Are we meant to have 4 car seats for 2 children

[ana7887]

Just want to see what's everyone doing with their car seats?
We have 2 children and 2 cars. I am driving during the week when my husband works and every time my husband drives over the weekend we change the seats into his car. Also my husband takes older one swimming so we change back again mid week.
My question is are we meant to have 4 car seats? Our car seats are around £100, so that's £400...

What's everyone else doing?

You either have four car seats, you swap them over each time or you use one car for the children and one car for no children and swap the car as necessary.

Those are the only options (or take the bus?).

Is it an issue for you both to switch the seats? Does it cause problems or situations where one or you needs the seat and you haven't switched.

The answer can only be, do you think you need seats in both cars?

My eldest and DiL do! 4 car seats between both their cars. I don't know if it's the case that you're are supposed to have four. They do, though.

We had 4 kids in car seats so had 4 seats in the family car and then two seats for the other car to be used it we needed to bring them different places.

We don't have his and her cars so whoever needs to drive the children takes the car with the car seats in. Simples 😊

We just have one car so no issue. But when we had two we just generally used one car (the bigger one) when transporting kids so swapped extremely rarely.

as they get older it gets easier as you can put them in boosters which are dead easy to swap round

I guess one thing to consider is whether the car seats are being properly fitted and secured each time especially if there's a rush.

Hadn't thought about having a kid car and swapping that over but then you've got to adjust mirrors, seat position each time which might be equally irritating.

When we had 2 cars we just had seats in one car, and used that car whenever needed to transport the kids. We were both fully insured on that one car.

Why do you use your husband's car at the weekends?

Agree his and hers cars is somewhat unusual I think. People have a “family car” and “another car”

Swap cars rather than seats?
We have 3 full sets of seats as depending on working commitments I do drop off and DH does pick up or vice versa and also MIL does some ferrying around - She purposely bought a giant car for all the DC and their seats so she doesn’t have to worry about the seats being incorrectly refitted if taken out regularly.

I usually had the kids in my car so had the seats. Once they were a bit bigger and could use the same type DH had one in his car as he rarely took both kids - it was usually just taking one to a party or Beavers etc. If he was taking two, he either drove my car if I wasn't using it, or swapped a seat into his.

We had expensive, spinning, luxurious seats in the main car, and cheaper ones in DH’s commuter car. Infasafe are reasonable and still good quality.

What's everyone else doing?

We just took the car with the seats in it.

We always had two more expensive nicer ones for long journeys and the car that they did most of their journeys in and 2 cheaper ones for the other car

We only have one car so no issues here, but my friends have two cars and they keep an emergency (cheap) car seat in their garage in case. It hardly ever gets used but on the off chance the car seat is in the other car and someone needs to go out, at least they have a backup.

We have 1 car that is driven by whoever has the children which has the car seats in. Now our eldeat is ina high back booster we do have an extra one of those in the other car as that was only £40

We bought car seats for each car.

We have always had a set of seats in each car. We often swap over who drops off and who picks up, so no opportunity to switch cars or seats.

We have different car seats for each car. It means we have flexibility in terms of who does pick up/drop off too in case we both finish work at a similar time and/or have errands to do x

Swap cars

We went with the very pricey axkid car seat and couldn’t afford more than one of those, so we have it in the car that makes the most sense for transporting DD(bigger, has sliding rear doors) and whoever has DD uses that and also any time we go out all together.

If another relative had to drive DD for any reason we’d move the seat into their car - that has only happened once though.

Bought double the car seats, one in each car. Don't have time to be faffing around loving them around often

We have car seats for both, as sometimes one of us will drop off on the way to work, and the other will pick up, so it's easier. We only got two sets once they were on high back boosters, so cost wasn't as bad, though that was more good luck then management, as that's the size the kids where when I changed jobs, and needed DH to be able to drop off.

We have four seats. We both do a similar amount of ferrying the children around and due to both working full time either wfh, on office days, attending meetings elsewhere and older child's activities and swimming lessons who does a nursery run or picks up the eldest often changes on the same day. Car seats are bulky and personally I find them a PITA to swap in and out of the cars regularly. It's also helpful when the older one wants a friend over as we can take them out somewhere or drop them home safely with the additional seat.

Once kids are older it’s really easy to just leave the booster seat where the child is, so this becomes a non issue