Newborn car seat anxiety - health visitor freaked me out

[JoannaStayton]

Hello

We have a 5 week old baby - first one, fair to say I'm pretty anxious about it all. The health visitor came and mentioned that using a car seat can be dangerous as the babies head can flop forward and they can stop breathing. She recommended someone sit in the back with the baby to watch them. Has anyone else heard this?

I was planning to visit my Mum (recently widowed, in our support bubble) on a fairly regular basis, that's a 2.5 hour journey one way. Obviously can stop off once or twice if needs be but even with a mirror I won't in the back really be able to tell how the baby is whilst driving on my own. How do people deal with this? Is it just when they're really little that it's an issue? I have read somewhere that car seats are only dangerous for asphyxiation when not in the car as the angle is different, not sure if any basis for that though. Our car seat is fixed (Joie i-Spin 360) - not one that gets taken out of the car.

If anyone has any advice that would be greatly appreciated, feeling quite bleak about the next few months knowing travel could be a problem for us.

@BertieBotts because I'm a crash, statistically it is much more likely that the front of the car will be impacted, either from a front collision or a rear collision where the car is subsequently spun and the front is impacted.
For that reason, it is significantly safer to have any infant seat in the rear of the car where there it is less likely to suffer impact. Even with the airbags disabled, the impact of a collision will be a lot greater through an infant seat in the front of a vehicle when the front of the car in impacted.

*in a crash

You should have seen our car - as I said dp said he thought he was going to be sick when he saw the front of it. I can well believe @hownowbrowncowz from my own lived experience. I am so so glad dd was in the back

I know that frontal is the most common (and most serious) type of collision (I work with car seats). So it's also more likely there will be intrusion into the passenger compartment at the front?

The explanation that I have always seen for why it's safe (not necessarily safer, but safe) to put car seats in the front is that the passenger compartment as a whole should be reinforced so that intrusion is minimised.

It is not something I have felt a need to do myself, but I would like to know that I'm giving the best advice to people really.

It is still a safe place. The dash is built to take the impact. The middle back seat is the safest. But the front seat is still a safe place to put a car seat

I often assume this logic is common sense because of my work, so I apologise if I've been blunt but I really do find it difficult to compute that there are still people advising anyone to travel with car seats in the front of cars when they have a choice.

Yes, the front seat is safe to travel in. It is significantly safer for an adult to travel in it because in the event of a RTI, they will be protected by the airbag, obviously a car seat won't (or at least, shouldn't) have that. But in high speed or high impact collisions, over 70% have significant damage at the front of the vehicle and drivers and passengers suffer injuries of varying degrees from said impact. The middle section of a modern car where the rear seats are sited is one of the least likely impacted areas of a vehicle and therefore to me at least it seems utterly mindless that you would consider fitting car seats anywhere else.

As an aside, one of the main causes of collisions is through distraction. If you are putting a newborn in the seat next to you whilst you are driving with the intention of monitoring head slump, you are not driving with proper care and attention.

The most common reason people want to put them in the front is when the baby screams so much in the back that they are distracted, but are placated by seeing mum/dad from the front seat. Otherwise it is a case of space - needing to fit 3 children in the car and not wanting to put one in the middle without a seat. Or 3 door cars/vans without seating in the back.

I think probably the high speed / high impact is where I'm seeing different info. The info you tend to get about car seats is more based on town speeds because this is how the crash tests are done (max 40mph) and it's generally a bit of an unknown at higher speeds because there isn't a lot you can do in the way of testing there.

@hownowbrowncowz

I often assume this logic is common sense because of my work, so I apologise if I've been blunt but I really do find it difficult to compute that there are still people advising anyone to travel with car seats in the front of cars when they have a choice.

Yes, the front seat is safe to travel in. It is significantly safer for an adult to travel in it because in the event of a RTI, they will be protected by the airbag, obviously a car seat won't (or at least, shouldn't) have that. But in high speed or high impact collisions, over 70% have significant damage at the front of the vehicle and drivers and passengers suffer injuries of varying degrees from said impact. The middle section of a modern car where the rear seats are sited is one of the least likely impacted areas of a vehicle and therefore to me at least it seems utterly mindless that you would consider fitting car seats anywhere else.

As an aside, one of the main causes of collisions is through distraction. If you are putting a newborn in the seat next to you whilst you are driving with the intention of monitoring head slump, you are not driving with proper care and attention.

I'm not advising it as a first choice. I'm staying the fact that it is still an option for those who need to use it. It's not illegal or unsafe to a significantly higher level than the backseat.

@1940s where are you getting your evidence that the front isn’t significantly less safe?

Just looked at the AA eg and they say:

“ The most common crash involves an impact to the front of your car which means that the back seat is usually a safer place to travel. So, children are best carried in the rear.”

www.theaa.com/driving-advice/safety/child-safety/baby-child-seat-front-or-back

This is usually the information given to support the theory that the front seat is just as safe / not significantly less safe than the back.

It's a Swedish site so all of the sources, including unfortunately the quotes from them, are in Swedish although the bulk of the post/explanation is in English. But luckily it's easy to translate that using Google Chrome:

www.carseat.se/rearfacing/position-in-vehicle/front-seat-safety/

If you right-click on the swedish text then you can translate it to English. On a phone it is normally the "three dots" menu with a translate option (but may be trickier as most of the page is in English).

Actually this version of it is easier to read but the main post doesn't have the sources in it - you have to follow the comment thread right down to the bottom (it's not that long).

www.carseat.se/2010/05/28/are-car-seats-in-front-seat-safe/

Thanks Bertie for beating me to it

I also hope everyone reading that article who has been so concerned about where to place their child's seat also picks up on the fact that long term rear facing in a Swedish plus tested car seat is 500% safer than forward facing a toddler

Really fascinating article.

I guess what it all makes me think is that the safety of front seat positioning in Sweden isn’t that easy for me to confidently translate to the uk unless they are using same car seats and same car models.

Safety of our car seats in the front which might well not be rear facing and possibly different car types / brands? Not sure that is completely definitive

I was thinking that too, the cars it mentions are Volvo's, which tend to be big heavy cars, hardly comparable to the average UK mums fiesta or fiat 500.

The infant carriers are the same in Sweden. They use the same car seat regulation as we do here, so they are the same brands and models. The main difference is the next stage, most British parents tend to move into a forward facing seat, whereas Swedish children are almost all rear facing until around 3 or 4 years of age (some until more like 6) - this is according to an observational study Besafe did a couple of years ago, so it's up to date information. Advice in Sweden is to rear face until 4, and their market history is almost exclusively rear facing seats. Because they use the same regulations as here, it's perfectly legal to buy and use a forward facing seat, but I understand that culturally it is frowned upon and is advised against by salespeople, consumer organisations, paediatricians, their equivalent of health visitors etc.

Likewise it is perfectly legal to buy, sell and use the Swedish style rear facing seats which accommodate up to approximately 4 or 6 years in the UK. Some of these are even mainstream now, like the seats you can get which spin in either direction, although these are not commonly used on the front seat because they are isofix, and not many cars have isofix points in the front seat. The seats up to 6 years are more difficult to find and less well-known, because you tend to have to buy them from specialists, but the Britax models are actually made in the UK and then most of them are shipped to Sweden and Norway. They also appear on all the manufacturers' UK websites nowadays (you go back 10 years, and they didn't, even the ones which were produced in this country, and even though they have been legal to use here all along. It was like some kind of dirty little secret!)

The website that article is on is an online retailer specialising in international exports of those Swedish style longer-rear facing seats. They do stress that the recommendation that the front seat is as safe applies only to children in rear facing seats, whether they are infant carriers or these larger seats for older children, and they say that it does not apply to forward facing children. This is why (it was explained to me) most UK based sites will say the back is safest, because the assumption is that children are forward facing. And this is a problem because they are either in danger from the airbag or they are not able to be protected by the airbag like an adult passenger would be. The rear facing child doesn't need the protection from the airbag, as long as the passenger compartment doesn't suffer intrusion, because the shell of the seat performs that function instead.

As for what kind of cars are driven in Sweden, I couldn't tell you offhand, but I doubt they are all completely different. I did just quickly google it and came up with this:

Sweden
www.statista.com/statistics/424960/leading-passenger-car-models-in-sweden/

UK
www.autoexpress.co.uk/news/94280/best-selling-cars-2021

So yes, a higher proportion of Volvos in Sweden, but Golf, Quashqai, Kia etc in there as well, so I don't think all Swedes are driving tank-like Volvos.

Hello.

Thanks to everyone for the advice here, it was really useful.

In the end I bought a new car seat - one that allows the baby to lie flat. A Maxi Cosy Jade. It was gutting to shell out for another one but the seat itself has been absolutely brilliant on our journeys over the past few months.

It has a newborn insert which we used until she was about 10 weeks then she was just strapped into the pod on her back. She often slept and it was all very stress-free.

Only down side is it takes up two spaces in the back as it lies across the seat.

I wish I had got it from the start, highly recommend for anyone who knows they'll have to do a few longish trips with a 0-6 month old baby.