Do baby on board signs help emergency services, interested to hear from actual emergencyservices?

[Dinodigs]

I was recently talking to someone about baby on board signs and came across two different view points and wondered what the actual truth is and if they treat cars with stickers differently.

Friend one was saying the usual things about how they help emergency services know to look for a baby, which is what I've heard before

Friend two mentioned her police officer dad had told her to consider not getting one because he actually views them as more of a risk (in terms of people targeting vulnerability when cars parked, by your house etc) especially the stick figure family kind.

He also said that it doesnt make a difference to responses as they scan the whole car anyway (they wouldnt just not check the back properly, because there wasn't a sticker), that they would notice car seats, that 70% of the time cars with the sticker have no baby in them so they take them with a pinch of salt. Police officer dad said that it was more designed for times where babies were in arms, and that modern car seats are pretty immovable and bulky enough that they wouldnt slip under seats like a loose baby used to be able to.

I wondered what the actual truth is? Everyone seems to think it doesn't make a difference but to have one just incase

I know that I was once advised that the warning sleeves for car seats (eg non verbal, combative child) are better than stickers because they get crumpled on glass in accidents

Its also true that when mine were little that I had a sticker in my car, dad's car and actually grandparents bought themselves a sticker. 90% of our driving was work driving with no baby in the car, but no body took them down

If you drive any differently when behind a car displaying one of these tickets from how you drive otherwise, you should surrender your licence.

If you have a child/baby on board then you will have a car seat in your car. That’s what emergency services will look for. I lost a friend in a car wreck. The emergency services spent time searching for her children at the scene of the accident not because of a twee sign, but because she had two car seats in her car. Thankfully her children weren’t in the car with her, although they lost their mother that day, they were spared because they just happened to go home in their dad’s car.

There is no need at all to keep any extra distance because children are in a car. You should keep a safe stopping distance all the time.

Also as PPs pointed out often the parent is driving round without the kids in the car anyway, so you are probably faffing around in car parks “giving extra room” (how? When the spaces are normally only just big enough to get in the lines?) and finding another space for no reason at all. It’s best to just be a courteous and safe driver towards everyone.

I am a courteous and a safe driver towards everyone - I'm just extra much so if I see the stickers, that's all - nothing wrong with that :) and I certainly notice a difference in my car with them on VS without them too :)

I'm a safe driver at all times, but perhaps just extra cautious if I see the stickers - that's all :) I've certainly noticed a difference on the roads when I've got stickers on VS not anyway :)

We have first responders in the UK too - usually volunteers - my friend is one. He works shifts overnight at weekends and is also on call so if you had a medical emergency and live in the next street from him he'd get an alert and go if he could.

He's trained to basically keep people alive until the paramedics can get there.

We went camping with him and forgot our first aid kit - he just laughed and opened his boot full of kit Inc a defibrillator 🤣

By day he's a finance director.

My mum reckons it's a warning for people with particularly unpleasant children. I think it's just reducing a bit of your field of vision.

My mum got me one when we had our first baby and I stuck it in without really thinking about it. I suppose I treat it a bit like an L plate: not so much “please be careful around me to protect the baby” as “WARNING, I might be driving badly” due to screaming kids distracting me. Emergency services never occurred to me.

I actually agree they’re a bit naff, interesting it winds so many people up though. Ah well.

urrrgghh I hate them. It’s so self-important and cringe, especially the “little princess on board” ones 🤮. And of course people don’t get them cos they think they’ll somehow help emergency services find them (I’ve never even heard this). It’s because they think drivers will be more careful around them. “Ah my plan to ram into the back of you, destroying my own car and putting my own children’s lives at risk in the process, has been foiled, cos I’ve just spotted a ‘baby on board sign’.” 🤣

As a child in the late 90s when they were becoming a thing I thought they were to deter people from crashing into you. I told my mum we should get one, even though we didn’t have a baby, for extra protection 😅

Bloody hell. If your children are distracting you to the extent you start driving badly, get off the road and stop your car while you sort them out. Putting other people’s lives at risk, and thinking a novelty sticker excuses it or puts the onus on other drivers to take evasive action, is madness.

Laughed when I saw one that said ADULT ON BOARD, I WANT TO LIVE TOO.
On a serious note, this thread topic came up many years ago and of course everyone was scoffing about how ridiculous the signs are and it's really a primal male move to display his virility . One poster said her baby had died (nothing go do with an accident) and she had terrible anxiety with her next baby that they were also going to die too. The sign very slightly alleviated her anxiety and made her feel a bit more in control to go out in public, which she knew was irrational but whatever. Ever since then I've been a lot less eye rolly about it.

This. I’d never have one either. But if I see one I do think, “I bet it’s chaos in that car” (mine all hated being in the car when babies, and screamed continuously). So it does make me think maybe the driver could be a bit more distracted than others 😅

Although, as people have said, 9 times out of 10 there’s prob not even a child in the car. And any large sticker will affect your visibility.

The emergency services are also well aware there are people out there who will carry a child with no car seat illegally. And they will look for them too.

100% agree.

Yes but similarly to how people will not remove the sign when the kids aren't in the car, surely nobody takes car seats in and out either? Ours only got removed when we needed to fold the seats down or carry adults in those seats. They were in place all of the rest of the time but mostly only DH drove the car. (We now car share/bike hence past tense).

Emergency responders should (i.e. it's training) treat every incident as unique and assume nothing. It's well known that bodies (or bits of bodies) can be thrown quite a distance from an impact and one of the tasks will be to conduct a systematic search of the scene.

Unfortunately so - younger children can be flung from seatbelts as they don't restrain them properly, being too small.

With car seats, if the straps are too loose then children can be ejected - loose straps means more than about a finger's worth of space between strap and child body, which can easily happen if they are wearing a winter coat, or shoulder straps more than 2cm above/below child's shoulder, children getting their arms out of shoulder straps. All happen and not always understood to be a danger.

Impact shield seats are also a risk for ejection if the crash is a rollover or offset (where it's head on but the cars don't perfectly line up - e.g. country road and one car is half in the wrong lane). The closer the impact is to the corner of the car, the more likely it is to spin creating centrifugal force.

Or if the seat itself is poorly attached to the car. It's been known in cases where the seatbelt routing around the seat has been done incorrectly, or where the isofix attachment breaks. Isofix breaking is rare but could happen in an extremely high impact crash, or if something is wrong with the fitting e.g. top tether not attached when it should be, one isofix arm not attached, baby seat not fully clicked down into base, and there have been cases of the ADAC/Which testing where isofix seats have come clean off the base in their crash test at ~40mph (the safety standard calls for a crash test at 30mph.) Usually the seats which fail in this way are immediately recalled, but not always, and where they are a model which is made in a generic factory and rebranded, the recall does not always extend to all rebrands of the seat unfortunately. I've also seen a huge rise in dodgy "universal" isofix kits sold on amazon/ebay etc and in crash testing they just break, which could eject a child seat from the car. Since all new cars have had isofix since 2013 and most new cars since about 2006 have had it, the use of these kits is hopefully rare but the possibility does exist.

And then of course there are cases where the child has taken the seatbelt off or the driver/parent didn't make them put it on in the first place. Though perhaps somebody who doesn't think it's important to put a seatbelt on would also not think to use a baby on board sign.

I’ve found in my experience, there is a direct correlation between people who use these stickers and being absolutely terrible drivers.

@BertieBotts @SerendipityJane yes of course they will treat every scene as unique but they also use the information they have - including the presence of car seats to inform their actions. I know some of the people who responded to the specific accident I mentioned so was quoting them verbatim.

If you have truly never been distracted by a newborn screaming, a toddler trying to escape their car seat, or a child projectile vomiting in the back of the car, then count yourself lucky. Of course I stop as soon as I can, but that might not be for 10 or 15 minutes, especially on a motorway.

I don’t think a sticker excuses bad driving, but it does warn others to expect it. Several posters have made snide comments about seeing a sticker and expecting horrendous driving. Well… yeah. That’s kind of the point.