When did you put your baby forward facing in the car?

[ZEWatson]

My baby has always hated the car, from the drive home from the hospital until now at 15 months old. It's horrendous, she screams like someone is torturing her. She doesn't nap in the car and once she's decided she's upset there's no amount of singing/ snacks/ toys/ distraction that will stop her. All our family are over 3 hours away and we do a lot of groups/ activities so have no choice but to drive.

She's a good weight and height and her car seat says she can go from 15m. I know it's TECHNICALLY safer to stay rear for as long as possible, but surely if she's so upset and I'm constantly distracted/ trying to settle her whilst driving then it isn't actually safer because I feel I'm so much more likely to crash when she's irate. Anyone else have this dilemma?

For reference she is a typical 'allergy baby'. She's fussy, she's got reflux, she generally is a miserable sod 😆

It's not about equivalent risks. It's about different likelihoods of different types of risks of different outcomes.

What's absurd is focusing only narrowly on one particular risk.

Like I said, not an equivalent risk. You do what you want, but don't parade around the internet implying that cbeebies is more dangerous than internal decapitation.

Rear facing til about 4.5 as a pp.
Local toddler in car accident had life altering injuries from broken neck. Why risk it?

Might if the tablet becomes a projectile in the event of a crash.

I specifically said "safety mounted".

I'm not. You're ignoring the likelihoods. I.e., you're only considering outcomes in your reasoning, not probabilities.

Is "parading around the internet" the same as posting something in a discussion on a forum?

Yes, but in flowery language.

WRT leg room and space taken by the seat, there is a bit of a trade off with these, the other thing that makes a difference is recline and whether the seat is an isofix/spin seat or a belt fitted/purely RF one.

So you do tend to find in a lot of the spin seats, especially Joie, there is very poor leg room rear facing, because the spin mechanism makes the seat bulky and because these seats tend to be at an angle on the base so they are at more of an angle rear facing - if you look, the base is normally wedge shaped. This is something to do with accommodating the younger babies.

With the Swedish style seats like the Axkids, they are designed more for children 9m+ so they are very upright with not so much of a recline and you can position them closer to the back of the car to make them more compact or closer to the front of the car to give more leg room to the child.

I don't know about the pelvic fracture risk but I understand it's not considered a risk for rear facing car seats. People sometimes want to compare rear facing children's legs as being like having legs resting up on the dashboard, which is a known risk (and you should never do) but my understanding is that this is very different, probably because the dashboard is likely to have airbags in it.

I have added a couple of pictures to illustrate two things - the picture with two children in it shows the leg room difference between a typical mainland EU/UK type rear facing and forward facing seat that goes up to approx age 4 (in this case, Joie Stages or Every Stage I think) which is at the front of the picture and you can see it is quite close to the back seat so the girl has to cross her legs. The boy in the background of the picture is in an Axkid seat, Swedish style up to approx age 7, which has space for him to put his legs down between the seat and the backrest. You can also see his seat has some distance from the front passenger seat, and this isn't a gigantic car. It's hard to see the difference in the angle of these seats but the Joie seat is more reclined which is why it takes up more space.

The picture with the blue and black car seats shows the Joie i-Spin (the blue seat) which is an isofix spin seat, actually the most compact one, compared to Britax Max Way (now discontinued) which is a Swedish style up to approx age 7. The purpose of this picture was to show how compact the Max Way is compared to the spin seat. Again a smallish car.

Sorry I wasn't very clear. The 25kg seats such as the axkid move/minikid are more open so they aren't so enveloped in the seat as the 360 type, from my limited experience. Hard to explain maybe google image the seats to see if you can understand what I'm trying to explain. She might feel less constrained and be able to see more so might feel happier. But as I said as you've got a seat that can forward Face I'd give that a go first to see if it solves the problem, before spending out on a new expensive seat.

I feel like if you want to reduce your kids’ chances of dying in an accident and make family life a bit saner, you need to start telling your relatives that they need to come to you. Three hours is insane. I wouldn’t want to be in a car that long with a small child even if they were a bundle of cooing joy.

Three hours is not insane. Not fun, but not insane.

It may be past the limits of elderly relatives or relatives with other difficulties. Travelling will allow them to catch up with multiple people at once.

I wouldn't blame OP if she didn't want to do it often, but it's a very normal distance for visiting family and I'm sure she can find a tolerable way to do so.

They do come occasionally but all working full time. I've got 7 nieces spread across the UK from Wales to Manchester to Midlands to Brighton so its just hard work and whenever we want to see anyone we have to travel at least 3 hours and same for them. Our parents do come a couple of times a year but again they all work full time too so can't come that often, also the 'family events' tend to be where are parents' are as they have the big houses and older relatives nearby etc