Are your children’s vaccines up to date?

Set a reminder

Please or to access all these features

Car seats

Confused about car seat regulations? Find baby car seat advice here. For Mumsnetter-approved essentials, sign up for Mumsnet Swears By emails here.

Harnessed forward facing safety

6 replies

toastofthetown · 27/06/2025 13:58

One thing I see all the time on car seat Facebook groups (which I should probably quit tbh) is an assertion that forward facing in a harnessed seat is dangerous, and the extra body movement allowed by a seatbelt reduces the forces to the neck to a safe level in a crash. Racing drivers have a HANS device to stop their heads moving forward in a crash so it makes sense logically but is it actually evidence based in a normal car situation?

OP posts:
Are your children’s vaccines up to date?
Springadorable · 27/06/2025 19:13

Yes. Having a helmet on increases the weight of the head proportionate to the body, which is the same set up as a young child. Ultimately children under four, and ideally six or seven, should rear face.

ToKittyornottoKitty · 27/06/2025 19:14

It is factual that rear facing car seats are safer

toastofthetown · 27/06/2025 19:36

I get that rear facing is safer and I’m hoping to rear face my baby as long as possible (which definitely won’t be 6 or 7 if he stays how he is because he’s 99th centile for height). But I get incredibly car sick facing backwards, and if he gets that too then I might have to turn him before he’s safe to be in a booster seat so I’m just wondering the evidence based position for not forward facing in a five point harness. Part of the reason I got the car seat I got for him is that it can also face forward if ERF doesn’t work out and I’m trying to figure out if FF in a harness is simply less safe than a seatbelt (where the child is old enough for a booster) or is actually unsafe.

OP posts:
BertieBotts · 27/06/2025 20:24

There's not much evidence either way, and there probably won't be, because the problem is a child over 4 in a high back booster is already very safe. You can't improve a huge amount on it and the amount of children travelling in rear facing seats (where you might well see an improvement) at that age who end up involved in an accident is so miniscule it is negligible and can't give you any real life statistics. You can only go by crash tests and that is not the full story.

There is some good data now showing that age 4

The idea that FF in a harness rather than a seatbelt is drastically dangerous to the spine/neck turned out to be something one of the companies marketing impact shield seats put out there in order to bolster support for their impact shields - apparently. In real world crashes impact shields come out about the same with 5 point harness forward facing, because while they do alleviate some of the neck loading they can put too much pressure on the abdomen and they can eject the child especially in a rollover, an offset crash and/or a very young or slim child. As said overall it comes out about the same as a 5 point harness.

Australia is probably the place to look at - they have very little rear facing, they have had 5 (in fact 6) point harnesses with top tether for a long time, and they have had safety campaigns focused on keeping kids harnessed up to the age of 6 or 8 even so there is more data to compare older (and even younger) FF children.

Rear facing is definitely safest but the idea that FF in a 5 point harness is terribly unsafe is not really evidence based at all. The risk of internal decapitation is horrible and I won't tell you it's zero, but it's not as common as some of the FB groups would have you believe. It's a pretty rare injury - one US trauma/children's hospital reported less than one case a year. Some people say that it's rare because children who die in car accidents don't always get this injury recorded, but the numbers of children who die in car accidents in the UK are also incredibly low, especially when you screen out the number of children who were not in a seat at all. And our national average time for turning forward facing is about 2 years old (which I already think is a brilliant improvement over 5-10 years ago!!)

RF is worth doing but it's not worth stressing out over. If it's working brilliant - keep doing it. OTOH if it's causing problems and your child is not a tiny baby, the trade off is likely worth it.

BertieBotts · 27/06/2025 22:28

Sorry I got distracted and lost my second paragraph before - there is good evidence showing children under 4 do better in a forward facing harness compared to a seatbelt.

TBH if forward facing was unsafe, no country except Sweden would have ever adopted car seat laws. But that's not what happened - pretty much all non-communist EU countries plus the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand all made laws mandating the use of child seats at roughly the same time, not long after seatbelts were made law for adults. There are plenty of studies/data from the 80s when these laws were just being established showing that car seats work better than seatbelts. And aside from the Nordic countries nobody was doing extended rear facing back then.

toastofthetown · 02/07/2025 15:10

Thank you, sorry I missed this update. Somehow I'm not surprised it's a marketing campaign by impact shield manufacturers who say that harness are bad. Like how I often see on these groups "evidence" quoted from Axkid and BeSafe (who mostly manufacture rear facing seats) that direction of travel doesn't affect carsickness when I know I've never been able to face backwards on trains or taxis without travel sickness even as a child.

OP posts:
New posts on this thread. Refresh page