Anyone else got a car-hating, screaming child? Top tips please!

[Ceolas]

DD3 is 8 months and hates being in the car. Screams blue murder and my blood pressure is going through the roof.

DD1 was similar and improved once she went forward facing, but DD3 is currently only 17lbs so quite a way off that yet.

Am considering:

1. buying a combination seat such as the Britax first class in the vain hope that a bigger higher up seat will somehoe be more comfortable for her and she can see out of the window

2. walking everywhere, which might not be ideal on the 200 mile trip for our summer holiday.

Any tips/sympathy please?

Sympathy from me. My dd hated her rear facing seat also, and used to regularly yell her lungs out for most of our fairly regular trips to visit the in laws who live 150 miles away. Not fun. No advice though, cos like you was only solved by putting her in a forward facing seat when she was old enough and weighed enough.

150 miles Esme? It's truly dreadful!

ds was like this. He did grow out of it before he went forward facing, so there is some glimmer of hope for you.

The only thing that we did, was we waited till he was very tired and then drove long journeys (ie: the 300 miles to my mums) but we live 30 miles away from the nearest city centre, so we just kind of got used to the screaming for journeys of an hour or so.

Twas always a barrel of laughs, dd2 is very travel sick and ds used to scream

And people wonder why I stopped going out

No tips but I have a 15 week old car hating dd and it'll be a blummin long time till she can go forward facing. I get really travel sick so it can't be unreasonable to assume that she does too but everyone thinks I'm mad to suggest it.

That's how I feel squonk. I don't do journeys of over 10 mins unless I really have to. Even 15 mins to my mum's and I try to time it for when she's tired.

Mine is now 2.5 and still much the same

It is awful, we are only holidaying NEAR to home and breaking up holidays with train journeys etc

We had this with Dd1 and tried a combination of:

• Fitting a toy over the car seat *Fitting a mirror on the headrest so she could see herself *Singing like loons for hours at a time
• One of us sat in the back with her

They all worked for a certain amount of time so we swapped between them and long journeys took us forever!
May the force be with you. . . .it does get better

Any success with changing the car seat or should I save my money?

I totally sympathise, my DS was just the same, I remember being on the motorway 20 mins into a 3 hour journey and he started screaming like you can't believe, I thought I was going to go mad, there wasn't a service station for miles and even when we could stop it was just a short break of quiet before I had to put him back in the seat only for him to start screaming again.
Though i was going to go mad, I was definately more dangerous on the road that day than a tired, drunk, high boy racer!

My mum was in the car with me and didn't help matters by repeatedly trying to suggest that it would be ok for him to sit on her lap during the journey as that would make him stop crying!!!

This was pretty typical of most journeys until he was forward facing.
I had tried toys, giving him a bottle, singing, everything,
I don't think he was comfortable with the curled/hunched position of the rear facing car seat.

The only thing that helped was to try and drive when he was really tired and pray that he would sleep the majority of the journey,
oh yes - and never travel for more than a couple of hours