What age did you face your LO forward in a car seat?

[Mamabear04]

What age did you face your LO forward in a car seat?

[SirVixofVixHall]

Dd1 is 16 and she was RF until about seven , maybe even eight I think , ditto dd2.
We had car seats from Sweden and they went by height and weight, and they were in them until they were too tall, then had ff high backed seats.

[SirVixofVixHall]

BlueShrew we had those taller seats, and my dds are both very light so they worked for ages .

[Liverbird77]

@HercwasanEnemyofEducation I would say that would be a minority of people.

I am aware it isn't the law. Your reasons aren't strong ones for me.
Anyway, I'll continue to follow the safety advice.
Others can do what they want, obviously.

[Onedaysomedaynowadays]

[quote Liverbird77]@HercwasanEnemyofEducation look it's not my job to educate anyone. Advice isn't welcome anyway. I just said I can't understand why people do these things. I can't condone them. I guess, yes, I am judgemental. I don't understand why people contravene safety advice and data.

Also, having children is indeed a choice. Contraception is free and, if that fails, abortion is free. Bringing a child into the world is a choice.[/quote]
Wow. You sound like great fun 😳

[jumpbounce]

5 year old still rearfacing in a britax dualfix. They are quite small though In general size and weight. Probably the size of an average 3 year old. They just cross their legs or put them up the back of the seat. We have had to use FF in emergency situations and they don't like it because it hurts their legs when their feet are dangling.

[Pinkywoo]

@Iminaglasscaseofemotion that's strange could be because I'm an older mum (I had DS at 39) so more the "Mumsnet demographic", but my younger cousins from other areas have rearfaced their children too.

[Justmemyself]

Still rear facing at best 4

[Justmemyself]

Nearly not best

[AegonT]

Still rear-facing age 6 in our cars (25kg limit seats). Went in a high-backed booster at 4.5 and only just the minimum weight in the childminder's car for a year but not anymore as we take her to school now.

[WorriedMillie]

Less than 2, she used to scream, then vomit, it made her so unhappy
I can’t travel backwards on trains, I get horribly travel sick

[BertieBotts]

You can get cheaper RF seats. The cheapest is Joie tilt which will rear face until 18kg which is about 3-4 years and costs between £50-70 depending on whether it's on offer.

Even £200 for an isofix or longer lasting 25kg (6-7 years) one is actually comparable to the cost of a decent FF isofix seat anyway. And if you're on a very tight budget the best way to get safety for cheap is to rear face anyway. None of the sub £100 forward facing seats are rated that well whereas it could be the oldest most basic RF seat and protect the head and neck well simply because of the design of it.

Anyway in terms of age. I had planned to go to 3 but communicated to DH that I was OK with DS2 forward facing on occasion, as we have a spin seat, like if he was totally struggling to get into the seat and he needed a novelty, or if he was alone with him and wanted to keep an eye on whether he was eating or sleeping. Then I started a new job, DH interpreted my words as "it's fine for him to FF now" and as he was the one with DS in the car mostly, put him FF all the time even though he knows it's not as safe so we had a compromise for a while where we would put him RF if we went on a motorway, but then there was always a reason this couldn't happen as well, and now DS2 hates rear facing so I gave up and bought a better FF seat. He's now 2.8.

Next baby is due in summer as well so I will say 2.5 as a minimum to get through winter as I was always anxious about that. Then I'll probably not worry about it.

I think ERF is important to be aware of, and would always try to help people with the info to do it as long as they want to, but the difference between FF and RF does get smaller the older the child is. These are the milestones I've found in my research:

Able to sit unaided for 20 mins (6-10 months, 9kg) - old milestone back from when car seats were first invented. Not recommended any more. Babies this young are at high risk of internal decapitation in a crash FF.

15 months - minimum for isize seats, also the place where if you want to prevent the most deaths caused by the higher risk of FF, you draw a line here and there it is. Again barest minimum, would recommend longer if possible. FF seats reduce risk of injury or death by about 60% whereas RF is about 92% - hence the 5x safer statistic. Its actually 5x more risky to FF at age 1. 8% vs 40%. 5x safer doesn't work, it's more like 1.5x safer because you're counting a different way. An easier to understand context is if 25 families had an accident severe enough for anyone to be injured, 4 1yos will be seriously killed or injured either way. 30 will be fine or only minor injuries. In the middle are 16 which would sustain serious possibly fatal injury if FF whereas only minor or no injury when RF.

Age 2 - US/AAP recommendations fall here. By this age, the difference has fallen a lot more. It's more like 15% difference rather than 150% or even 500%, but I couldn't find where this is calculated from. Even if you assume the worst case scenerio though that figure gives you 92% injury reduction for RF and 78% for FF so if we go back to our 50 families, again 4x 2yos will be killed or seriously injured either way. 39 will be fine in any properly fitted seat. Now there are 7 in the middle, who would be fine if RF but not fine FF.

3 (somewhere between 3.3 and 3.9, prob 18kg approx) - when statistically most children in Sweden are turned FF, Sweden being the country with the lowest child passenger road deaths in the world and a vision that nobody dies in a car. Their stats are very very low.

Age 4 - where all the European studies say to RF to, including the British medical journal. Interestingly the max age to rear face allowed in Australia. All Australian seats use top tether and apparently they have never had a FF child die in a top tethered seat. They harness much longer than us and delay moving to a booster seat.

Age 6 / 25kg - 25kg is the max capacity of the most easily available RF seats. Age 6 is when the neck vertebrate have solidified so a child's spine is equivalent to an adult, they would from this age tend to get whiplash rather than spinal cord severing unless an impact is very severe. The evidence also shows children aged 6+ are less likely to be injured in a high backed booster than younger children.

[Chelyanne]

Once they were too big for the carry seat which was by a year old for all of them.

[tedsletterofthelaw]

2.

He HATED being rear facing and would scream and kick and try and get out of his seat. I think it was probably safer to move him to FF with the level of distraction his distress took from driving (both myself and DH). Once we turned him he's been fine. It could possibly have been car sickness causing it as I've seen from PPs, never really considered that.

[YouJustDoYou]

About age 3, the recommended European/Swedish way as before then they can easily get decapitated internally from the weight of their head being snapped forward. Lots of test dummy videos showing this etc, just not worth the risk doing it early for convenience sake.

[picturesandpickles]

4 iirc.

RF is statistically much safer.

[Sirzy]

Ds was 18 months old, at that time it was - locally at least - considered old to still be RF

He is 11 now. I am so pleased to see ERF seats becoming much more normal and affordable

[modgepodge]

Confused by the number of people who say they turned their children at a year, and don’t know anyone who rear faced past a year. Isn’t the legal minimum 15 month?? I know this has changed so fair enough if you have teenagers and don’t know any one with young children now, perhaps the law handy changed when yours were little. But the childminder who only has mindees who’s parents break the law? Seems unlikely to me!!

My daughter is 2 and I plan to RF as long as possible; she is fine in the car and small for her age so no hardship. If she starts hating it or getting travel sick I may have to rethink.

Have to say I actually don’t know which way most of my friends kids face as it’s not something we discuss much.

[marplemead]

Still RF at 4.5 years.

[BertieBotts]

@modgepodge because it's only the law if you have a seat approved to R129 (aka i-size). If you have an older seat R44 then it's legal to forward face from 9kg although I wouldn't recommend it.

But also it is a very recent change, not everyone on MN has babies and toddlers, there are quite a large amount of posters on here with school aged children and above!

Probably about 50/50 among my friends - and those who did ERF tend to RF until about 3 years old. It seems more common in Germany, I see ERF seats all the time here in strangers' cars (probably about 20% RF, 80% FF past the baby seat) whereas you hardly ever see them in the UK. Certainly not as much as 1 in 5. Maybe a spin seat occasionally, which you can never tell as they're always facing the door when the car is parked!

[ForeverBubblegum]

3yo, would have left it longer but his sister was born via c-section and I needed him to climb into the seat independently (I was ok to drive months before I was up to lifting a top percentile toddler)

[modgepodge]

[quote BertieBotts]@modgepodge because it's only the law if you have a seat approved to R129 (aka i-size). If you have an older seat R44 then it's legal to forward face from 9kg although I wouldn't recommend it.

But also it is a very recent change, not everyone on MN has babies and toddlers, there are quite a large amount of posters on here with school aged children and above!

Probably about 50/50 among my friends - and those who did ERF tend to RF until about 3 years old. It seems more common in Germany, I see ERF seats all the time here in strangers' cars (probably about 20% RF, 80% FF past the baby seat) whereas you hardly ever see them in the UK. Certainly not as much as 1 in 5. Maybe a spin seat occasionally, which you can never tell as they're always facing the door when the car is parked![/quote]
Ah ok, I hadn’t realised how recent the law change was. When i went car seat shopping almost 3 years ago the guy in the shop made it clear babies should be RF til 15 months, but perhaps it was just guidance not law then? Can you still buy FF seats legal for 9 month olds?

Yes, well aware that plenty of people on here have older children and the law/guidance was different then.

[EekThreek]

Dc1 was 3.5 ish (now 11)
DC2 was 18m - too broad for the RF seat we had, couldn't afford to replace it (now 6)
DC3 is 3.3 and has plenty of space left in that seat so will RF for a good while yet. She occasionally FF if she asks, but most of the time prefers RF anyway.

[BertieBotts]

It seems to be a common misconception that the 15 month guidance applies to all seats. Also, in car seat shops it probably will have been emphasised to the salespeople that 15 months was chosen for a safety reason, so they'll advise it as a minimum for all. That is what we did when I worked in a car seat shop. It was only if someone explicitly asked/said "But this says from 9kg/9 months" that we would explain the difference in the law but we'd still say that it's safer to stick to a minimum of 15 months, and preferably longer.

[Thesearmsofmine]

We turned ds3 to forward facing last year when he was 4.5. We were in a crash last year, 5 of us in the car and he was the only one who didn’t suffer any bruising.

[OverTheRainbow88]

My kids are 2 and 4 and FF since about 14 month each.

Until this thread I’ve never heard of kids RF at 4!!!! Seems very excessive