Car seats - how long did you rear face your child for?

[ShutterHaze]

I know a lot of people say “as long as possible”, but interested to hear what people have done in practice!

16 months.
Widely quoted stats on benefits of rear facing seats originate from a single 2007 study (Henary B, Sherwood CP, Crandall JR, et al. Car safety seats for children: rear facing for best protection) that got retracted in 2017.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5740505/

Mechanical analysis and dummy testing both suggest that rear facing car seats should be safer, however there is not sufficient real life data to confirm this for children older than 1. Modern car seats are already very safe so any incremental benefit of rear facing is not visible in any observable data sets. In other words, any potential incremental risk is very small. If a rear facing arrangement does not for the family (e.g. the child starts protesting and distracting the driver during car rides), there is no benefit of pushing for it.