Is 4 too young to stop using a harness?

[Fizxy]

Just wondering when everyone stopped using a 5 point harness? Our DD has just turned 4 and is 18kg so has reached the limit for her current car seat. When we’ve been looking into the next stage car seat the vast majority don’t have a 5 point harness. Someone in a shop told us this is to do with their hip development and it’s not safe once they turn 4 and they’re safer with just a seatbelt? Not sure how accurate this is though because everything I’ve read online seems quite mixed!

our dilemma is that we just don’t trust that she will stay sat in her seat with just a seatbelt on. Most of the time she’s fine, but we recently had a bit of drama from her on a long trip where she was screaming ‘get me out of here’ on repeat for a good 5 minutes 🙄. If she wasn’t harnessed in she would have 100% climbed out. 4 seems so tiny still to just have a seatbelt on. So we’ve seen some car seats with the extended harness upto 25kg (joie bold is preference) but now we’re doubting if this is the best/safest option? Or should we just go with the high back booster option and have a stern word about staying in our seat and hope for the best?

any advice appreciated :)

It doesn't have it's own harness, so it's always with the belt. Obviously seats like this actually exist and are still on the market, so it isn't unrealistic having ones that last this long.

I’d highly recommend an Axkid Minikid. Either the minikid 2 or the 4 (4 obviously more expensive but a lot longer lasting).

My boys are 91st and 99th percentile for both height and weight and my eldest is 5 and still has masses of growing room in his Minikid 4. It has the tallest back height on the market and has a height limit of 125cm. If your daughter is only 105cm and 18kg at age 4 she will have masses of growing room in either of the Minikid seats. My middle child is the one on the 99th percentile and he is in the minikid 2 and still has masses of room. He’s just turned 3 and about the same height as your daughter and weighs more than her.

By the time she outgrows it she will easily be ready for a HBB and you can pass down the Minikid to your younger child.

You may have the same issue with your younger child too unless they are low percentile of them outgrowing an 18kg seat before being HBB ready so it would likely be worth the cost in the long run.

I Believe the Little Peas website is reputable.

I've been researching this abit recently as our 3yo (4 in the autumn) is outgrowing their toddler seat and I whilst I have weight based next stage seats (with harnesses) to use from first child which go upto 18kg I also need to get another one for my mum to use.
I think she is way to young not to have a harness but discovered that with the new ISIZE seats, because they are going by height only and only upto 105cm, they don't last as long as the previous weight based ones did! (Hypocritical really as ISIZE was supposed to improve safety)
Children are not held in very securely by the main seatbelt and they and it can easily move about making a secure fit difficult.
I think it's a worrying and unsafe development......my older child's weight based one lasted her with the harness until she was rising 6!
Now it seems the only affordable option is the Joie Bold.

And not sure what the person in the shop was on about to do with the hip thing, but alot of people in shops that sell car seats haven't a clue what they're on about 🙄

Would recomend you read the manual. And as @FamilyAreEverything has already said, the impact shield is outgrown at 105cm/21kg and then the seatbelt has to be used as a hbb.

Little Peas is reputable 😃

Re rear facing and how long the Axkid Mini kid 2 might last for. My eldest was low weight centiles (between 9th + 25th) but 75th for height - she was 6 years 8 months when she outgrew it height wise. My youngest is mid centile for weight (just below 50th) but higher for height (just below 75th); she is currently still in her mini kid 2 at 6years 5 months and very comfortable with plenty left height wise.

As previous poster have said, rear facing is safest. If that's not an option then at 4 a HBB with crotch guard is next best option.

Could you get the tinyseats travel car seat? Can be rear facing but also then turn FF as a HBB. It's expensive but then it will do harness for a bit longer RF then also HBB.

I had this same issue and ended up getting an extended rear facing car seat (britax romer) as couldn’t find a FF with 5point harness over 18kg. The one I got goes to 36kg and is worth it to stop my DC removing their seatbelt during journeys.

It's not safer to have a seatbelt at age 4 though some children are fine in a seatbelt at 4. The idea that a 4 year old's head/neck is at risk in a FF harness seat is not really evidence based. This mainly comes from marketing around impact shield seats. The info about younger children and neck injuries is correct, which is why you should RF as long as reasonably practical, but at this age there is not really a risk from a 5 point harness forward facing (at least, there's no evidence supporting it). The main argument against FF harness comes from Sweden and basically it's that if you make a FF harness available people turn their children forward facing earlier because they perceive it as safer than a seatbelt only, which it may not be. If the only two given options are RF or HBB, people rear face longer. That is more impactful on a population level than keeping children in a 5 point harness longer.

So - if you are wanting a forward facing one I noticed the other day that the i-size version of Cozy n Safe Excalibur now has the 125cm harness, and the R129 approval. I'd probably go for this over Joie Bold if I was buying now. Unfortunately I don't know if the harness has a weight limit, because the manual doesn't seem to be available for download yet. But you could probably email them and find out.

(Ignore the "Swedish approved E5" bit - all that means is that they did the crash test approval in Sweden. Means nothing at all about the safety.)

https://cozynsafe.com/products/excalibur-i-size

Rear facing (e.g. Minikid) is of course always a winner, and this is a brand new seat so no idea what it's like to use or anything. Cozy n Safe is not my favourite brand but I do have one of their seats.

Personally I'm not hugely keen on these big heavy seats as HBB, though I do like the Britax Advansafix/Evolvafix in both harness and HBB mode, you'd probably get another 6 months or so on the harness with that seat given it's a 105cm/21kg limit, and I wouldn't be at all worried about slightly exceeding the 105cm, as long as she physically gets a good fit in the seat and is under the 21kg. If you think you'll want a harness longer than 6 months, go for a proper extended harness/ERF seat.

I've just found a reference to the cozy n safe Excalibur i-size weight limit, so I wanted to come and update - it's 22kg/125cm.

It sounds like it can be fitted only using the Isofix and top tether which is another plus over the older versions. But I'm not as certain about that.

Look at extended rear facing (ERF) car seat safety group on Facebook

much safer to keep them rear facing for as long as possible

we’re in same situation as you, looking at the axkid that goes up to 125cm

We just got a car and got our just 4 year old a Minikid 4, he’s so small and light that he could use it for another 4 years I think. His bigger (higher percentile) sister is 6.5 and has 4/5cm left in it but she has a HBB, she got one at 4 and it wasn’t the best seat in the world but it also didn’t help her being very young that on a long journey where she fell asleep she was prone to slipping down in it. She has a better one now we have a car.

I'm certain a seatbelt isn't safer for a 4 year old, and you should probably complain about whoever is telling you that. A 4 year old doesn't need a rear facing carseat, but a proper Booster is good. Google it using whatever the legal requirements are where you live?

Something like this is good for a next step, they vary in price

Thanks everyone some really helpful advice!

when I was putting my daughter in her seat yesterday I actually noticed the weight limit on her joie car seat is 19kg (not 18kg like I thought) so it gives us a tiny bit more time to think about our options.

although I’d love her to be as safe as possible I’m just not sure how long we’ll get away with rear facing. She’s had a taste of forward facing so I think the horse may have bolted. I feel more comfortable forward facing now she’s 4 and most seats for this age are FF so I think we’ll look at the options for a FF harness seat.

the shop that gave us the advice re seatbelt being safer is actually a big national toy store 🙄 so not sure how trained up and knowledgable they are on car seat safety! It took it with a pinch of salt and thought it sounded a bit strange. But does make me wonder if they should be giving out advice if they don’t know their stuff!

Smyths? I don't think their training is great but I do think some of their staff spend a lot of time on the online car seat groups so will give the advice which gets parroted on there. Or perhaps someone high up responsible for training looks there, I hear quite often that their advice seems to be based on the ERF groups. (Which is funny because they don't sell many ERF seats).

John Lewis training can be better but they tend to not know about the existence of seats they don't sell. Their range has got bigger, but they still don't sell any extended harness forward facing seats (which TBF is because there haven't been many on the market) and they don't stock the cheaper ERF 125cm seats, only some quite pricey models.

The idea that seatbelts are safer than 5 point harness does go around on the web because as said, it was a big marketing point by a company trying to promote impact shield seats about 10-15 years ago. Because it fits into the existing knowledge about rear facing being safer, which is correct, I think it has been absorbed into the general consciousness and repeated as fact, but it's not really evidence based.

OTOH a lot of people assume that a 5 point harness is definitely safer than a seatbelt, and this is also not clear cut except that it definitely is safer if the child is under age 3, and the evidence leans towards suggesting that it's safer if the child is under age 4.

After those ages, it really comes down to your individual child - if you feel they aren't ready for a seatbelt, they probably aren't. I think some of the guides online like them needing to sit perfectly still for an entire car journey and never fall asleep are a bit too extreme for me personally. But if they are still prone to tantrums and trying to escape, or they constantly lean out of their seat, slide forwards and down and the seatbelt is all over the place, then it makes sense to stick with a harness if possible. My youngest is nearly 4, and I let him go in a HBB the other day for a very quick lift 5 mins down the road but he was still very wriggly and it definitely confirmed I will keep him in his harnessed seat a bit longer!

Oh, the logic behind the seatbelt being better is because the 5 point harness supposedly pins the shoulders back whereas the head can be flung forwards creating a lot of strain on the neck, whereas a seatbelt allows a more gradual stop for the whole upper body and the strain is more equally spread over the whole spine rather than that one specific part of it. This is not completely ridiculous - it's true that this is a problem for young children (under 2 particularly), and it's why racing car drivers wear a HANS device which essentially tethers their helmet to the car headrest. But 4+ year olds don't have a particular tendency towards neck injuries in forward facing car seats, so the worry about this is fairly unfounded. Some of it is also based on much older seats with less anti-rotation protection - modern seats use top tether or support leg to reduce this. A seatbelt typically allows much MORE forward rotation of the upper body before it stops, so whether overall, more movement but slower is better vs less movement but quite a sudden stop - it's difficult to make an exact judgement call. More forward movement can also be a problem for contacting other items in the car such as other passengers or the front seat, or an airbag if in the front.

OTOH, 5 point harnesses are much better at containing younger children in a rollover situation and generally are very good at preventing children being ejected from the seat entirely. They are also much better for side impact protection compared with a seatbelt, and they put less strain on the abdomen, especially in comparison to a seatbelt which sits too high due to lack of booster seat/incorrectly used booster seat/child slouching in booster seat/poor design of booster seat.

Just out of curiosity Bertie, is there any evidence on three point vs five point harnesses in car seats? Americans seem horrified by our infant carriers which are mostly three point harnesses, and I’ve never seen a toddler seat with a three point harness. More an idle thought because my infant carrier has a five point harness and I hadn’t really noticed until I saw comments by Americans on how unsafe our infant seats looked, but I’ve never heard of any issue at all with three point harnesses for babies. Sorry for random but you seem to have a lot of car seat data and I love data!

4 does feel young to be in just a seatbelt but if she's the right height and weight then you have to go by that. My near 6 year old is still in a 5 point harness as she's under 14kg still and I don't think I'd have felt happy in a seatbelt at aged 4 in terms of maturity to sit properly to be honest.

I’m in the exact same scenario. I could have written this. I’m considering this seat from joie https://joiebaby.com/uk/i-irvana-max-child-car-seat

it’s has a harness up to 25kg and is r129 tested. Only thing making me pause is the price and the fact I can find no reviews of it

@BertieBottsyes it was smyths 😂 thanks for all your advice there though that’s really helpful! I think we’re definitely decided on keeping a harness for now just need to decide on the right seat.

@fakeflowerits such a minefield isn’t it! I haven’t actually seen that seat before so that’s another one for us to look at! It looks a similar price to the bold I was looking at. I wonder if it’s a new seat which is why it has no reviews? @BertieBottsmight know

Yes I think it must be new. I searched about it and Joie only started to mention it on their social media in May this year.

It does look like a better bet than the Excalibur - the only thing I'm unsure about is that the manual Joie have linked on the page says the harness is up to 105cm and 22kg, but it's also the manual for the i-Irvana, rather than i-Irvana max. I sent them a message on one of their FB posts so let's see if it's a mistake and they correct it.

I bought and fitted the joie irvana max and think it’s great. Seems really sturdy and looks like it will work well as a booster too (similar design to the joie i traver I have). My 4.5 year old fits nicely

Oh nice! Can I be cheeky and ask for a pic of the label or manual showing the 125cm/25kg? Joie still haven't updated the manual file on their site.