades of data to prove any benefit.

Uk has good car seat regulations. A good quality FF HBB is absolutely fine for a 5 year old.

I find @bertiebottsoften pops up on car seat threads and gives great advice.

There are a some independent companies who offer a variety of services; I’ve relied on this one in the past.
(hopefully the link I’m trying to attach will actually work, in all my years here I’ve never tried to do this before!)
https://www.childseatsafety.co.uk/

Erm hello I have been summoned

I left the FB groups because the competitive safetyism and insistence on adherence to a very rigid, narrow, not always correct (IMO) line became unhinged.

Cybex high back boosters are some of the highest performing on the market and tend to give a very good fit as long as you follow the guidance which IIRC was that there should be two fingers' width between the child's shoulder and the bottom of the headrest. And it's a perfectly acceptable seat for a 5yo.

I have no idea what people are objecting to. What kind of advice are you looking for? Often the manufacturer is a good place to ask, or the retailer where you bought the seat, as they are generally trained by company reps who come out and show everyone how all the seats work. Admittedly some of the chain stores seem better than others at making sure all their staff receive this info.

Try Car Seat Ninja! She is amazing and gives great advice, think she only works in a certain radius but would probably do phone advice and can send seats in the post

My dd was in a forward facing but belted seat when she was in an accident aged 2 just as well there was extended rear facing then because the car crushed into the boot and was touching the back of the seat which was pushed into the car seat, the police said the car seat prevented the car behind going any further, if there hadn’t been a rigid back because it was rear facing I don’t want to think what would have happened. She walked away from the accident with zero injuries because it was fitted correctly and was made to a good standard. Fitted correctly is number one, a poorly installed erf is no good