How do people feel about this campaign to make kids under 4 sit rear facing?

[RareTiger]

Don't get me wrong I understand it's safer, but I also know sometimes it's impractical, for mine there are both fast growers and big kids my just turn 3 year old has been in a high backed booster seat for over 6 months now she 17kg wears 4-5 going into 5-6 clothes, but if the law changed I woundnt be able to use the car for her, now for preschool and shopping? fine a incontinence at times but I would just walk or get the bus I do half the time anyway, but for her speech therapy I would have to stop it the travel would mean if something even a bus is 10mins late I don't get home for my son after school or we don't get to speech therapy (3 hour bus, 2.5 hour train ride one way)
I like the current rules both sets, both sets are for different types of car seats why change something that works?
Even with my son we couldn't find a size 0+ to fit in are car we were struggling to fit him in the size 0 at 6 months old he was the size of a 18month old we had no choice but buy a size 1 forward face, he's now 5 been in a high back booster for 2 years

I can make it worst if you need 3 children in car seat but can fit them in you can put the older one from 3 in the middle with just a seatbbelt

https://www.gov.uk/child-car-seats-the-rules/when-a-child-can-travel-without-a-car-seat

And before people start I wouldn't do it I just ran into this random piece of information one day

We do a lot of long drives to see family and my kids would be miserable facing backwards. It makes it much harder to check in on them, sling snacks at them, give them a different book to look at etc when you are trying to do at least 2 hours between stops.

This thread does highlight why the safe way also needs to be made the legal way. It seems some parents are still in a rush to get through the car seat stages ignoring the very clear safety facts.

It wasn't about being happy the car did not fit the size 0+ or 1 rear face car seats we went to Halfords (rember covid not meny shops open lots of travel restrictions) and test every one they had in stock but the car needed longer seat belts in the back (no iso in the car) and we couldnt take out the fuse for the front air bag so front was out the only way to fit a rear face I the car was to strap it to the roof so we had to front face, we had a small car

I'm sorry, I'm tired and haven't read the full thread but I see @BertieBotts is here with a relentless regard for facts ❤️ so I can't add much other than that IME, it is much more feasible to ERF than most people think. My very tall kids were both RF until 5.5/6, and because that was all they've ever known, it was fine. The seats were Swedish and well-designed, straightforward to fit and use.

However, we didn't have to deal with regular swapping between cars, Houdini-style escape attempts, particularly sicky children or frequent long journeys, so I'm very aware that we had good conditions for ERF, as it were.

On balance, it can only be a good thing that more parents are being educated about the safety benefits of ERF, despite the fact that it's a nuanced decision in some cases.

The image of a rear facing child upthread shows a child with disproportionately short legs for height and presumably no feet because there is no indication at all that there's any room where they could be comfortably placed.

I'm sorry, but I think this is bonkers.

What happens if a front seat passenger needs more leg room than the petite woman pictured? The child in the photo would be forced to sit without moving much, if at all, for long stretches if a family were driving to a holiday destination. What about heavier children?

Why do auto manufacturers who produce vehicles normally bought by families that include children not offer child-safe rear seats and seat belt systems that children would be able to use? Or even an option to have child safe rear seats and belts installed and the seats designed for adults removed?

And if the back seat contains seats and children positioned that high, the rearview mirror's utility is going to be severely compromised.

Well put, and I agree.

My local firemen run events several times a year where they assess the installation of car seats and correct when necessary. The current correction rate just for installation/ belt positioning and tightness is 78%.

They also correct or advise on suitability of seat for height and weight of babies and children. The last event they held, they found that 53% of car seats were not appropriate for the children using them.

The parents who go to these events are those who care about these things, but plenty of them obv still get it wrong.

How on earth do you fit a 4 yo rear facing? Does the seat move into the footwell gap and then their feet go on the seat?
Mine are in their 20s, and rear faced in baby car seats, but were front facing well before their first birthdays. I have vidid memories of jumping around in my dads land-rover on the motorway completely unrestrained. Going to be a steep learning curve when the grandkids come along!

I can't imagine this, I didn't even know it was a thing. My youngest is 16, so I can accept that things have moved on, but what do they do with their legs?! Also, I liked to look at them to make sure they were ok and check what they were doing and not getting out of the seat ( youngest did this a lot, he was like Houdini and I often had to stop driving).

Is this a safe leg position? It looks all kind of wrong. And uncomfortable for long journeys

I've before on threads like these that what's a comfortable position depends on the person. I’m an adult and I look at rear facing children with their legs crossed, or resting on the seatback or on the seat in front but with their knees above their hips and I’d be more comfortable like that than in a traditional seated position. I find sitting at right angles very uncomfortable in general and if my legs were dangling unsupported like they do in most FF seats I’d really really struggle. Maybe because I’m hypermobile, but I am a bit jealous of seating positions ERF children have available and that's naturally more like how I sit if I have a choice. I'm sure that some children find sitting in rear facing seats as uncomfortable as I find sitting at 90º angles, while others either prefer it or aren't bothered.

As I mentioned upthread, my DP is a personal injury lawyer who sees a lot of RTA cases. The crossed leg position is not really an issue. As he says, they can easily fix broken ankles and knees, but they can’t fix a broken neck, or a massive crush injury to the chest or a FF injury where the bones in a child’s legs have been telescoped right backwards through their trunk, face or neck (to be brutally honest about some injuries he’s seen).

We used a cheap and very unstylish secondhand buggy that was given to us, rather than buy a nice travel system; and spent our money on a RF Cybex instead. In the remote chance it’s you in that very unlikely accident, you want the best protection you can get.

You can use a cheap plastic mirror in the back of the car so you can see them while driving - they cost about £10 on Amazon. Problem sorted!

I started front facing my daughter at 15 months. This is the legal age in England, unless your toddler is really short. Car journeys were a lot more peaceful once she was forward facing. I also don't have a 4x4 or other big car, so a large extended rear facing car seat wouldn't have fit in the car.

@lemonarcade
Genuine question here, so why don't all passengers sit rear facing? Why aren't cars designed with rear facing passenger seats?

Because body weight distribution is very different in an adult than it is in a young child.

as it is currently seats and seatbelts in cars are designed around males so aren’t as safe for women but that’s a whole different debate and an issue with many things in life.

This. My daughter, now 5, has severe travel sickness as it is, and it was much worse when she was rear facing, so although I'd accept that it was the law and would of course comply, I'm not a huge fan. It would probably have meant we took her in the car even less frequently than we did - an overall impact on our quality of life.

How much safer actually is it in percentage terms?

We bought a HBB when DD was 3,5.

Reason? We actually didn't have a car for 4 years after that. Very occasionally she would go in my mother's car or we would rent a Volkswagen Up. My mother's car is tiny and it would require a lot of faff to install a seat correctly every time.

Meanwhile the HBB we bought is a very good rated one that can be installed very easily with the isofix points.

It seemed like a complete waste of money to get a 400 quid seat for something my daughter would use so little, with no guarantee it would fit in the cars that would actually be used.

Genuine question here, so why don't all passengers sit rear facing? Why aren't cars designed with rear facing passenger seats?

I believe the answer to this is quite boring and unsatisfying - because it's always been that way. A lot of things are like that. There are cars with rear facing seats (usually people carriers with a reversible row) but because they aren't so sought after that people will preferentially buy them, and most adults prefer facing forwards (e.g. on a train) it's easier/cheaper for car manufacturers to just keep doing it like it's always been done.

How much safer actually is it in percentage terms?

It's hard to say exactly. A study a few years ago came up with a figure of 5x safer but it was later retracted because the maths wasn't right. I also feel like it was a bit misrepresentative to say 5x safer. The figures in that study showed that forward facing child seats reduced the chances of injury/death in an accident by 60% whereas the rear facing seat reduced them by 92%.

Which gives you 8% injury chance vs 40% injury chance (but bear in mind this is 8%/40% of the chance your child would be injured if they were completely unrestrained). The 8 vs 40 is where the "5x safer" idea comes from, I think. To me it is more like saying the FF seat is 5x more risky. 60 to 92 feels like about 1.5 times safer. And because this was children up to age 4 you can assume that this is concentrated at the younger ages.

In case studies where they look at accidents where children were killed or injured in forward facing seats the numbers seem to come out fairly consistently that about a quarter of the time it wouldn't have mattered what seat they were in, whereas about 3/4 of the time they would likely have been less injured or uninjured in a rear facing seat. But also if you look at some of the case studies they are things like one year olds in booster seats or they are very old data with old seat types we no longer use because the design of them is inherently dangerous (like the T-shield seats from America).

In crash tests where they can measure the relative forces on a crash test dummy, the loads are about 5-10 times higher in a forward facing seat compared with rear facing. That doesn't mean much really unless you look at the threshold for injury - but essentially FF seats tend to be over the threshold whereas RF seats tend to be under it.

I did at one point find figures which led me to an understanding that at least for children up to about age 2, bearing in mind that the injury rates of unrestrained children are MUCH higher than for adults, being rear facing reduces their injury rate roughly to the rate of adults who are wearing seatbelts, whereas being forward facing reduces their injury rate to the rate of adults who are not wearing a seatbelt. However, I can't recall how I came to these numbers so I don't want to quote it as some kind of authority. It is quite stark because we are so used to seatbelts for adults as being an absolute necessity.

@newrubylane

This. My daughter, now 5, has severe travel sickness as it is, and it was much worse when she was rear facing, so although I'd accept that it was the law and would of course comply, I'm not a huge fan. It would probably have meant we took her in the car even less frequently than we did - an overall impact on our quality of life.

How much safer actually is it in percentage terms?
Risk is something that needs to be measured against other factors.
What is a laboratory study and what is functioning day to day are different things.

If things came down to purely danger then no one would drive at all. Or no one would drive over 20min ever. But we determine and accept that there is a practical and quality of life factor that means we as a society are accepting of the increased risks of driving at 40mph...50mph.... 70mph etc in some circumstances .

If your dd is at risk of vomiting and thereby choking if she sits rear facing and she is the age she is then logic would say it is sensible to have her face forward as the risk of choking on her vomit and the cost to the quality of life having vomit all over her and your inability to get places has to be weighed alongside the small increased protection from facing rearward.

When they don't know any different it's fine - my nearly 5yo is still happily rear facing. The seats are much more expensive though - which would need to be considered. Ff obviously safer than no seat at all.

Should say the needing a bigger car thing isn't true - my mum has a rf seat in her Nissan micra and my nearly 5yo sits just as comfortably as in our bigger car.

I think this kind of stuff is well into the domains of diminishing returns, and has to be weighed against the issue of people requiring ever more massive cars due to multiple massive car seats - knackers infrastructures and endangers people outside the car.

My son is in the 98th centile for height and was fine in his Axkid in our small car until the age of six. I can’t believe that the people who say their kids wouldn’t fit made any kind of attempt at it