To wonder why parents choose to forward face their child from a young age?

[incognito1991]

Genuinely no judgement I’m just curious, when I had my DD 2 years ago, I knew absolutely nothing about car seat safety and admittedly I still don’t know a lot. When looking into it I learned that children are so much safer rear facing for as long as possible and defiantly between the ages of 0-4. I have removed myself off some car seat safety groups as feel they can be too much sometimes but I was wondering if this is the best guidance why do parents choose to forward face from the legal age?

Lately on my Facebook I keep noticing people post their children, all 3 and under and they’re all forward facing with a harness (which I’ve just learned is completely unsafe but not 100% sure why). This is why I asked actually I was curious as to why everyone seems to forward face

Unfortunately my child is very carsick and facing backwards seemed to exacerbate it. I found that my own driving was harder to focus on safely if I was stressing over my child vomiting /choking on vomit so decided that for shorter local journeys we would forward face.
Sometimes it's about assessing what is causing more risk. Forward facing is not the only thing that can cause risk while driving, not laying due care and attention also causes risk too, and a distressed child vomiting can mean you are not paying due care and attention.

My DS2 is 91st percentile, and rear faced until yesterday. He will be 4 in 20 days time so I suppose that is technically not extended rf? I drive a mini and he fit eg fine behind the passenger seat. My 8yo sits behind the driver seat. It’s fine when I drive but my 6ft 6 husband can’t air in the passenger seat.

Condescending to assume that parents wouldn't have tried other ways to solve the car sickness first 🙄

What if the screaming/sick child is what causes you to crash the car in the first place? Drivers need to be concentrating on the road and that's harder to do if your child is distressed and vomiting.
Which is better: situation 1) child is rear facing and screaming due to vomiting from car sickness, mum is panicking and brakes suddenly causing a pile up. Rear facing child is OK because of their car seat, but the their mum dies, and a child in another car is badly injured in the accident.

Situation 2) child is facing forward therefore doesn't feel sick so mum is able to focus on driving and does not crash the car.

You have to learn to risk assess the whole situation not just the risk from the seat to the child.

Massively condescending. And clearly that poster hasn't had kids who get really motion sick. We tried everything - the wrist bands, phenerghan medicine (made my child unwell for about 24 hours after!!), etc. Nothing worked!

Dd escaped from car seats so I got her the cybex one which is forward facing. She also hates rear facing.

Wasn't a thing 30-40+ years ago. We didn't have a car until DSs were toddlers so went in ff, 9 month + 5point seats. DD went in a RF baby carrier that clipped onto pushchair until 9 months.
A relative put her 9 month old on a booster seat and was critical that mine were in proper seats.
I guess each generation things its doing the parenting lark better than others.
Judging by school tip out time round here not everyone has kids in seats much past 4, never mind RF. Kids climbing over insides of cars.

Absolutely.

Most people I know who have forward facing toddlers have toddlers who get travel sick. Our two year old is rear facing still but only because she’s fine with it. If she was travel sick or generally hated it to the point of a tantrum every time we’d do forward facing. My view is of she’s ok with rear facing still we’ll do it for as long as we can.

It's not completely unsafe. It's misleading to say that it is (not you, but whoever told you this). Forward facing with a harness is safer than using a seatbelt if the child is under 4. A properly fitted 5 point harness actually does a really good job of protecting children. If it did nothing at all, car seats would never have caught on, since only Sweden started with RF seats (inspired by astronauts, apparently). Every other country inventing child car seats independently started with forward facing ones, mostly ideas which would be looked at as dangerous death traps today but they worked - they saved lives. What we have now is much better, but what we started with is still worth something.

The idea that it's dangerous or increases risk only applies to very young babies. In fact it's not even true to say that it's "completely unsafe" for a baby under 15 months old, though I would not recommend it, and the risk is unacceptably high given the alternatives, which is why it's illegal under the current standard.

Even for an under 15mo, it's much safer than being unrestrained or using a seatbelt. It's a dangerous myth actually - I once saw a question on one of those groups where the poster was in a low income country where car seats are not law, and only had the option to use a forward facing car seat for their 6 month old and was so worried about this that they opted to hold the baby on their lap instead. They had the risk the wrong way around - it is much safer to have the baby restrained than not, even though a 6 month old should definitely not be FF if at all possible.

The idea that it's risky for older children only makes sense in relation to rear facing, because rear facing is safer, although it was also put about by the companies promoting impact shield seats during the early 2010s. There is NO research study showing that seatbelts are safer than 5 point harness, for any age. It's just a myth, basically. There is a theory behind it which isn't proven.

The main reason RF advocates (including Swedish traffic authorities) have for discouraging use of FF harness seats is that they encourage/normalise FF before age 4. If your only option to FF is a high back booster using adult seatbelt and you know this is unnaceptably risky to use before age 4, then you're more likely to stick with a RF seat until then. They state it more like until 4 you can RF and then move straight to a HBB with seatbelt, so the FF harness seat is an unnecessary step, which is a completely valid argument, but it's not at all the same thing as saying that a FF seat is unsafe. They just mean it falls under the line that they would consider to be safe enough (and they only consider RF to be safe enough).

BTW, when someone writes a long post you can always tag them instead of quoting the post 😅 I always feel bad when people quote me when I have done my usual brain dump.

Car sickness and not feeling that worried. Mine also went on buses and in taxis around London without a car seat when they were babies and toddlers. They weren't in the car that much.

@BertieBotts you are probably the most helpful poster on here with car seats knowledge.

MN should pay you. (Really!)

This surprises me greatly.

My DD was born in 1995. The car seat she had while still a baby was rear-facing certainly. But the next car-seat, I e toddler one, was FF and I honestly don't ever remember seeing rear-facing seats for toddlers or knew anyone that had one.

My kids would scream their heads off when rear facing at maybe 12-18 months old, so we put them forward facing.

The phrase I used was ‘can often’ -not can always, and I’ve dealt with more than one child with travel sickness. If you took it to be condescending then that’s on you, read more carefully.

Many parents do not ‘try everything’ before turning the child. That was many, not all, in case you needed it reiterated.

Well, I didn’t tbh. For us, it was as simple as forward facing suited us both. Something being safer than an alternative doesn’t make it unsafe. I don’t really have a lot of patience for the view that having a child in a perfectly legal and safe car seat is akin to murdering them. I’ve never actually been in a car accident!

I see a lot of comments about ‘where do their legs go?!’ Look at your child sitting on a sofa or arm chair, see how they sit. The vast majority will never sit upright with their legs hanging down, they’ll tuck their legs up. It’s perfectly comfortable for them, generally more so than to have them dangling. But this is all the stuff that there’s advice for online, studies and evidence based- that’s why people like to be on car seat groups because they get all that info fed to them. Some of the groups are more gentle than others, Bump to Booster I found to be particularly good but I’m not on it anymore.

Forward facing with a harness is often not advised due to the rigidity of the harness vs an adult seatbelt which has a little give before it locks. A harness has no ‘give’ at all meaning the body is pinned back even more firmly, leaving the head swinging forwards even more risky in a crash situation. The ideal is rear facing until at least 5 and then a high backed booster with a seatbelt so long as the child is mature enough to sit properly. If you choose a suitable seat from birth, then that will only mean 2 seats in the child’s lifetime.

people assume that rear facing seats won’t fit in smaller cars but they often don’t know of the safety gap required for a forward facing seat between the child’s face and the back of the seat in front, it’s not always more of a space dominator. But, as in my previous post- ignorance is bliss and going against what their friends and friends do clearly is seen as weird and unnecessary by a lot of people. It’s a shame, the stats for car injuries and child deaths in Sweden vs the UK put us to shame- same laws but different cultural norms.

How many children are killed in the car in the UK every year?

Well it was 15+ years ago now but mine were in forward facing from about 9 months once they moved out of the very small car seat.

They also only used a booster from about age 7 and nothing at all from around 9. Everyone I know was the same.

I guess you just weigh up the risks like everything else. E.g. we co slept from birth, I used to put them down to sleep on their tummy etc

Cigarette’s are legal but not that safe, our legal testing for car seats in the uk isn’t very good and there are many safer options easily available that can even be cheaper than forward facing seats. Most crash testing is 30mph which is a combined speed, in a head on crash that’s 15mph for each vehicle.

They think ‘legal’ means ‘safe’, which it should. The government needs to update this.

His legs are too long to face backwards and get squished so I turned it to forwards

Ours has an airbag and doesn’t have a harness system. It was one of the safest around when we bought it. It was the best choice for our family.

I think the poster in the middle is talking about rear facing seats for babies, and quoting a Google AI summary which has garbled the advice or possibly mixed up UK and US guidelines, but you and TeenToTwenties are talking about not having seen RF seats for older children.

Those were not widely available in the UK 20+ years ago. All you could get were seats which went RF up to 10kg or 13kg depending on whether it was before or after the Group 0+ category came in, and then they could be turned FF from 9kg and used up to 18kg. Those lasted a bit longer than an infant carrier by height but that was it really.

The In Car Safety Centre was importing some seats from the Nordic market in the late 90s/early 00s (funnily enough Britax was making those seats here in their UK factory, but only selling them in Sweden, Denmark and Finland!) but they were a specialised retailer and the seats were sold for children with special needs who needed more postural support, rather than as a safety benefit for all children. If other places were importing them, I don't know. I was not around in those circles on the internet then. You can look at old MN archives though if you're ever interested (it's fascinating to put in any keyword you like TBF)

It was mainly thanks to American parenting/car seat forums online, where a debate was raging over whether it was safe to FF at age 1 or wait for age 2, and awareness raising by the families of some children who were unfortunately injured or killed as a result of FF seats used too young that the idea of RF for longer started to become known, at first in small corners of the internet and then spreading wider as the internet became more widely used really. There were also a couple of online bloggers or activists who had moved from a Nordic country to another one (often UK/US) and were then confused and dismayed by the lack of availability of RF seats so decided to campaign for them.

By the end of the 2000s the In Car Safety Centre was not the only ERF importer in the UK, they had moved their ERF seats out of the special needs area to a new ERF area of their website, although you still had to drive to them for a fitting. It was also possible to buy seats directly from Sweden online. But that was basically the only way to get a rear facing seat for a child over 13kg, you had to have a specialist nearby or be willing to order an expensive and possibly complicated seat directly from abroad, remember online shopping was not at all the norm at this point, and online video was only just starting to be used for things like car seat installation demos. A lot of RF seats for the Nordic market use lower tether anchors, which are normal there but not well known at all in the UK even now.

But certainly through to about 2014 it was virtually unknown by the vast majority of people. Then some of the more mainstream brands (Cybex and Britax) released rear facing spin seats and things took off then. Joie made them affordable a few years later and now they are totally normal, and more people RF to age 2 or 3 which was virtually unheard of 15 years ago. TBH, 15 years ago most people thought it was extremely strange to keep babies rear facing past their first birthday. Now it is the law, even if the law only says you must RF for 3 months past that date. It seems it's enough to get people to switch to a second stage seat which at least has the ability to RF and therefore it is a no brainer to keep doing it if everyone is happy. Which I think is great. I'd much rather see a lot of people RF a little bit longer, than a few people RF for a lot longer.