Rear-Facing Car Seats and Safety — Updated!

The whole car seat thing drives me crazy. I kept my son in the front seat (no air bags) and what he knows is that I will meet his needs. What are the effects of leaving a child to feel “alone” not even able to see anyone else and unable to get their needs met in a car seat?

Their is a huge interest by the lobbyists in writing into law the requirements to have these seats. Who stands to profit? Who really loses?

Here is an unbiased, scientific look at how booster seats are MORE DANGEROUS than seat belts.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steven_levitt_on_child_carseats.html

This is going to be an interesting post to follow, I think.

I had a good deal of freedom growing up, and I am trying to share that with my children. My son is only 2 1/2, so we haven’t faced as many free range issues as other parents. But he picks his own clothes everyday, is able to play in our backyard without me hovering over him, and *wait for it*, he’s still rear facing in his carseat. He is a smaller kid, at 27 lbs, so technically he could still be in some infant seats based on weight.

I plan to raise him with the free range mentality, but he’s much too small to ditch his car seat at this point. So as long has he has to be in a car seat, shouldn’t it be in the safest position? He’s never once complained about his legs being uncomfortable or wanting to face forward.

I’m not trying to be a fear monger by facing him backwards. But he will be in a carseat for a long time and I do want him to be safe in that instance. I don’t think there is anything for him to learn by facing forward.

This really disappoints me, coming from this reality-based site. Car safety is one of the only things that is a legitimate danger to kids in this day and age, and leaving them rear-facing is so simple (they just sit cross-legged, instead of having short legs uncomfortably dangling from the end of the seat – as a short woman I can attest that it is far harder on my knees to have my feet dangling than my legs crossed).

There is just no good reason to be up in arms about NOT switching a kid around. My first rear faced until 2.5 and is now forward facing in a 5 pt harness at 4.5. My 2 year old and 8 month old are rear facing. In the back of a Subaru Outback. Two of them were car screamers until about the age of 1, so I am sure if I had switched them then I would have been all “They just hated rear facing!” No, they hated being strapped in instead of being held. But they deal because we have to drive sometimes. My children are not understimulated because they rearface, they have side windows. My 2 year old loves the expressway and calls out truck colors as we pass them. Can a kid behind an adult headrest really see much out of the front anyway?

I am baffled by the outcry about this – it is not legislation, it is just a recommendation for how to keep kids safer FOR REAL, not as security theater with GPS devices at the mall, in the most dangerous part of their day.

There are so many things to vent about our frustration over the loss of childhood. Car safety is not one of them. A lot of kids aren’t here to say “I rode without a booster and I’m fine.”

I’m going to have to disagree on this one too. My 2 year old is only 25 pounds and 33 inches. Her car seat says right there on it that it can’t be turned forward until 34 inches. She is so comfortable that she falls asleep almost every time we are in the car more than 20 minutes and her legs seem just fine. People are in car accidents all the time. It’s not a rare occurrence that it’s silly to be afraid of. A small child’s spine can’t handle the whiplash that an adults can so they are better off facing backwards as long as possible.

Apparently Swedish children sit backward until age 4, and I haven’t heard that there is a rash of Swedish children unable to function in society. Much as I want to turn BabyNonymous around when she turns 1 in a few weeks, I’m going to wait. Until she’s 2? Maybe, maybe not. I’ll have to see.

Lenore, could you elaborate on how this is a free-range issue? Many times you’ve offered up car accident rates as a rebuttal to concerns about children walking to school, yet when this is brought up as a way to reduce car accidents, you seem to dismiss it out of hand, with no solid reason for that dismissal. The result is that this post seems reactionary rather than logical–and using logic has always seemed to be a big part of your free-range advocacy!

Lenore, I disagree on this one, too. I’ve seen the videos with kid-sized crash test dummies of the impact that front-facing kids get from accidents vs. rear-racing. There’s a big difference, and as another commenter said, car accidents are a REAL risk, not an imagined one.

wow. i am baffled that you see this as a problem. here in sweden, we are recommended to keep kids rear-facing until at least 4 yrs and if possible even longer. pls watch some dummy crash tests and compare between children facing forward and children facing rear of car and then tell me if it seems TOO SAFE?! i was really sad to have to turn my 3 ½-yr old only because he outgrew his kid car seat, because i know that is a lot more unsafe in the event of a car crash. in the us, you spend a whole lot more time in your cars than we do, and you still turn your kids when they are still babies.

i really like your free-range philosophy and i am raising my kids that way, but you seriously lost my respect with this post. it is one thing wrapping your kid in bubble wrap until they turn 21, and another making sure you do your best to make them survive a possible car crash to see them live until 21.

Oh, and anecdotally–yes, I remember my car seat. It was a booster seat that you wouldn’t find in a restaurant today, and it relied on the lap belt. I never had a problem with it (except that it was ugly and looked like a hamburger), but I also know that traffic is worse–and drivers seem to be, too–than it was when I was a child.

In many ways, times haven’t changed as much as the media would have us think. But in other ways, they have. Should I put BabyNonymous in my old car seat just because I rode in it without incident? Or should I consider the possibility that safety standards might have changed for a reason?

I don’t agree with you on this issue either. I also don’t see what the big commotion is. My daughter rear-faced until she turned 3 years old and she will remain in her 5pt for quite some time. (She turns 4 next week.)

If your kid is spending so much time in their car seat that remaining rear-facing would “restrict their daily lives just about completely” I think you have bigger issues to look at.

What concerns me isn’t whether young children face forwards or backwards. If it is safer to keep ’em looking at the seat for a few more months, fine, I’ll do it.

What bothers me is this: booster seats seem to have eliminated carpooling, at least until third or fourth grade. How do you get enough booster seats in the right parent’s car? Instead, we’re all driving – one parent, one child, putting extra cars on the road.

I’m not sure the equation ultimately comes out on the side of safety.

A broken leg is easier to heal than a broken neck. Our first child got turned around early – he enjoyed looking around. The subsequent children stayed in their rear facing for longer, but were all turned by the time they were two. Forcing the issue is stupid and punitive.

Here, kids are supposed to be in boosters till 9 or 145cm tall. I have a notch on my wall and my son is a hand’s span too short at 8.5. But three boosters/car seats in the back is unsafe, imo – one of the kids always needs help buckling when the car seat is in it but without the car seat, is able to buckle their seat.

The law’s even stricter here than just the height/age. All children under 12 MUST have a shoulder and lap belt. No regard to the age of the vehicle either. I’m just waiting for the first stop by the police because the child in the middle is not in a booster and doesn’t have a shoulder belt. What would a judge say if the mother, who can not drive (at the moment – long story) and has to sit in an adult sized seat because she has mobility issues ends up required to sit in the middle seat of the back seat just to satisfy a stupid shoulder belt law for kids?

Yah, an older car, but ffs, no law is just if it is absolute and childrens’ safety are absolutes.

North of 49 – “A broken leg is easier to heal than a broken neck.”

True! But in fact that’s what you’re more likely to get in a rear-facing accident than in a forward-facing accident. In a head-on collision, which is the kind that involves the most force and risk, the body is forced forward. If the child is in a rear-facing seat, the child’s back is forced evenly into the back of the car seat. If the child is forward-facing, the child’s body is forced forward, with only the restraints to catch him or her, and the spine and neck undergo enormous pressure. Here’s a video that demonstrates that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8mFsXNXOLw

I can more-or-less accept the up to two years recommendation (though, goodness, I’m tired of the nasty attitude that goes with– such as the accusations of anyone who questions if it really needs to be the full two years, or notes the fact that many car seats don’t fit in smaller cars– people like me get accused of not loving our children because if we did, we’d never question this recommendation.) We discovered this weekend that our car seat doesn’t quite fit in our little car– no one can ride in the passenger seat if the car seat is in the back. We don’t have the money for a larger car and are considering turning the seat around because that would give us more room… but even thinking that means, according to many, that I don’t care about my child’s safety. That’s the part of about these things that hurts. I was told to my face that by considering turning the car seat around (my son meet’s the seats requirements for being forward facing in height and weight, just not age) I was an abusive mother.

The recommendation that I find really problematic is the booster seats until adult-hood– I mean, 4’9″– guideline. Personally, I think that one is excessive. Is it just about the seat belt fitting properly, then surely there are other, cheaper choices that don’t require an after-market seat (hmm… who lobbied for this recommendation– and as stated above, the culture is that anyone defying a “Recommendation” is a horrible parent). Lastly, I have to ask– if these things are so necessary, why aren’t they built into the cars in the first place?

I’m glad to see someone else annoyed by this. I don’t have a problem with rear-facing, if it works for you, but it REALLY didn’t work for my child or my car. Saying a kid must be rear-facing well into toddlerdom (as many do) is pretty much requiring that all parents own SUVs or minivans. It’s economically and environmentally unsound. My carseat only fits rearfacing in the center position which means, according to some, in order ot have 2 kids I should be legally required to purchase a larger car. Or at least be publicly scolded.

Additionally, my child screamed incessantly in the car starting about 7 or 8 months. I held off on turning her around for awhile longer, but I honestly believe it is morally wrong to let your child scream alone until they pass out (imagine how I feel about the Ferber method). So we turned her around before she was 1, and car rides immediately improved.

I have her in a highly rated 5 point harness now, forward facing, and she’s quite safe. Yes, rearfacing is a bit safer, but forward facing in a good seat is still very safe. People behave as if you either have them rearfacing until they’re reading and potty trained or you’re letting them run around unrestrained and don’t care one bit about their safety. It’s so black and white and just stupid.

Lastly, why is the onus to keep people safe on the consumer, and not the manufacturer. The AAP wants kids in some sort of aftermarket carseat until they’re adult sized (age 12) and even that’s not enough. My body size is the mean (5’3″, size 14) of the American adult woman, and often I don’t fit properly in cars. Does that mean i need a booster? No, it means that car designers should engineer seats in such a way to fit a wider range of bodies, instead of just the 5’10 male.

But then Britax, Graco, etc. would lose a lot of money. Can’t have that, can we?

I agree with those who disagree. I vehemently disagree with you on this one. Sweden has practically eliminated car accident deaths in small children, and they also rearface until 5 regularly.

The leg issue is a non issue. This thread from car-seat.org has pictures to show you how kids fit: http://www.car-seat.org/showthread.php?t=44012

A lot of kids find it more comfortable to sit rear facing, they are bendy. We’re projecting our issues when we think it looks uncomfortable. Rather, a lot of kids think it’s more uncomfy to sit forward facing with their legs dangling down not resting on anything. It also helps them keep toys within reach instead of lost to the floorboard.

There has never been a documented case of a child having their legs broken by rearfacing. And if there was an accident bad enough to break their legs, then that is the better alternative.

I strive to not overreact and fear monger about risks that are blown out of proportion, but car accident risks are not only real but also easily preventable for our children. Rearfacing doesn’t hurt anything, and it saves lives.

So, while my kid will be playing in the backyard by herself, walking next door on her own, playing in one part of a store while I’m in another, and safely talking to strangers- she’ll also be rear facing until she outgrows the limits of her seat.

I’m in the disagree camp as well…riding in a car doesn’t have anything to do with child independence. I’m wondering why you chose this to post about?

My kids were all able to buckle themselves in and out by the time they were 3 and yeah, they were all rearfacing at that point. They are all very much thinkers and I freerange them like crazy in most things. Freeranging in my mind is all about looking at actual information about actual danger. Kidnapped by a stranger= 1 in 37400 (or .00004 of children are abducted and ~40% of those children are killed acording to the missing and exploted children web page) but chance of a child being killed in a car accident is around 1 in 109 (or about 1.9% of children are killed in car wrecks). This also depends on your region, some are higher some are lower.

Those are odds I try beat for my children…

Gotta disagree on this one, too… There is just way too much evidence – not anecdotal worries – supporting the fact that kids are far safer when properly restrained in a car than when not. And, yes, on the completely non-Free Range end of the spectrum, they’re potentially “safer” by not climbing playground equipment, never crossing the street alone, etc… But, as we Free Rangers agree, in those cases, the skills and confidence gained far outweigh the “dangers.”

With carseats and car restraints, however? The very real risks – as in, this is happening dozens of times a day, versus the “risk” of, say, a pedophile nabbing a kid off the street – include severe injury and death. So many kids’ bodies just aren’t big enough to bear the brunt of a car crash – the seat belts don’t fall in the right place, their backs aren’t tall enough, their muscles (in toddlers) aren’t strong enough to support their necks. On the other hand, there isn’t so much confidence or a rash of life skills gained by sitting in a grown-up seat with a grown-up buckle.

Our kids (ages 4 and 6) make their own breakfasts, dress themselves, play outside alone, wait for me in the car while I pick up the pizza, etc… You know – they’re Free Range kids. ;o) But they both were turned backward in the car until 18 months (they just fold up their legs!) and still remain in 5 point harness carseats – yes, even the 6 year-old Kindergartener. We simply explain that it’s safer, and she doesn’t fight us on it.

So, for me, this isn’t a Free Range issue at all. I’ll fight tooth and nail for less helicopter parenting, more independence in kids, teaching them to be competent and confident, and showing them that the world ISN’T full of dangerous people. But it is absolutely irrefutable that, unless kids are big enough for “regular” seats and buckles to work properly, they’re not only *safer* in carseats and booster seats… they’re in pretty serious danger if they’re *not* restrained.

So… can’t agree with you on this one. But you can bet my kids will be buckling their own carseat buckles (without mom’s help!), will be responsible for their own belongings while in the car, and that when they get out of the car, they’ll be running around outside… by themselves. And with helmets, if they ride their bikes. 😉

And to those talking about the size of the seat vs car… I drive a Kia Spectra and have the carseat at an infant recline behind the passenger seat. If I tilted it so it is more straight up and down (which you can safely do after a baby has good head control and doesn’t slump forward when sleeping), it would fit behind my driver’s seat (granted I’m not a tall man or anything).

I get that some babies get carsick when rear facing, or scream until you’re not able to concentrate. At that point it’s up to you, the parent, to decide the risks vs benefits. But to not keep your kid rear facing out of a sense of injustice at being told what to do annoys the heck out of me.

Considering your child will be strapped in in any case, why does being rearward facing be a free range issue? They are in the safer position, can still see out the window, but also learn that they have to deal with not being able to see a parent. These are all good things.

If you want to argue car vs walking, I would agree with you, but I don’t see the benefits of turning a child before they are ready, which compromises safety for no additional benefits.

SERIOUSLY??? Lenore, you have it WRONG this time. REALLY, REALLY WRONG!!! You go on and on about how parents make up these crazy, unrealistic, stupid, never-going-to-happen dangers that they have to protect their kids from, but when you are offered a realistic, easy-to-do solution for the NUMBER ONE KILLER OF KIDS, you say it’s overboard???

UNBE-freaking-LIEVABLE! You need to do your research. You REALLY, REALLY need to do your research. Then repeat after me: Playing outside – safe; being in a car – number one cause of death, and one of the top causes of SERIOUS INJURY!!! EVERY SINGLE STEP of car seat safety is a step down in protection. Why would you, with the wide-reaching voice that you have, try to convince parents to make their children less safe when there ACTUALLY IS A RISK???

Is a child likely to be in a crash? YES (statistically)
Is a child likely to be injured or killed in a crash? YES (again, statistically)
Do rear-facing car seats for kids through at least 2 years, harnessed seats for kids up through 7-8 years and boosters for kids up through 10-12 years significantly lessen that risk? YES!!!

Put your brain back in, Lenore, and stop going on auto-pilot every time a news media prints something with the words child and safety in the same sentence.

Nonsense = live saving measures. Children’s heads are around 25% their total body height. That is a lot of pressure on a still developing skulls, necks and spines. We choose to put them in “faster than a speeding bullet” contraptions and balk at a few extra measures to keep them safe? Have these writers seen the crash test videos comparing FF to RF? I have, it’s shocking. My 18mo is RF and couldn’t be happier sitting indian-style – and he will continue to do so indefinitely.

those of you talking abour car size, you really believe all families in sweden drive suv:s or only have one child? granted, we drive a mpv ourselves, but only because i have a disability and not because of the car seats. most people drive common station wagons in the smaller range (mostly volvo v70, ford escort and such), and two kids is the usual amount. and still we face our kids rear until age of 4-5, PLUS using booster seats until 12 yrs of age.

using arguments like “we didn’t ave any car seats in the 50’s or 70’s and we’re fine” is just stupid on so many levels it’s not even worth answering.

My biggest gripe about rear facing seats is that they are nearly impossible to install correctly. 70% are installed wrong (seatcheck.org). Getting the right angle, no interference from front seats or other rear passengers, and tight enough straps is incredibly difficult.

I think is more interesting that the APP didn’t recommend having parents have seats professionally installed or inspected.

If RF parents are making you feel bad, see if they’ve had their’s inspected. Chances are they haven’t, and aren’t as great of parents as they’d like you to think.

I have to jump on the bandwagon here and say that from a reality-based perspective, keeping kids rear-facing as long as their seat allows them to be is one of the best ways to keep them safe during the most dangerous part of each day.

I have big kids and our car seats required that once they were tall enough to need the shoulder straps in the top slot of the seat, it had to be turned around, so my daughter was turned around at 15 months – but I wasn’t happy about how early we had to do it. My son is currently rear-facing at 9 months, and we have absolutely no plans to turn him around until it is necessitated by his size.

My parents were both EMTs when I was growing up, so I learned the sad-but-true names that first responders on accidents use: for example, motorcycles are “donorcycles” because young men in perfect health die while riding them too fast (and often the families donate their organs).

And rear-facing car seats? They call them “orphan seats”, because in serious, multiple-fatality crashes it’s pretty common to have only the baby – in a rear-facing car seat – survive.

Normally I see you responding in a logical way to the facts, Lenore. I’m disappointed this time. As the saying goes, you can have your own opinions, but you can’t have your own facts.

Eh, I’ve got to disagree with you on this one I think.
I agree with almost everything else you’ve posted on this blog, because it’s always backed up by science, research, and, y’know, truth. Like that people are generally overreacting to the danger of things – strangers are most likely _not_ dangerous, nor are playgrounds, etc. The statistics back you up on all that. It’s ridiculous to protect children from unlikely, rare causes of harm, especially when protecting them can cause harm in and of itself.

But the stats go the other way on this one – cars and car crashes kill people, and especially kill small children. From the age of 1 to 24, motor vehicle accidents are the leading cause of death in the US, and for _all_ ages cars are the leading cause of accidental death. And having babies and toddlers rear-facing in their carseats is not going to cause any harm (is Rowland positing that we turn them around to protect them from _boredom_? I think that may be overreacting a bit, actually. )

Now, the fact that there is a necessity for such large protective devices around children in order to lower the death rate from motor vehicles (but that the rate is still extremely high) might indicate that we shouldn’t be confining children or adults into motor vehicles at all. Surely we can all “look.. around and see.. what the score is” easier while walking. Or biking, or on a train or a bus. We might (gasp!) run across other people (strangers!) while we’re at it. I’ve never found motor vehicles especially useful for free-ranging.

I did like that penultimate paragraph, though. Pity it couldn’t have been attached to a better issue.

For those of you who are saying that your seat doesn’t fit in your car rear-facing, that is why you should either a) do your homework before you buy a carseat– there are lots of resources out there that talk about specific models of cars and what seats fit best in them or b) test drive seats. To me, that is an excuse, not a legitimate reason to turn your kids around to forward facing when it’s clearly proven that rear-facing is so much safer.

this one is CGI, but it’s illuminating:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sssIsceKd6U

this is one place where I will follow the recommendations. And I plan on being as free range as they come (when he’s older than 14 months, obviously)

@Aimee–
Actually I DID do research and thought that I had found the answer. It was a compromise between cost and size and there were quite a few responses that said that the car seat we picked WOULD fit in a “small car.” Imagine how disappointed I was to find that didn’t fit in our car after purchasing it.

And there’s that little dig about how I’m making the wrong choice to even consider turning my child around. It’s a recommendation– at the end of the day, it’s up to me, as a parent, to make the risk-benefit decision. I will have to live with the consequences, which apparently includes scorn from other parents…

I too completely disagree with you here. In one of the largest areas of real risk (not crazy perceived risk) safety should be followed!

I would like to see some numbers illustrating the types of crashes children tend to be in. Parents are not your average drivers, we are far more careful, do not drive at night with our kids in the car, and are thus ( I would guess) at a far lower risk of a head on collision.

I am free range through and through. My 4-year-olds make other parents cringe because they climb and dangle from bars and jump and test their envelopes; in the process, they have bitten tongues and lips and have earned a few battle scars. But, they are still rear-facing in my car (Daddy’s car is too small to accommodate non-infant rear-facing seats). They actually find it MORE comfortable because they have someplace to put their legs, instead of having them dangle uncomfortably in the air (they rest them on top of the back seats). They see out the back window and chatter constantly about everything that’s going on outside in the world…it just so happens that their viewpoint is the same as that which I get from my rear-view mirror! They know both ways of riding, so it’s not like they don’t know what they’re missing out on! Our seats rear-face until 40 lbs, and they’ll be rear-facing until that point (we have about another 7 lbs. to go).

Just before I turned one, my mother drove from Texas to upstate NY with me in a CARDBOARD BOX. It’s what was done back then. Indeed, if these cars-eat rules had been in place in my day, I’d have needed to take my driving test in a booster! (As it was, I sat upon a couple of phone books.) But my mom was in law enforcement and in law enforcement circles, the rear-facing seats are known as the “orphan seats” because, in the event of a bad crash, they are sometimes they only ones who survive.

Free range is great, but not in the car!

I have very mixed feelings about this. My first reaction to the new recommendations was intense irritation mixed with gratitude that my own kids are too old to be affected by it. I have a family member who, by her own admission, is a “sanctimommy” on the carseat issue — she won’t even take her kids’ carseats out of her car because they’ve been professionally installed — and she’s been all over it and kind of driving me crazy. On a day-to-day basis, car accidents are pretty rare. And these “recommendations” do have a tendency to morph into laws that don’t allow for individual needs.

On the other hand, these carseats do seem to be used in other countries without any major issues, so I have to admit that it’s possible that the benefit (fewer toddler deaths in car accidents) exceeds the cost.

Bottom line is, I’m really glad that I don’t have to deal with this issue!

When I first heard this, my first thought was about what this blog had said about the economics of banning the drop side cribs and how those were the cheapest cribs, meaning that now all parents were obliged to spend more on cribs. Again, the carseats that allow children to sit rear-facing for longer are the most expensive ones. Obviously, this is different – a lot more kids die in car accidents than in accidents caused by those cribs, but I still pause and wonder about who is benefiting here. The difference in prices for those seats can be more than 100% – sure, it’s easy to say that safety should be bought at any cost, but tell that to someone who’s completely broke. How difficult it can be to scrape together twice as much for a carseat.

And I must say that the idea that kids sit rear-facing until they’re 4 yo in Sweden astounds me. I can’t figure out how one would make that comfortable for the child without completely re-engineering the whole idea of carseat and car. I’m not doubting it, I just can’t picture it – even the really expensive ones here don’t seem to allow for that as far as I know.

The day we turned the kids’ carseats around at long last was one of the happiest days of my early parenting life. They stopped screaming. Finally. FINALLY we could go more than a block away in the car without all enduring psychological torture. I see what people are saying about the safety, and I’m not arguing exactly. All I know is turning my kids’ carseats around helped me be a better driver because I wasn’t in tears the whole time so I’m really glad this recommendation didn’t exist when they were small – because it’s likely I would have followed it. It’s safer, I get it… I just am so glad to not have to do it because my kids are older.

Another reader disappointed in the FRK attitude to this topic.

I honestly don’t see the issue. Children legally must be in a child restraint until a long way past 2 years old. Why is it such a big deal to mandate that it be rear-facing, which, let’s face it, IS safer than forward-facing?

You in the USA are incredibly lucky that most of your regular, affordable child restraints allow rear-facing to 35lb+. Leg length is NOT an issue, kids are happy to cross their legs, or hang them over the sides.

Here in Australia, our seats are much more restrictive, and most children outgrow their rear-facing seats very quickly. On top of that, the legislation here allows for forward-facing at six months (don’t get me started on that one).

Perhaps FRK would like to see Australia’s previous laws (only updated in 2010) adopted – children only legally required to be in a restraint until 12 months old, and after that a seatbelt is fine? After all, we as parents should have the choice, right???

I am so glad you picked up on this and posted. I am sure there are hoards of people defending the need to strap our children down in the name of safety. I am not one of them.
Each of my daughters has nearly died BECAUSE of being strapped into the car seats in the back seat of the car where I couldn’t reach them. In the 7 years that I have had kids I have only been grateful for car seats one time. And the truth is even that time a seatbelt would have worked out just fine.
We need to stop child and idiot proofing the world. In the end it just makes children and idiots of us all.

Quoting Rhiannon: “Honestly? I’m so appalled by this that it’s making me hard to take you seriously in general.”

Disappointed doesn’t even BEGIN to describe the way I feel about this post. I won’t repeat what nearly every other commenter has said, because they said it well, but this is WAYYYYYY off the mark and really, truly discredits everything else you teach/promote!

“Personally, I don’t get how that even works. Do we cut off their legs?” <–Seriously? Don't you ever sit "criss-cross applesauce" with your legs bent? Even a 2 second google search would answer this question for you. There are entire websites dedicated to extended rear facing (ERF) with photographs of children of ALL sizes and ages rear facing with NO problems with their legs. They bend/fold them. It's simply NOT an issue. Worst case scenario, they break a leg … that's NOTHING compared to a severed spinal cord.

So, so disappointed. Ugh. 🙁 Your site is great, your views are challenging … but this is uneducated and irresponsible.

The cars and seats in other countries where they are rear facing to 4 are designed differently.

Another fan objecting to this post. I thought free range was about recognizing real risks and not overhyping fake ones? Car accidents are really dangerous, and what kind of freedom is a toddler giving up by facing the rear? The freedom to be a back seat driver? I reall don’t follow.

My son is over 14 mo and tall AND I have a small car and yet he rides comfortably rear facing. No need for leg amputation at all. Sorry Lenore, you’re looking a little reactionary on this one.

I have to disagree with this too. My daughter is 1.5 years old and still rearfacing comfortably. We have a Honda Fit and a Britax Marathon seat installed behind the passenger seat because my husband is 6’1″ and can’t drive when it is installed rearfacing behind the driver’s seat. However, he can still fit comfortably into the passenger seat and has for many a roadtrip so I’m really not buying the “my car is too small” argument. (My FIL has also fit into the front passenger seat and he’s 6’3″ and 250lbs, he might not have been comfortable, but he fit for a 4 hour drive and yes, my seat has been checked by a carseat tech.)

As for the argument that keeping a child rearfacing is somehow keeping them from having as much freedom as they should I just don’t get it. They are strapped in one place anytime they are in the car anyway, why does it matter which way they are facing. My daughter can easily see out the back of the car as well as the side window. She can also see forward with the use of a mirror which makes it easy for her to see that we are still there if need be. How is this worse than the choice between looking out the window or looking at the back of my seat? I can still talk to her and she can still talk to me. The car is small so hearing isn’t a problem and it’s not like we would be making eye contact anyway if I’m in the front seat and she’s in the back. As for nursing in the car, I find this really easy to do with everyone buckled in when my daughter is rearfacing. I just sit in the seat next to her and lean over, no problem.

From this you might think I am a helicopter parent, but I’m really not. My daughter has free run of about 70% of the house and when we go to the park I sit on a bench and talk to my friends while she plays with hers (remember she’s 1.5, she’s not old enough to find the place on her own or to have the impulse control not to run into the street without a reminder yet). She can even buckle the top buckle on her carseat, brush her teeth, comb her hair and is beginning to be able to put on her own shoes. She walks out to the car herself and will even climb into her carseat about half the time. She had no problems if I am cooking dinner while she’s playing, though she will sometimes wander over to watch or beg for snacks if I’m making something she likes. She even plays with dogs and cats that she hasn’t met before once I double check that they understand kids and are used to them (this is as much for the animal’s sake as my daughter’s). She is really independent, but that doesn’t mean that she is somehow in less danger than other kids in the car so why not keep her rearfacing until we have to switch her for some real reason?

Everyone here screaming that Lenore has it wrong needs to think about the difference between recommendation and regulation (law). Recommendations are flexible and regulations are not. They also stifle inovation and can be more dangerous when they get it wrong. Remember how many children were killed by airbags when the law forced everyone to keep kids in rear-facing carseats in the front seat? That was regulation.

Nobody is saying that you can’t keep their kids rear-facing longer than necessary. However, for some, it is impractical. Regulations don’t care if mommy has a bad back, your baby is growing like a linebacker or it’s hard for grandma to hoist a 23 month old into a rear facing seat in the back of her Toyota Yaris. These are real-life situations where parents need to weigh the risks.

My kids couldn’t fit in a rear-facing seat much longer than the minimum. They were thrilled to be able to climb up to their front-facing seats and it’s much easier to install/un-install/re-install properly.

If you’re still convinced that safety is paramount to all other concerns, then ask yourself why we don’t all need 4 point harnesses, roll-cages and crash helmets to get our groceries. Why not, so the ladies can keep their hair looking nice? How many lives would they save? Probably many – if only because the helmet would make it harder to use your blue tooth device to make dinner plans on your way back from soccer practice.

So, maybe you think it is safer and it works for you. That’s fine, but be careful about advocating for regulations. THAT is the key FR issue IMO.

@Theresa:
“We have a Honda Fit and a Britax Marathon seat installed behind the passenger seat because my husband is 6’1″ and can’t drive when it is installed rearfacing behind the driver’s seat. However, he can still fit comfortably into the passenger seat and has for many a roadtrip so I’m really not buying the “my car is too small” argument. ”
You just proved your car is too small to fit the seat behind you’re husband. What if you had two kids and he has to drive them somewhere?

I turned my kids around the MOMENT they were big enough. Why? Because it was a screamfest in the car from day one. I walked everywhere I possibly could, regardless of weather, just to avoid getting in the car and listen to that noise (twin boys). Combine sleep deprivation with the stress and distraction of two screaming kids, and that is one awesome recipe for a wreck. The moment I turned those seats around, the screaming stopped. Bliss. I still avoided driving whenever and wherever possible (I really do like to walk), but I felt much safer when I was in the car. And not for nothing, if I had left the boys rear-facing until 2, their knees would have been up by their freaking ears. They are flexible kids, but who in their right mind would think kids would find that remotely comfortable?

Personally, I don’t get how that even works. Do we cut off their legs?

Legs have this nifty new feature called knees. They bend!

Maybe I read the blog wrong, but it seemed Lenore was commenting more on the super-safety thoughts and less on the specifics of car seats, so I don’t know what the hype is.

My concern is not so much car seats (which I like) but on how they are used. The best seat is useless if not installed properly. And technically 8-year-olds are supposed to be in them, yet I never see that.

thinkbannedthoughts: Anecdotes are not data. You are using an extreme logical fallacy to defend your stance.

I’m with Shannon and others, “Disappointed doesn’t even BEGIN to describe the way I feel about this post.” That said, most of the comments are heartening.

Those asking about carpooling with kids (or planning travel, or who regularly combine car and public transport) might be interested in this contraption I recently found online: Safe Rider Travel Vest. Search on Amazon, google, etc., it’ll pop right up. As far as I can tell, for kids 3+ and at least 30 lbs and 34″ tall, it meets US safety standards and is basically stash-in-a-purse-until-needed/safe-with-nothing-more-than-a-seatbelt (shoulder belt or latch system). I haven’t used it so can’t recommend it but am planning to buy one for a trip I’ll be taking soon with my preschooler; once it arrives, I can report back. But except in exceptional cases (e.g. trips) yes, I do plan to keep my preschooler in a 5-point harness in a seat that’s had expert (fire department, where I live) attention to its proper installation, thank you very much.

Those asking if, as small adults, they would be safer with booster seats — the answer is yes. Your decision, of course, whether you want that safety.

The problem is, “anything that can further protect them in cars is a good thing”. There are probably a dozen more devices that could protect our kids in cars. This will become yet one more law we must obey, to the detriment of our freedom. Nobody wants their children hurt or killed in a car. I think Lenore brought this up not as a rail against car seats, but against a government that is taking away more and more of our rights to parent how we decide to. It may not be a law yet, but give it time!

They are flexible kids, but who in their right mind would think kids would find that remotely comfortable?

Somebody who has spent a dinner at my house, where we’re constantly telling the girls to sit properly and stop contorting themselves at the table.

Parents are not your average drivers, we are far more careful, do not drive at night with our kids in the car, and are thus (I would guess) at a far lower risk of a head on collision.

You don’t drive at night with your kids in the car? No parent does? No parent EVER picks up the kids from the babysitter at night, or lives where it gets dark early in winter, or decides to make their trip to Grandma’s starting at 8pm so the kids sleep through it?

Around here, I constantly am seeing small children on the SI Ferry at 8, 9, 10, 11 at night. These children are getting off the boat and going right on the bus… or in a car. I think it’s a little late, but if you work late in the city, what can you do? You take the kid home when you go home.

ALL parents are careful drivers, ALL the time? None of them are ever a little distracted by squabbling children? Alcoholics never become parents, and there’s never any risk of them driving drunk with kids? (Sad to say, that one’s not true at all.)

And even if that were all true, the other drivers are still the “average driver”. Car crashes are still the leading cause of death for children under the age of 15 – that is, children who are NOT learning how to drive yet. (It’s also the leading cause of death for children older than 15, and for all Americans, actually.)

Your kid CAN see plenty from a rear-facing view (heck, when I was a kid, back in the bad old days, I used to sit backwards on the bus, and in the few times I rode in a car, JUST to look out the rear-view mirror!) And if everybody in your area is putting their short, skinny children in booster seats at the age of nine (much less if it is the law!) your children probably are NOT significantly embarrassed by it because they see it as normal.

This isn’t really a free-range issue. However you sit in a car, there just isn’t that much scope for movement or decision-making on the part of the passengers.

I actually don’t have an issue with the rear-facing until 2 recommendation. I remember reading somewhere that, in the vast majority of cases, everyone would be safter if we were rear-facing (nevermind the logistics of the driver being rear-facing, though that could be fixed with technology now).

What I do have an issue with is the booster seat thing that goes along with this new carseat recommendation. It recommends 4’9″. I know a number of adults that don’t meet that height recommendation. My local radio station talked about this one morning and one of the hosts mentioned about how she’s had friends that were too small/light to trigger the passenger side air bag.

I also have an issue with the fact that cars are designed such that we need these recommendations. If safety recommendations are getting to the point that it’s affecting a good amount of the adult population, and even a good chunk of the population that, in some states, can get a driver’s license, then it’s not the recommendations that need changed, but the design of the cars.

We gladly switched our 2 year old to front-facing even before he was 1 year old (9 months or so). It was a tight squeeze otherwise, he was comforted being able to see us, and–frankly–it was more convenient for us.

NO WAY we would’ve strapped in a rear-facing seat the past year REGARDLESS of what the law says. At least we weren’t lap-riding them. Stay out of our car & our parenting. We’re the ones doing all of the work, “how we roll” is OUR business.

LRH
Android Froyo on Samsung Captivate

I have just read the Update part of the original blog entry.

I think the reason I had such an issue with this post originally is BECAUSE of the blurb at the left of the home page saying that FRK believes in car seats and bike helmets! I didn’t think it was such a huge leap to believe in using a car seat that installed the opposite way to a “regular” car seat!!!

Anyway, I was glad to read the update. I absolutely agree that there comes a point where we have to draw a line at ridiculous measures to make what is very, very safe even safer. I just don’t think of r/f as such a ridiculous measure!

@Lenore – Appreciate the update. Would appreciate a full retraction even more. 🙂

@SKL – “If car seats and boosters were going to solve all thes problems, why are “car accidents” STILL the #1 cause of kid death after all these years of strict regulations??”

Because there are more cars on the roads than ever before, going at higher speeds than ever before (and the stats are coming down…a little). And because somewhere between 95-99% of the child restraints that are being used are being used incorrectly.

“So when they say most accidents are front-end accidents, are they including the rear-ender accidents? Now then, what is the true ratio of front-end impact vs. rear-end impact?”

Still the same. Put it this way – in nearly ALL 2-car crashes, at least 1 car is going to be involved in a “frontal” collision. That’s 50% right there. Then you add in all the head-to-head collisions, and all the “vehicle into tree” “vehicle into light-pole” and “vehicle into other non-vehicle object” crashes and that’s why only 4% are rear-end crashes. Plus a bunch of other statistical data that show rear-end to be the most “benign” type of crash.

“But aren’t the knees projectiles, just waiting to be flung into the rear-facing child’s face in the event of a severe front-end impact? And if so, isn’t the real danger that the child could break his facial bones and seriously damage his skull or brain?”

Again, just take a look at the stats (or the videos that are posted above). The way a rear-facing seat performs in a crash is much different than what you’re picturing. And the stats don’t lie. A child’s face, skull, brains AND LEGS are all at more risk when they’re turned forward-facing.

The problem here is that they’re not “facts” . They’re FACTS. No grey. Black. White. Fact.

For those who wonder why the boosters until 4’9″, here’s the deal. A lap belt is safest if it fits across the passenger’s hip bones. If it lies above that, then there’s nothing that can keep the belt from digging into the soft flesh (and underlying organs) in the abdomen, and doing real damage. So a booster might *seem* more dangerous than the lap/shoulder belt alone, b/c it’s not tethered the way an infant or toddler seat is, but it really is safer.

My kid just turned 8, and the law in WI is 80 lbs OR 4’9″ OR 8 yrs old, whichever comes first. We’ve hit on a compromise that if she’s in a friend’s car, she shd use the booster if they’re also using one, but she doesn’t have to if they also don’t. In our car, she uses the booster. She finds it more comfortable, anyway…

you have to wonder about the whole rear-facing thing – it all depends on the type of accident. The recommendations are based on a front end collision, but a safety fixated parent is more likely to be rear-ended than run into something. In that case, the rear facing seat would act like a front facing one. The first thing one learns in Physics is that all motion and acceleration are relative to one’s frame of reference.

At my daughter’s12 month dr.’s appointment, the doc told us to turn her to forward facing because her feet were hitting the back of the seat. I was prepared to keep her rear facing as long as possible, but it seemed like we had reached that point b/c of her legs. Her 18 month appointment was 2 days after this recommendation came out & now the doc says she should be rear-facing (though she said it would be impossible to turn her back around now). It’s difficult to get wholly different advice from the pediatrician 6 months later. To further complicate matters, my daughter’s height & weight is comparable to a typical 2 year old… so does that mean forward-facing isn’t so bad? The one year recommendation included a weight & the child had to meet both. There was no weight recommendation with this statement.

I was aware of the tougher car seat standards in Europe because my daughter was born while we were living there. I am also aware that the european car seats are different than american ones. We wanted to buy one, but knowing we were coming back to the states & it wouldn’t have the NTSB approval meant we had to buy american. Toddler car seats, and possibly the car seats themselves, will need a redesign to make this recommendation fully implementable.

We drive a Volvo, a swedish vehicle, and the convertible seat we got fit fine behind the passenger’s seat… maybe that’s because they keep their kids facing backwards until 4? I don’t know that I could keep her facing backwards that long. Europeans do not spend as much time in the car as we do, so it may be easier for them to eschew any concerns about comfort or family interaction.

I’m glad you brought this up Lenore, I have been torn about it since first reading the recommendation. I see a strong link to free range parenting because part of it is about making children part of the adult community so that they learn how to be an adult before reaching adulthood. What kind of rights and responsibilities we give them and at what age is always part of the equation. To make the connection more clear here’s an anecdote: some of the best discussions I ever had on religion, philosophy, science etc… happened while I rode in the backseat of our family wagon on vacation. Holding those conversations would have been much more difficult if I had been facing backward. It would have been even harder to see the alluvial fan or big horn sheep my parents were pointing out (seeing where they were pointing, not the object necessarily). I wasn’t having philosophical discussions at 4 years old, but my parents were pointing things out to me for sure.

Our next child will stay rear facing until 2, but until 4…. we’ll have to see…

My friend was in a car seat this week. She’s a trained CPST (person who volunteers her time to help people install car seats). She does it because she likes helping people keep their kids safe- no other reason.

The car crash was potentially fatal, the van hit a concrete barrier and rolled, but due to the fact everyone was buckled in properly, and she by luck was in the back seat, everyone survived with relatively minor injuries (bruised lung, broken legs, etc). In a normal situation, where the car seat is usually misused and the child is graduated through the safety stages prematurely, I don’t think a family would have been as lucky. Her youngest, 2, was in a rear facing car seat. She came out of the accident without a scratch. I know an ER physician who said that some paramedics call them the “orphan seats”, because often the rear facing child is the only survivor. We would all be safer if we could face the back, and the thing is these little ones can, often with little inconvenience (they need to be in the seat anyway)

I tend to see safety as a scale. You want to balance being reasonably safe with being able to live your life. So helmets are in, not riding bikes because of the dangers are out. Freaking out about stranger danger is out, looking both ways before you cross a four lane highway is in. Similarly with car seats best practice is in, not traveling is out. I’m sure others above me have discussed this already, but in Sweden, Norway, and several other countries they have managed to keep their kids rear facing to 4-6 years old for many years now. And aren’t these the places they leave their infants outside in a pram? Places where kids are often still allowed to venture off on their own?

Personally, I want car seats that are as easy to use as it is to screw in a light bulb. I want rear facing car seats that are as comfortable, or more comfortable, than forward facing car seats. I want boosters that you can fit into a backpack for soccer practice, or better yet boosters that are already built into the seats. And we CAN do it. The technology is there, there are places it is used and it has been used before. It just takes some political and social will.

Uly Maybe Lenore’s post “opens herself up to remarks” or whatever, but I still found them to be quite snotty and nasty. It is THEIR RIGHT to do so, I suppose, but that doesn’t mean I agree with it, and just because I havent’ made that observation about every single forum on the entire World Wide Web doesn’t equate to hypocrisy.

Moreover, this: it may be true that the AAP is not a government body, fine, they have no authority, BUT, it sure seems to me and a lot of others that almost anytime some think-thank, advocacy group, media story, any number of things–makes a recommendation like this, and it becomes “highly recommended” for parents to start doing things this way, and when some of them don’t, then next thing you know, a law is passed REQUIRING it, and the law should’ve never been passed to start with. Maybe not every single recommendation leads to this, but in my observation, many of them do, and none of them (almost, anyway) should have.

My main point is this–the AAP can make this point all they want, fine by me–but the minute people start wagging their fingers in your face lecturing you for not doing it the “recommended” way, and especially once it becomes the law, then I advocate against that strongly.

They’re MY kids, not everyone else’s, and I advocate just about anything that protects that and keeps the busy-bodies away.

LRH

Just to clarify.

People keep tossing out the phrase “leading cause of death” in reference to motor vehicle accidents.

1. All the statistics I have seen refer to ‘Unintentional accidents” as the so-called leading cause of death in children. None mention motor-vehicle accidents as being the sole type of accident, but it is a leading type of accident.

2. The term ‘motor vehicle accident’ in these studies and tables does not differentiate from accidents where a child inside the car and where they were a pedestrian struck by a vehicle.

This is an important topic. Safety for our children is paramount, but useless fear-induced rhetoric is not.

Jennifer, your responses to my comments on the “facts” are completely unconvincing. All but one of the accidents I know of (and I’m 44 years old with a good memory) have been rear-enders. By your logic, that is only 8% of crashes (4% for the guy behind and 4% for the guy in front – illogical math in itself). So then you want me to believe that about 90% of all accidents are “other” front-end crashes such as head-on collisions (which are possible only in the rare situation where someone is zipping along on the wrong side of the street); people hitting trees and lamp posts; etc. OK. One, I’m not buying it. Two, even if I did buy it, I am not moved by it, because I don’t drink and drive, hence my chances of speeding down the wrong side of the road or violently assaulting a lamppost with my car are pretty much zero.

By the way, that one accident I know of that was not a rear-ender: four adults were in the car. Only one survived. She had been taught by her dad to never wear a seatbelt, but if she saw a crash about to happen, to get down on the floor in fetal position, which she did. She was 8.5mos pregnant and did lose her baby, and was hurt badly, but now is just fine. If she’d had on a seatbelt she would have been dead. Now, I still wear my seatbelt every time, but I do get tired of hearing people talk as if seatbelts turn super-high risk into zero risk. No, there are always pros and cons. Seatbelt/carseat enthusiasts would gain more credibility by admitting that.

And as for the knee argument – surely you know that older kids have relatively longer legs, and also that rear-facing seats are more reclined than front-facing seats. An older RF child’s knees could easily slam into their face in a head-on crash. I actually broke my nose as a kid during a tussle with my brother, in which my knee slammed into my nose.

@Theresa: http://cdc.gov/Motorvehiclesafety/index.html

http://cdc.gov/MotorVehicleSafety/Child_Passenger_Safety/CPS-Factsheet.html (first sentence says “Motor vehicle injuries are the leading cause of death among children in the United States.” Recommendations for preventing said death are listed as follows on same page:

Rear-facing car seats. Infants should stay in rear-facing car seats as long as possible. Ideally, until the infant reaches the upper weight and height limit for that particular seat. At minimum, until they are at least 1 year old and weigh at least 20 pounds.

Front-facing car seats. When infants move into front-facing car seats, they should remain in those seats until they are at least 4 years old and weigh 40 pounds. However, it is safest to stay in a front-facing car seat until the height and weight limit of the seat is reached or the seat no longer fits.

Booster seats. Once children outgrow a front-facing car seat, they should use a booster seat until they are big enough for the seat belt to fit right. Children can stop using a booster seat when they can sit with their back against the seat back while their legs bend over the end of the seat. A seat belt fits properly when the lap belt lays across the upper thighs and the shoulder belt fits across the middle of the child’s shoulder and chest. This typically occurs when the child is 4’9″ tall and between 8 and 12 years of age.

Hope that helps. If you get really brave, you can try doing your own WISQARS search, but be warned they get pretty hairy! http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/

SKL Exactly right. There are plenty of people who hear talking about this & that who are vehement about such being the law. Car seats, for whatever reason, are a big one. I am not big on celebrity news per se, but I remember the uproar when Britney Spears once put her children in the carseat the wrong way (I don’t recall the specifics). To hear people arguing, she was practically leaving them outside in the snow naked for an entire weekend.

My response was along the lines of “Britney Spears owes you no explanation for any of it,” the fact that she later had a psychological melt-down was, to me, beside the point.

As I’ve stated before, unless you’re talking about extreme neglect (as in having a meth lab in your house, committing acts of incest or molestation etc), I advocate strongly on behalf of parents pretty much having total 100% authority to parent how THEY feel, end of story. Yes they should be willing to listen to others who are trying to help, especially ones in the family, but there should be no judgmental or holier-than thou type of attitude or tone with such persons. Anyone offering their advice should be doing out out of support for the family as a whole and out of love for the parents just as much as out of love for the children, and because they want to see things turn out well for all concerned–as opposed to doing what they do to be a nagging judgmental busy-body.

No one, I think, is advocating that parents should have absolute total 100% authority, to such an extreme that they could kill their child if they became frustrated (or even seriously hurt the child), or just be out & out neglectful in a seriously irresponsible manner. But when we start nitpicking every little thing and insinuating that such ought to be law, we’ve gone WAY too far with it–and even if the AAP isn’t doing that (or able to, whatever), the response of other persons in power hearing what’s said often-times is that very sort of thing–or, at the very least, pestering you with haughty judgmental-ism. That is where I take offense, and others also–and rightly so.

LRH

@SKL: Be unconvinced all you want. I’m replying with hard data and you keep coming back with anecdotes. “I know someone who” doesn’t prove anything. STATISTICALLY (as in, when scientists take facts about all the crashes and put them in columns with pretty headers and cute titles) the least likely crash is a rear-end crash. I don’t know how to say it any other way. There are plenty of front-end crashes, which are the most common. There are also lots of side-impact crashes, which are the second-most likely and also happen to be the deadliest (and statistically, rear-facing seats protect better in those crashes too!). The least likely is the rear-end crash, which also happens to be the least-likely to be serious.

Now, does that mean that catastrophic rear-end crashes never happen? NO – in fact “I know” someone who lost her daughter in a horrific, highway speed rear-end crash. (Though for argument’s sake, the cause of death was the design of the particular car seat she was in; a car seat, I might add, you can’t even find because they don’t make them any more…thanks to people who advocated for SAFER car seats that didn’t put huge chunks of hard plastic directly in front of the child’s chest where their head could, and often DID, strike it.)

Point 2: The seat-belt equals zero risk. I never even remotely suggested such a thing. Again, most people “know” someone who “would have died” if they’d be wearing a seat belt. Guess what? STATISTICALLY there are about 3% more people you COULD know but don’t because they were NOT wearing their seat belt. They aren’t here to advocate it, because…well, you get the point. But again, the facts aren’t on your side, and anecdotes don’t save lives.

Not to bore you, but these recommendations came from actual, real-life, everyday, regular people situations. See, there’s a research project between State Farm and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia that’s been going on for over 10 years. In a handful of states, every time someone insured by State Farm is in a crash of ANY kind, a huge list of data is gathered from that crash. Guess what the FACTS showed?
– Rear-facing for kids up to the age of 2 is safer (including the fact that head/brain, neck, face, and LEG injuries are MORE COMMONS in FORWARD-FACING children)
– Forward-facing kids are safest in a harnessed seat that allows the harness to be used up to 65, 70, or even 85 lbs, until the harness is outgrown.
– After outgrowing a harnessed seat, a child needs to use a belt positioning booster seat until they pass the 5 step test http://bit.ly/h68uHF

Finally, about the knees and the face: Go look at the crash tests. Believe it or not, the dummies they use for these things are built to “perform” in a crash the same way a kid’s body does. Forward-facing: Head, legs, arms all flailing forward at tremendous speeds (so tremendous that they have to slow it WAY down so you can even see what happens). Rear-facing: the kid bounces back (along with the seat) and the knees (even when bent straight up at the face) move only a few inches up, if that. So the crash tests show what happens. Real life shows that the injuries you’re concerned about don’t happen.
http://bit.ly/gIjiB1
http://bit.ly/e2oVBv
http://bit.ly/hNFUUG

“I really don’t understand what all the fuss is about. Kids can fold their legs and be quite cozy. If the kid doesn’t know anything but riding backwards, it’s just how life is for them.”

EXACTLY, Ann.

In australia now you have to have your kid in a car seat until five or so, and a booster seat until age seven! And no children on the back of motorcycles until they’re 8 or so, i think. It’s getting to be a bit much.

Having said that, i always thought those nets around trampolines were stupid, until my then-two year old had her first jump on one, and promptly bounced off the net. She would have come right off the side if it wasn’t there. But once she’s older the net comes off. Half the fun of jumping on a trampoline is jumping off it! haha

@Larry
I’m a “car seat nazi” (thanks for that, by the way, comparing those of us who are concerned about the safety of children to the criminals who annihilated millions of people). For over 12 years, I’ve been advocating for the exact same recommendations that came out from the AAP this month. You can check out my extremism at http://www.cpsafety.com It’s very forceful and intrusive into parents’ rights. Oh. Wait.

It’s not. It’s information. It’s there to help. It’s there because once I was just a parent who thought I was doing the best I could and someone was kind enough to show me the facts, the information, and help me understand how I could better protect my child when we’re doing the activity that’s most likely to kill or injure him (driving). It’s also there to answer the questions that people have (such as “where do their legs go”)

Guess what you won’t find there? ANY advocacy whatsoever for “stronger” or “more” car seat laws. Because I don’t think there should be car seat laws. In fact, the only reason I DO think that car seat laws should be changed is because the law is already there, and there are a lot of parents out there that think the law in their state equals what’s safest for their kids. Frankly, I’d be a lot happier if there were no laws regarding seat belts or car seats on any books at all.

So why are the laws there? Because John Taxpayer got tired of people deciding that it was their right to choose whether to wear a seat belt, and parents deciding it was their right to decide whether their kid should sit in a car seat, and then having to foot the bill when Jane Darwin was in a crash and spent the rest of her life on disability because she was too stupid to put her seat belt on. In addition, John taxpayer got tired of paying for funerals for babies that could have been avoided with a correctly used car seat, life-long medical bills for children that could have been healthy and whole with a correctly used car seat, and wheelchairs and diapers for teenagers who could have been happily texting while driving if they’d only been lifted up on a booster that would’ve made the seat belt fit them correctly. So we got seat belt laws, and car seat laws.

Unfortunately, every state of the union has a law that addresses car seats and seat belts. And every state has a large population of people who think that those laws equal what’s safe. (I only have to wear a seat belt in the front seat? Well, then it must be safe to not wear one in the back.) So unless every state is going to repeal their car seat law, yes, I’d prefer they were updated to reflect what is actually safest. Not because I enjoy nosing into parent’s lives and making them do what I want. But because most people equate those laws with what’s safe.

So, what’s your preference? Repeal the laws completely and let your taxes pay for those who “choose” to have total 100% authority to parent how THEY feel? Or amend the laws to reflect what’s safest, and live under a little more intrusion?

SKL: “since there are statistics that show that children who go to church perform better on many important objective scales, including some which have safety implications, should all parents be required to take their children to church?”

There’s this fun little ditty that far too few people understand: “Correlation does not equal causation.”

In your case, just because children who go to church perform better it does not prove that church is the cause of the improved performance. It CORRELATES with it, but does not CAUSE it.

In this case, the activities in question (seat belts, car seats, direction of the car seats, age of the child in the car seat, etc) directly impact the statistics. Children up to age 2 in rear-facing car seats are safer in rear-facing car seats because rear-facing car seats protect better. Whether the kids are riding to church or not. 🙂

@Paige – trust me… I know all about car accidents and the damage they can do without killing the person. I’m lucky I can walk.

When the “booster till 9” came in here, and yes it is a law, a lot of parents were saying “I can’t force my (4, 5, 6, 7, 8) year old back into a booster seat! Unfortunately, our youngest doesn’t really want to use a booster seat. She refuses to “sit proper” and that required the reinstall of her full sized car seat. *sigh*

@SKL I read the blog you are referring to and I thought it was one of the worst things I’d read in a long time. Yes, the example the author used was stupid, unrelated and not even necessary. I thought that then, and I still think it now.

The problem with your “maybe the parents who are more likely to rear-face are also more likely to install the seats correctly, to actually belt the child in at all…” argument is that the study I referenced STILL found a normal (somewhere between 95-99%) misuse rate. What does that tell me? That even an incorrectly used rear-facing seat is going to protect a child better than an incorrectly OR correctly used forward-facing seat.

You said, “I would like to know how many moderate-to-high-speed, head-on crashes have occurred with children (over age 1) in the car during a recent 12-month period. And then I want to know how may billions of dollars we spend to prevent that number of kids from the difference in injury while “properly restrained” versus injury while wearing a plain old lap belt.” Frankly, your question confused me.

I can tell you how many moderate-to-high-speed, head-on crashes (though I’m not sure why the head-on matters?) with children over age 1 have occurred in a semi-recent (because the data never gets released immediately) 12-month period. And I can tell you how many were injured. I can tell you how many were properly and improperly restrained. I could probably tell you how many were in car seats vs. lap belts and injured vs. not injured. But I really don’t know what you mean by “how many billions of dollars we spend to prevent that number of kids from injury” though. Are you asking how much parents spend on car seats? Are you asking me how much is spent between car seats and enforcing state regulations and education campaigns? And then somehow divine what the difference is in cost between properly restrained injuries and lap belt injuries? I’d be happy to get the facts you’re interested in, but I’ll need to you clear up what it is you’re looking for.

I also don’t understand your comment “it makes me wonder why the straight story wasn’t good enough.” Please, show me where the BS is? I’ve not posted a single thing that is not a proven fact. None of the recommendations released are based on “BS”. I really don’t understand your comment at all.

@SKL – how’s this for starters?
According to PCPS (the study I referenced in an earlier post): “Children ages 2 to 6 placed in child restraints were 28 percent less likely to be killed in a crash than children restrained in seat belts alone. (Archives of Pediatric Medicine, June 2006.)”

I have to say that I was pretty surprised by the large-scale outrage that people seem to have launched at the new recommendations for RF until 2 mostly because of this blog.

As I live in Sweden, my kid will be RF until at least 4 in his specially designed car seat.

But the thing I don’t get is here is something parents can REALLY do to help their kids safety. In Sweden in 2009 NO children in a rearfacing car seat died in traffic accidents.

But safety-crazy americans tend to find it ‘outrageous.’

I love your blog because I am a firm believer that there aren’t people camped out, plotting to steal my child. I hope that in our society can continue to make room to allow young children to participate in our society and not that we have to protect them from our society.

But a RF car seat is an effort where we can legitimately protect them from real danger – not abstract ones. And to be honest, since it is the cultural norm here I’ve never seen DS look askance at the idea nor have I questioned it. Where we live the recommendation is for kids up to 4.

I consider it my responsibility to take precautions in traffic for my children until they are old enough to do so themselves – which I think would be when they are a bit older than four.

I am glad you took up the issue though I love FRK

Like so many other laws, those mandating child car seats for kids older than two are unsupported by science.

According to the economists who write Freakonomics, studies of the effectiveness of child seats have compared them not to seat belts, but to no restraint at all. The authors reported that “among children 2 and older, the death rate is no lower for those traveling in any kind of car seat than for those wearing seat belts.” Yet kids are tortured by these monstrosities for years, and parents are compelled to spend billions on this scam.

The Seat-Belt Solution
http://liten.be//8xcU5

Wow, I actually agree with Larry! At what point is safe safe enough? For those of you who keep saying they are only recommendations, look at where we are with car seat laws. We went from “just” a car seat, to “just” a rear-facing, to “just” booster seats until age 8. Where does the “just” end?

The only statistics I could find were these:
5.5 million accidents per year or 15,068 per day. Of those, 61% were single car crashes. This resulted in the deaths of 4 children per day under the age of 14. We don’t know how many of them were in rear-facing seats.

If my kids were still little I don’t know if those statistics would warrant keeping my child backwards for more than a year. Do we know how many kids are killed each year while playing outside?

Our tax and insurance dollars pay for a lot of stupid things, we can’t regulate all of them, and we shouldn’t even try. Maybe we need to stop having the government pay for stuff and make it our personal responsibility again.

Jenifer A quick PS, as I went back & read your post more fully, and would like to clarify a few things.

If it is true what you say, that you are NOT advocating meddling in parenting affairs, that you’re advocating the laws solely because parents tend to use that as their determination of what’s safe, then I can at least respect that you’re not advocating busy-bodyness. So my apologies for my rant in terms of it being directed at you, because apparently it doesn’t apply here–it applies in GENERAL, yes, but apparently not to your advocacy.

That said, however, I will also say–passing a law because other parents are too ignorant to do research & do the right thing (whatever that is) by their own fruition? That’s not my fault. Don’t penalize my freedom because other parents are too lazy to read, research and learn for themselves what the best way is. It’s too bad that some parents are that blind and prone to misapplication of safety or whatever, but that’s not my fault.

My thing is this–when deciding how to parent in whatever manner of speaking, I don’t consider what the law has to say. I read up and do my own research and then I decide what I think is best, and do it that way. If it happens to conflict with what the law says, I do it my own way ANYWAY. Yes, if the police are around or whatever, or I’m in a more “high profile” environment where lots of people can see, I may “fake it to make it,” but the second that’s over–it’s right back to doing it my way.

Call me a scofflaw if you want, I certainly have heard the “you can’t pick and choose” argument many times. But anymore, the law, it seems, doesn’t respect the sovereignty of parental authority anymore, so I’ve pretty much lost all respect for it. (It doesn’t keep me from justifying my leaving the kids in the car briefly based at least partially on the reality that it’s legal here, if that’s inconsistent–fine, I’m inconsistent.)

All I am saying is that parents ought to be able to parent how they please, so long as it doesn’t involve running meth labs, molestation, in-breeding etc. If that means they let their kids (ages 7 and up or so) ride in the back of an open-bed pickup truck on a 55 mph highway, or leave them in the car for short periods without them dying or being seriously discomfortable etc, or have them in the carseat frontwards, backwards, sideways, upside down, whatever–I support them (including myself) having that right in the most absolute form.

LRH

Glad you changed your tune.

BTW I think the whole “We do what works for our family” argument is ridiculous. Humans are notoriously bad at gauging risk, and saying it’s okay because you survived while riding on top of your dad’s car or jumping up and down in the back seat is silly. This is one arena where safety should trump convenience hands down. Mainly because it is actually proven that rear facing is safer. Not because of overblown fears (like with child molesting).

To echo many that came before, car safety trumps nearly all. Even a cursory review of the data shows that until age 25, death by auto crash is a child’s biggest threat.

Seat belts have been and continue to be the best performing occupant protection device ever introduced. Unfortunately we need laws to instruct and require adults on how to protect their children in vehicles because amazingly it is not common sense.

Make your occupants buckle-up before you start the car, put the phone away, and watch out for the less careful.

I’m pretty sure that the risk of a kid developing health problems from a poor diet is higher than his getting seriously injured from sitting in a properly-installed front-facing seat after age 1. But if the state governments started making laws requiring you to feed your kids apples and carrots whether they screamed or puked not, would you all be so supportive of it? I agree it’s “easy” to RF a child to age 2 if she’s happy and comfortable that way. But when the law starts saying you have to do something that you and your child hate, they had better be able to prove it will save a LOT of lives. So far I don’t see enough proof to justify a law.

Just inform the parents objectively, and you might be surprised at how many of them do the smart thing!

I set a goal to keep my kids RF to 2.5 because I heard something about RF years ago and applied my own IQ and logic to it. This was before all the “you don’t care for your child” BS, which I find offensive beyond measure. My blood is boiling, actually.

I personally don’t give a fig how long you keep your kids rear facing.

But I get ever so tired of the “You’re a bad mom if you are not exactly as paranoid as me” syndrome.

When my kids were in car seats, I followed the guidelines at the time, read the directions, installed them properly (both the seats and the kids), and called it done. But there was a mom in a playgroup I was in for whom anything less than a professional installation by some certified authority was tantamount to child abuse. She ended up leaving a store without something she needed once because to fit it in the car she would have had to move her child’s car seat. She was convinced that there was no way an ordinary human like herself could possibly install a car seat correctly, and if it wasn’t exactly correct, her kid was doomed. She bought car seats for both of her cars (large, expensive SUVs, of course, because they are the only cars safe enough for children, don’t you know), and refused to ever remove them, whatever the situation. To me, that’s insane. But she totally bought into the ‘you can only keep your child safe with lots and lots of expensive professional help and safety devices’ mentality. She also hired someone to baby proof her house, read every single parenting magazine she could get her hands on, etc. She was a miserable person – constantly worried, terrified for her children. Her kids picked up on it – you never saw a whinier, clingier, more fearful pair of kids. I am sure her kids were marginally safer in the event of a car crash than my kids. But at what cost?

If I’m over-chiming in, forgive me, I know others have a right to contribute as much as me.

To echo Robin (link–that is exactly right. Too often, what starts out as a “recommendation” ends up becoming law, and often times the entire thing is specious. Give it a little time, and next thing you know, they’ll MANDATE rear-facing seats until you’re 14. Good grief. And yes, just because something costs in ways that include taxes & insurance premiums doesn’t mean it should be everyone’s business. If that’s the way it works, the system shouldn’t be accommodated, but broken–and smashed to bits emphatically.

As Maggie said here, it’s yet another detriment to our freedom to parent as we CHOOSE, and yes-it is a choice, and should be. This is NOT like “choosing” whether or not to leave them outdoors for 5 hours naked in a snowstorm. This is not like “choosing” whether or not they should report Uncle Mark for molesting them. I don’t think anyone, not even me, is arguing that extremes like that should STILL be a parent’s prerogative.

Don’t forget–even as Lenore supposedly reversed her position, she also has clarified that even the “wrong” way, kids in car seats are still very darn safe. We’re not talking a quantum leap here, we’re merely taking a very safe practice & arguably making it safer still.

But, again, at what cost, with regards to the parent’s convenience (which STILL matters, even here), the child being able to see their parents and make facial contact with them (especially the other parent not driving), and for parents who are doing it the “wrong” way to be scorned as if they’re smokers on an airplane–all for a relatively small incremental amount of safety vs a massive quantum leap.

Like I said, in our case, we found it much easier to buckle our boy in front-facing as he grow tall enough that his legs were cramped & he was uncomfortable. At least he was still in a car seat, it’s not like he was back there loose & flopping all over the place. To me, that is “good enough,” especially if it gains you a huge amount of convenience & the safety compromised is rather nil.

I mean, it really doesn’t end. Besides front-facing vs rear-facing etc, there’s also nagging legalisms over what sort of harness. You know what sort of harness I sought out? Whichever one was EASIEST to buckle & unbuckle. When I saw a seat for sale & the person was extolling the virtues of how much safer that design was, but I tried it out & found working with it to be like wrestling a fat pig, I said “no thanks, it’s too hard to deal with.” Often-times the person selling it would say “but it’s safer,” and my reply–“that isn’t all that matters, having to wrestle with that annoying octopus of a car seat everyday–I’d end up not using it at all, I’ll take the one that’s easiest to buckle.”

Yet, you will STILL be on the receiving end of scorn, because you used the one that was easier to buckle. Do you REALLY expect me to believe the one that’s easiest to buckle is really that less safe, and that I’m a horrible parent for caring about convenience? Not to be crass, but those of you going ” yes, of course”–go suck on a lollipop and leave me alone!

Rhianna said here that “not doing what is right because I was told to do it, that attitude annoys the heck out of me” (that’s a paraphrase, not an exact quote)–sorry sweetie, but that’s human nature, and may it ever be so. I know of people who won’t wear a seat belt–as adults–because they get sick & tired of all of those “Click It Or Ticket” campaigns where the government is making it their business to ORDER you to wear a seat belt. Some may say that’s cutting off your nose to spite your face, but my reply–the damn law shouldn’t exist in the first place. It’s not their business to ORDER someone to wear a seat belt–or for someone to HAVE to wear a helmet when riding a motorcycle, any of it. The law has no business meddling in these matters, and people are right to revolt against it.

End of rant–for now.

I personally don’t get why people think it’s so unimaginable to keep a kid rear-facing until toddlerhood. Here are some photos of kids who look perfectly comfortable rear facing: http://www.childrestraints.co.nz/rearfacing.php

My son is 23 months and still rear facing, until he outgrows his seat’s limitations. That will probably not be for awhile, since he’s a small guy. We drive a small Saturn, and the big Britax fits fine in it. If it didn’t, I’m sure we could find another seat that fit. As for him getting bored, we give him a few toys, and we have a mirror that allows us to see him. He used to freak out in the car when he was little, but that was when he was small. He outgrew it.

And for those who say, “I didn’t have a car seat/booster seat, and I turned out fine” were you in a major car accident without said booster and turned out fine? Because that argument makes no sense at all if you weren’t.

Anyway, people give me weird looks all the time on the extended rear facing thing, and there’s all these articles out there about how these new regulations are ridiculous, would NEVER work, they can’t understand it, etc., etc. But in my experience, it is so not a big deal at all.

The other thing that bothers me about “guidelines” and “laws” is that it doesn’t allow for significant individual differences. My 4.5-year-old is about 30 lbs and 38″ tall. Other than her size, she is physically advanced for her age. There is no reason for her to need the same “protection” as a child half her age (or more) just because she is of the same (or lighter) weight.

The guidelines say she should be rear-facing until age 2 OR until she reaches the maximum stats for rear-facing in her seat. That would mean that in many (if not most) convertible seats, she would still need to be rear-facing, while chunkier kids half her age would not; and her younger, larger sister would not be allowed to rear-face (unless I bought a different seat). So the weight limit makes no sense, at least after a certain age.

My concern is that some people will blindly (even sanctimoniously) apply the “guidelines” without considering whether they actually make sense for their individual child; and when the law changes, we’ll all be pressured to follow suit.

Dee, the info you provided is the type of info parents should be given. Not “if you care you’ll do this just because we said so.”

@SKL – pleas point out which responses you’ve read on this thread that qualify as “do this because I said so.”.

“So the weight limit makes no sense, at least after a certain age.”

The only sense the weight limit makes is that the weight limit is the max the seat has been tested to.

These recommendations come from what is kind of a starting perspective of “we are all safer rear-facing” versus the reality that is neither practical or possible with modern car design and our culture. Once a kid is heavier than the max tested weight, there’s no guarantees on how it will behave. Will the bolts or seatbelt hold against the additional weight/odd pressures of the overweight rear-facing seat + the forces of an accident? No company is going to guarantee that past the level they’re required to test to. (In fact, some LATCH systems are not supposed to be used up to the weights some of the newer carseats go up to. Some LATCH bolts are only supposed to be used up to 40lbs, check your car manual.)

But that is why most newer convertibles are going to/being tested to much higher weights.

There are studies out there that even suggest that we would all be “safer” rear-facing in airplanes for many of the same reasons we are safer rear-facing in cars. (Disregarding that airplane travel is already among the absolute safest methods of travel out there and for most of us this is purely an academic question.) Most survivable airplane accidents happen on the runway/ground, while the plane is traveling forward. The physics of the forces involved mean that if they put all the seats rear-facing in a plane, it would increase your chances of survival without major injury. The flight attendant in the rear-facing jumpseat is probably in the safest seat on the plan. But define “safest” in this situation. The reality is that you’re so unlikely to be in any sort of plane accident, that it really doesn’t matter. The chances you’ll be in a car accident are a lot, lot higher.

So read the recommendations as “your child is safest rear-facing, as long as they are within the contraints of the seat requirements and the seat is properly used”. Yes, your younger child would be safer if you got a newer seat with higher limits and rear-faced her again. But that’s your decision to weigh. If your younger child is properly restrained forward-facing, she is much more likely to survive with little injury than if she was not properly restrained forward-facing. If you got into an accident, the realistic difference might be between some injury forward-facing versus no injury rear-facing. And everyone has to make that risk analysis for their own kids/family.

From my perspective: my kid is almost 5 and is still restrained forward-facing in a 5 point harness. The personal reasons I have for this: he is small, light and slender, and as a result, I haven’t seen a booster that will fit him properly into a full size seatbelt. Also, he is a small bundle of relentless energy, and he would probably not sit correctly (without fussing with the belt) even 50% of the time in a lap-shoulder combination. Thus, he is safer in his 5 point harness until he either reaches that mental maturity to sit properly or he outgrows the limits of the seat. If he outgrows the limits of the seat and has not reached the maturity to sit correctly in a booster, well, that will be a bridge we cross should we get to it.

Elizabeth:
“HOW does facing the other direction require more entertainment? ”

Because, in most standard cars, all the child in a rear-facing (and thus more reclined) seat can see is… the back of the automobile seat. They can’t see out the window. As an adult, you don’t have that problem because you are taller.
(Note, however, that the mirrors that hang on the back of the seat and allow you to see the child are also considered unsafe by safety experts. That means that unless you bring along another person to supervise the kid you can’t see and who can’t see anything, it’d better be a really good book or toy he’s got there, and you better hope he doesn’t drop it.)

That doesn’t mean kids shouldn’t ride rear-facing. But it does answer why some rear-facing kids are driver distractions.

@EricS:

“Now this same group is saying that if you really want to be safe, children should be facing the rear up to the age of 12. 12 people. Really?! ”

I think you need to go back and reread. The recommendations are now that children should be rear-facing until 2, in proper restraints (forward-facing 5 point harness, then high back booster, then seat booster) until the ages of 10-12 depending on weight and height (thus fit of the adult seatbelt). And that children should be in the BACK seat of the car until age 13.

Although, that’s partly because the front passenger seat is also the “death” seat. Doesn’t matter who you are or how you’re restrained, you’re at highest risk of being injured in the front passenger seat.

Everyone, of any age or size, is better facing the back. If we valued safety above convention and the view out the front, cars would be manufactured with all seats except the driver’s facing the back.

Obviously, the consensus of our society for adults is that the advantages of looking out the front of the car outweigh the extra danger of facing forwards. The decision about when a child should be allowed to face forward is arbitrary, there is a risk penalty at every age. In effect, through the legislative process we choose a particular average probability of death (or serious injury) which we declare to be “too high”. It is impractical to pass laws which take into account all individual features of a child, so we compromise with a law that gets all children to roughly the same risk with a simple formula (age, height, weight, whatever).

Similar arguments apply to better seat belts. 3-point belts are always better than 2-point (lap belts), 4-point are better than 3-point, and 5-point are better than 4-point. We have decided as a society that the reduced effort required to buckle a 3-point belt is worth the increased risk over a 4-point belt. Similarly, we have decided that the ability to drive without bunching up your dress between your legs is more important than 5-point belts. I have no opinion on whether or not these decision points are reasonable, but certainly the advantages in safety with each step of increasing belt complexity are smaller.

Personally, I would like 4/5-point belts in all seats (leave the 5th unbuckled when you have a dress on). However, it isn’t so important to me that I am willing to pay for a custom installation.

SKL- the APA guidelines are divided into two categories. One is bare minimums, that is the 2 y/o (and formerly the 1 & 20) recommendation. The other is best practice- this is the “to the limits of your convertible seat” recommendation. However, you would be hard pressed to find ANYONE in the CPS community to complain about a 4 & 30 lb child in a forward facing car seat. The consensus is that it is safer for her to be rear facing, but forward facing at 4 years old is more than reasonable.

If you guys want something to get outraged about, let’s talk about seat belts on school buses. School buses are more or less one of the safest modes of transport, without seat belts. Lap belts may actually decrease safety (although they are needed for special needs kids and small children/toddlers, to install safety seats). But this fact does not prevent legislatures from passing laws requiring belts.

In response to Lenore’s update :

Should we require videocameras on all rear bumpers? Yes, IF due to the design of the car’s body, a standard rear view mirror doesn’t provide enough rear visibility.

Should we redesign the hotdog? No. You can cut it up if you find the sausage shape threatening.

Should we get rid of trampolines? No, but perhaps they can be redesigned to be safer. As a klutzy adult who has gotten her leg stuck in the springs, and accidentally launched herself off a trampoline – I think the pads and nets are a good start.

Does it ever make sense not to embrace new safety notions? Yes, but like any new idea or notion, they should be evaluated individually to see if they make sense, as many times there was a valid reason someone came up with it.

However, I don’t think safety standard should be something required by law, if it is a choice that a person can make for themselves, as opposed to something that I can’t control (like lead paint in kids toys – that should be (and is) illegal because there isn’t anything I can do about it). Like helmet laws and seat belt laws. If you want to ride around without those, more power to you. Natural selection, I say. Child seats should be required by law because there are some awful parents out there who wouldn’t bother with them anyways…and a child can’t really make the choice to strap themselves in.

(Add to above: and the risk of injury to the body grows as due to the change in inertia required. There is most risk of injury when we are moving in one direction at some speed and forced to move in another/stopped abruptly, slightly less when stopped and then forced into movement, and less when moving and forced to continue moving in the same direction. Isn’t there some physics calculation out there that represents this?)

Jennifer, perhaps I should have said that they don’t intelligently allow for individual differences. The fact is that a chubby 2-year-old is less safe in a forward-facing seat than a slim 2- OR 3-year-old, all other things remaining equal. Yet the guidelines would keep the slim 2- AND 3-year-olds rear-facing while having the chubby 2-year-old turn around. And the same argument applies to booster seats where weight is a cutoff (as is the case in some states).

As for several of the other comments in reaction to mine – I think it’s right for parents to question recommendations, regardless of who issues them. To the vaccine comment – I don’t believe the aggressive vaccine recommendations are best for our kids. I believe in vaccinating up to a point, decided by the parent for each individual child, at which the parent believes the benefits outweigh the risks. I don’t believe in “back-to-sleep” for the majority of healthy babies, and if I had time for it, I could list plenty of scientific reasons why. I don’t think there is anything wrong with properly-assembled drop-side cribs and I’d rather my kids eat dirt than wash their hands 20 times a day.

As for car seats, as seen above, you partially proved my point on my mule-headedness regarding the 4% rear collision figure and the weight thresholds; and I’ve seen documentation debunking other figures that are stated as “FACTS” in the carseat debate. Still, I believe that for a child whose behavior does not create a safety hazard, RF is usually safer on balance; but beyond 1 or 2, only marginally so (given that the vast majority of kids will never be in a catastrophic accident, thank God). I believe the “cons” outweigh the “pros” at some point for every safety measure, and the parents have a right to decide where that point is, given honest, objective information.

Someone above used the same argument, but from the opposite side of the field. “I’m afraid that if the law stays where it is, people will wrongly believe that the current law reflects maximum safety.” In other words, yes, that some parents will blindly do what someone told them is safe because they are conditioned to just obey the “experts” without question. I say, question everything. Maybe you’ll agree, but you’ll know why you agree.

Isn’t there some physics calculation out there that represents this?

Yep, there is. I don’t remember the exact equation, but basically, the force the external object (in this case, another car, or a tree) has on the viewer is relative to the speed the viewer is going.

Therefore, a car going 30mph hits a stationery tree, the force of the impact is 30mph (the “control” in the experiment); two cars colliding head-on, each going 30mph results in 60mph effective speed (equivalent to the control going 60mph); and two cars colliding while going the same direction, one at 30mph, one at 45mph, is 15mph (equivalent to the control going 15mph).

There’s also forces at play with regard to how fast the stop happens. In the case of the tree or head-on collision, the force is pretty close to instance (assuming a reasonably large tree), which puts a huge amount of force on the people in the car (to the tune of several times the force of gravity), while rear-ending another car (unless the victim car is significantly larger), results in a longer stop time, because the car moves, and therefore less force on the bodies, and crashing into brush or a lightly-packed snow drift results in the least amount of force, because it has the longest stopping time.

The majority of car collisions are REAR IMPACT. 1/3 of all US collisions are rear end collisions, http://www3.ntsb.gov/publictn/2001/SIR0101.htm,
25% in Australia, http://www.rta.nsw.gov.au/licensing/tests/hazardperceptiontest/novicedriversareatrisk/5mostcommoncrashtypes.html.

So if you are the driver that hits the car in front of you, a rear facing seat might be best. BUT, if you are the person in the car that gets hit, well, suddenly the statistics get a lot less easy to find. But take a look at this video from a rear-impact crash test. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xoauIutCmc

Look at the way that dummy and the seat went backward, and imagine if the dummy had been facing the rear.

As someone else mentioned, the parent with kids in the car is more likely to be the one who gets hit.

I’ve only had 2 relatives die in auto accidents, both young kids, under two. One, many years ago, not in a car seat. Two, in a rear facing car seat, in a rear impact accident. Nobody else in the car died, though there were some other non-life threatening injuries.

Letting dramatic videos create policy (and hysterics) is completely counter to rationale thinking.

Jennifer, interesting study that you linked. I note that they were studying injured children in crashes, so the data for kids who were NOT injured in a rear-impact accident is probably not included. Could be the stats show lower rear-impact crashes due to the fact that kids who were FF (i.e., most kids over 1) were less likely to be injured in that kind of accident.

@Dragonwolf

Thank you, a much better and more understandable explanation than I could have possibly ever come up with. 😉 I recall some science teacher during my educational years did one of those “real life” tutorials where you calculated the forces on the body over some gigantic list of car collision possibilities. No matter how you cut it, the greatest force on the body thus greatest risk of injury generally resulted from two cars colliding head-on while both were moving, then a car colliding head-on with a stationary object , then various odd side impact collisions, then rear collisions. But I figured if I tracked down and ran down the math (the way I best think about it), I’d lose everyone here along the way 😉

Oh and also BTW, when I was rear-ended with my kids in the car, I was stopped at a red light (with my foot on the break). So the “physics” analysis would be the same as if someone had hit me head-on while I was stopped. Don’t always assume that the front car is moving when hit. Most likely the driver behind made that assumption too and it was wrong – hence, the accident.

Good point on the RF/Rear end accidents. However, the way a child sits (upright) front-facing versus (At an incline) in a RF. Changes the physics. The head is pushed more toward the shoulders in the RF seat while when sitting upright the head is thrust directly forward from the body, way outside of alignment.

In a head-on collision a larger amount of energy is transferred directly into the seat but it is not a 1:1 change by turning it around.

Now you see why I was so offended by the “only 4%” “FACT”? And yet some of you wrote me off as just stubborn and stupid.

Since most of us sit forward-facing in a car, that is probably a big reason why rear-end crashes cause relatively few injuries. That’s great, but don’t take the resulting statistics and say they mean that all the injuries that did happen prove that FF is patently unsafe!

@SKL – if you read through, several different people have all posted explanations of why and how rear-impact crashes are NOT as severe as frontal crashes. EVEN WITH YOUR FOOT ON THE BRAKE – your vehicle will disperse some of the crash energy by moving forward, away from the point of impact. In a frontal impact (whether into another vehicle or into some object like a tree or telephone pole), all of the crash energy has to be absorbed by the vehicle and the occupants.

On the same token, a rear-facing car seat in a rear impact crash does not perform the exact same way as a forward-facing car seat performs in a frontal crash. If you really need me to spell out the details of crash dynamics to you, let me know and I will. But for now I’ll sum it up to say that a forward-facing child in a frontal collision (remember, the most common) is at higher risk for injury and death (regardless of age) than a rear-facing child in a rear-impact collision (still statistically the rarest type of crash).

Do some research, if you’re so inclined, but don’t keep suggesting that:
A) Rear impact crashes are as severe to occupants (whether rear-facing or forward-facing) as frontal impacts.
B) Rear impact crashes are more common or the most common.

I never saw a single person say you were stubborn or stupid. And for what it’s worth the 4% came from this http://bit.ly/gxoafv and for years it was what we had to go on. I see that the page that was on at crashtest.com has now become safercarguide.com and has an update to their diagram, which can be found on this page: http://bit.ly/h27JkA It shows rear-impact crashes to be 14% of all crashes (if you include off-set rear-impact). And specifies: “Impact Angle Data – Statistics vary greatly from year-to-year and source-to-source, but we’ve averaged the available data to come up with this angle of impact chart. This chart denotes all collisions, not just fatal or injury-producing incidents.”

Am I the only one who read the *update? And seriously why all the arguing? Each parent/Guardian will do what they feel is best. Why argue over it? Personally I feel that if everyone wasn’t in such a hurry to get no where fast , most of these accidents wouldn’t happen anyway. We all need to slow down and smell the coffee for a change and start getting along better with each other.

@EricS: if that was part of another article you read, the writer of the article was either accidentally or intentionally mis-understanding the recommendations. The age of 12 is in the APP recommendations and related studies, but NOT for anything regarding rear-FACING but for sitting the the rear of the car. The highest age recommended age for rear-FACING I’ve seen in any of the studies or discussions is age 4.

A major part of research is also being able to determine the validity of the sources you’re reading.

The recommendation is, and actually has been for many years at this point, that children not sit in the front passenger seat. My parents were being told this when I was a child, and I’m in my 30s. I was told this when the safety officer came to my grammar school. Back then, the simple reason was that the front passenger seat has been shown to be the most hazardous seat in the car–you are most likely to die or be badly injured while sitting there. Now the recommendation is also because the air bags put into place to attempt to rectify the above issue for adults (the front passenger seat being the most hazardous for everyone) have worsened, not improved the situation for children.

So the question becomes: remove air bags and again make the front passenger seat more dangerous for everyone, or leave airbags and tell people that children should sit in the rear?

Oh Emma Blue, is this really the place for common sense and rational though? Now, now…:)

Can’t you turn the passenger airbags on and off in cars nowadays? Seems like that should be standard.

Information about the NHTSA airbag waivers:

http://www.nhtsa.gov/cars/rules/rulings/airbagqa.html

(Something else referred to on that page–apparently even if you get a waiver, it can be difficult to find a mechanic who will disable the airbag even with it. Most of them don’t want the possible liability.)

Oh, and the link for the Volvo study:

http://liten.be//RbUgL

Another example of the callous disregard that governments have for our safety, despite the pious declarations of bureaucrats, is fact that rear-end collisions have increased with the installation of red-light cameras.

Red-Light Cameras Increase Accidents: 5 Studies That Prove It
http://blog.motorists.org/red-light-cameras-increase-accidents-5-studies-that-prove-it/

Red-light cameras are, however, very profitable to the city governments that have installed them.

@Nikolas – the image on the page (about 2/3 of the way down) – this one http://www.safecarguide.com/img/angle468NEW.gif with some simple math ends up showing a total of 14% of crashes being rear-impact.

@Nikolas – Thanks for the link to the Volvo study, but you do realize that the sentence you quoted “rear-end collisions are the most frequent among all crash types, accounting for 29% of all police- reported crashes in the United States, summing up to approximately 1.8 million annually.” contradicts itself? I would think that anyone capable of posting here would understand that 29% of anything does not represent the “most frequent” of anything. Additionally, the report states that “approximately 70% of the striking cars in car-to-car single rear-end collisions have an impact speed lower than 30 km/h.” which confirms my statement that rear-impact crashes are not as severe (30 km/h equates to a little over 18.5 mph).

“They just want to stop the EPIDEMIC of children who are DYING.”

Epidemic of kids who are dying? Really? Whatever you feel about car seats this is WAY over the top. In 2009, 1,070 kids under 10 died in car accidents. In a country with around 40 million children, most of whom ride in cars several times each day, this is hardly an epidemic. Further, once you subtract out from that 1.070, the kids who weren’t in car seats because they exceeded the requirements, kids who were required to be in car seats but weren’t, kids who were in improperly installed car seats or were improperly secured in car seats (the largest cause of car deaths in young children) and the 25% that your statistics say will die anyway regardless of the position of the safety seat, we are talking about a miniscule (in the scheme of 40 million children, not in the value of a life) number of lives saved by leaving the child rear-facing. Probably about the same number as are kidnapped by strangers each year.

I’m all for giving information and allowing people to make their own informed choices, but let’s give CORRECT information and not the same scare tactics that helicopter parents use to support never allowing their children out of their sight. By all means, if you don’t care and your kids don’t care, leave them rear-facing but don’t act like leaving kids rear-facing is saving thousands of lives a year because it’s not.

“Legs have this nifty new feature called knees. They bend!”

Great, you sit criss cross applesauce (which is by far the stupidest PC phrase I’ve ever heard in my life) for several hours straight. My kid doesn’t enjoy it and I don’t blame her.

“Additionally, I’ve already already posted several different sources that indicate that while rear-impact crashes DO represent a much higher percentage than the 4% that was originally being tossed around, they are still the LEAST LIKELY type of crash.”

Hmmmm. I strongly suspect that this is manipulated statistics. I do agree that the vast majority of rear-end collision are non/very minor injury collisions, with most being little more than a ding to the car. I suspect that this is how the statistic is manipulated – it discounts all the minor rear-end collisions that I see at least weekly on my way to and fro work.

@Jennifer – Thanks for the link. I don’t see the “thoroughly and completely debunked” part of it though. I see “he said, she said.” There is a comment on the linked page that I think makes a great point: the data for the pediatrician studies comes from interviews. Interviews, really? The Car Seat Lady (with a name like that what could we expect)* also makes an “ad journalim” attacks against the Journal of Economic Inquiry, while lauding praise on other peer reviewed journals. Also the link wrongly attributes the authorship of the 2009 study to Levitt and Dubner, instead of Levitt and Doyle. Not exactly hallmarks of quality.

Whom do I trust more with statistical interpretation: an economist or a pediatrician? An economist has far more training in the area.

“I would think that anyone capable of posting here would understand that 29% of anything does not represent the “most frequent” of anything.”

“Based on that sentence alone, I could easily say that the researchers who wrote that paper are obviously too stupid to write anything I could trust.”

How can 29% be the most common type of car crash? Simple. There are more than 3 types of car crashes in the data set, which includes: rear-end, head-on, angle, side-swipe same direction, side-swipe opposite direction, and others. So let’s say 29% for read-end, and an equal split of 17.75% for the others I’ve enumerated.

Ta-da! 29 > 17.75, therefore 29% does in fact = the most frequent! Let this be a lesson in mathematical humility to us all.

See http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811355.pdf page 34.

*Lest I be accused of an ad hominem fallacy myself, let me simply note that “The Car Seat Lady” has a facially obvious bias, where as the “Journal of Economic Inquiry” does not.

In summary, I have no problems if anyone wants to put their kids in rear-facing seats and boosters seats for longer than I do. You can even feel like you are a better parent than I am (which may be the truth). I just want to maintain my legal right to make my own judgment in this area.

Your update is precisely why I love you. You do your research on issues and you take into account safety that isn’t hyper-media-overblown panic. I consider myself a Free Range Parent, but I came across http://www.joelsjourney.org when my son was still an infant. That’s all it took for me to decide to ERF (Extended Rear-Face) my son. He stayed rear-facing until about 3 weeks before his second birthday and we only turned him then because 1) he weighed over 30 pounds, 2) he was unable to climb into and out of the rear-facing seat on his own, and 3) lifting his weight into and out of the seat (and his crib) gave me bursitis and tendonitis in my shoulder from which I still haven’t fully recovered four months later.

Except for his inability to climb in and out of the seat when positioned that way, Liam didn’t mind being rear-facing despite the fact that he’s in the 95th percentile for height.

This discussion, minus some of the emotion, is a good example of why I feel parents need to question recommendations / laws. With a fuller picture of whatever facts are out there, we see that things are not black and white, and we can make a parenting decision that is appropriate for our individual child. Now let’s all hope that the lawmakers are too confused by all of the above to come up with any new laws about it.

@Jennifer: while many rear impact crashes are the result of a car’s front crashing into the rear of another car, not all rear-impact crashes are the result of front-impact crashes.

All you have to do is visit my son’s daycare to see examples of THAT. I’ve seen multiple parents back into the sides of other cars. *sigh* A couple of my neighbors also seem to have the tendency to back into their mailboxes or their garage doors.

The 29% statistic is also consistent with another article that someone linked to before, regarding highway design, where they were talking about cars rear-ending other cars because they didn’t notice the person ahead had stopped.

@SKL – it’s funny how you keep ignoring the clear evidence and poking around trying to find holes. I can’t imagine what kind of fraud evidence you think you’ve found, but it sort of seems to be of your own making.

Someone above posted that in Sweden, NOT A SINGLE REAR-FACING CHILD DIED in 2009. Someone else posted that in Sweden they’ve practically eliminated car accident deaths in small children. You made up the supposed statistics that might somehow explain that as irrelevant or not applicable (you said: “but they even admit that they spend less time in cars than we do, and they have a smaller population, and surely there are lots of other differences that make the comparison unhelpful. In short, I really don’t care what Sweden does and I’m kinda sick of hearing it.”)

So stop blaming others for somehow making you think there’s some sort of fraud being perpetuated. The only fraud here is you – because you aren’t grown up enough to admit that the evidence is there, the evidence is clear, and there’s a good reason for the recommendations. If you want to stick your fingers in your ears and sing “nah, nah, nah, nah I can’t hear you.” that’s fine. But don’t pretend for a second it’s not because people haven’t been trying to teach you what’s real, what’s true and what’s very clearly black and white.

Jennifer, the statistic I was talking about re the kids age 1-3 was in a paper about “injuries.”

I can see this carseat issue is big for you, but since you have had to back off on some of the numbers you based your strong opinion on, have you reconsidered your position at all?

Re Sweden – the fact that no Swedish kid died while rear-facing does not prove that my kid is gonna die if she is FF. Here’s how your logic looks to me: there are almost no documented cases of peanut allergy in many tropical countries. We should feed our deathly allergic kids tropical peanuts, so they will be cured of their allergies!

Jennifer, I don’t mean to be an asshole, but your numerical analyses posted here are not convincing to folks who analyze numbers for a living. That is why pig-headed people like me won’t just go along with your “evidence.”

I’m not accusing you of fraud, by the way. But whoever provided the information used to sell the new “guidelines” has either poor reasoning skills or little respect for the truth.

@SKL – could you please be more specific? Quote me, if you must. But I’d really like to know what “numerical analyses” I’ve posted that are not convincing?

You know why we have seat belts? Because 40+ years ago in Sweden, seat belts were saving lives. You know why we moved from a lap belt to a lap/shoulder belt system? Same reason – they were doing it in Sweden and showing that it saved lives. The original rear-facing recommendations came from there and were based on 20 years of research. You might want to just dismiss it out of hand (US-centric much?) but the fact is that most of our vehicle safety features come from Swedish research and are based on Swedish systems. Even our head restraints (that are keeping YOU safe in those rear-impact crashes).

I’ll be happy to continue the dialog if you’re really interested in facts. It seems that every time I post one, you either pretend like I didn’t, or generically paint it with your fraud brush without any evidence or facts of your own to back yourself up.

Jennifer, I see you are a Swedophile, and that’s great. Surely most countries are responsible for some aspects of advances in our culture, and vice versa. Not sure how this became all about Sweden, but whatever.

I have no personal beef with you. It’s just that the numbers keep moving all over the place and I’m getting less and less confident in them. I don’t believe public policy, laws, or big spending should be based on fuzzy data. We get ourselves into all kinds of trouble that way.

I’ve already mentioned various figures that I questioned, and you can read over your past comments to understand what analyses I am talking about.

Keep in mind that I kept my kids rear-facing to 2.5, and that decision was made long before any of this hype came out. I’m not trying to kill my kids or yours (or the ones in Sweden).

Donna, I was so glad to read your rebuttal of the “have you ever heard of knees? They bend!” crowd. I wanted to ask every one of them if they had ever, ever felt like stretching their legs out while riding in the car.

Apropos of nothing, my grandma topped out at 4’8″.
She would have needed a booster her whole life!

Just a quote from one of the articles referenced earlier…will hopefully clear up some of the ambiguity regarding front-end vs. rear-end crashes:

Vehicle- and Infrastructure-based Technology
For the Prevention of Rear-end Collisions —

“According to the 1999 Fatal Analysis Reporting System, rear-end collisions accounted for 29.5 percent of all crashes that year. Sometimes referred to as a frontal collision, a rear-end collision occurs when the following vehicle strikes the rear of the lead vehicle.”

RF vs. FF seems to ruffle feathers, both here and in the comments section of the NYT. I certainly hope that some of the energy we put into deciding which car seat is statistically safer can be put into making our communities more walkable/bikable/busable.

@Jennifer – bless your heart for valiantly defending your position.

“Remember from school when they taught that if “all A’s were 1′s and all 1′s were C’s, but that does not mean that all A’s were C’s”? Same thing here. All rear-impact crashes, by definition, are also frontal-impact crashes.”

If all A’s are ones, and all 1’s are C’s, then all A’s are in fact C’s. Just think a bit more about it. The conclusions you can’t draw are that that all C’s are 1’s, all 1’s are A’s, or that all C’s are A’s. Draw a circle labelled A, inside a larger circle labelled 1. This represents all A’s are ones. Now draw a larger around the 1 circle labelled C. This is all 1’s are C’s. Please note the A circle lies entirely inside the C circle. From your stated premises, all A’s are in fact C’s.

How this applies to all rear-impacts, by definition, also being frontal-impacts regardless of how the studies are conducted is, frankly, beyond me.

The Levitt’s analysis of only fatalities is certainly the best argument against it reliance on it. But the assumption that fatalities can tell us something about injuries isn’t absurd, it just doesn’t let us see the whole story clearly. One of the good things about their analysis is that it uses actual data, car seats usage out there in the real world. You dislike that aspect while I do like it.

Ya want less car accidents? Hugh decline in fatalities? Less drunk driving? Raise gasoline prices!!!

http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2008-07-11-auto-deaths-gas-prices-study_N.htm

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26389156/ns/business-autos/

http://nexus.umn.edu/Papers/GasPricesAndDrunkDriving.pdf

Dragonwolf, I was trying to keep it simple. I don’t disagree with your physics, but in that statement you quoted, I was talking about the car itself, not the people in it. And the semi incident was a completely different incident, in which I actually was moving forward (still got whacked pretty good). The time when I was stopped, a regular car hit me from behind. From the perspective of physics on the car, other than the difference in shape between the front and rear, the impact would be the same whether I was hit (while stopped) from the front or rear. As for the car “giving” (unlike a sturdy tree), that would be true regardless of whether it was hit from the front or rear. Of course the passengers would be affected differently assuming they were FF in each case. My point was that multiple people are stating an assumption that a rear-end collision involves two moving cars, and that is a faulty assumption, i.e., it could be true or untrue in each case.

As for “I’ll never have a frontal collision,” I agree that it’s not impossible, but the likelihood is a lot lower due to choices I make. I don’t expect to be 100% in control of what happens to me, but like I said earlier, “accidents” are far from random. I drive on 2-way streets all the time, and I have very rarely been in danger of being hit by someone coming at me in my lane. Sure, there have been a few close calls with people passing in unsafe conditions and such. But when I analyze risk, I weigh the probability along with the severity. I’m not one of those people who fills the bathtub with water every time I hear a big storm is coming, just in case.

Wow. Just, wow.

For the record, I agree wholeheartedly with SKL, Larry and others who think similarly.

I also think the “I’VE LOST ALL RESPECT FOR YOU LENORE I’M LEAVING AND NEVER COMING BACK!!11!!!!!!!111!” people are wound a little too tight. Frankly, being unwilling to consider positions that don’t jive with What You Know To Be True!!! usually indicates an inferior intellect.

I don’t for a minute believe all the statistics that people/orgs with an agenda throw out there. Manipulating data to inflate risk very often leads to attention, notoriety, papers getting published, research money, federal grants, etc. Do some research on the center for missing and exploited children–a scam if ever there was one.

This is absolutely a Free Range issue, because we must not allow the [often faulty] risk perceptions of others determine how we raise our children.

“Except that you are forgetting that if 29% of crashes were rear-impacts, AT LEAST 29% of crashes were ALSO frontal impacts. ”

Not true at all. If I back into something I’ve been involved in a rear-end collision but there is not corresponding front-end collision.

Car accidents are defined as the impact to the innocent driver, not as to the impact of the at-fault driver – which is almost always front impact. However, if we are defining “front-end collision” as the at-fault driver who hits something, those accidents are fairly easy to avoid with a little attention. Thus, I’m not going to spend my life worrying about what will happen to my child when I cause an accident. I’ve managed to avoid doing that for 22 years and I’m pretty confident of my ability to continue to do so, especially when my child is in the car. Really, if you are thinking “what car seat is safest when I slam into someone because I’m too busy talking on my cellphone to pay attention to the red light in front of me,” then maybe you should reconsider the idea of ever driving your child anywhere.

” all car collisions are avoidable.”

Not true at all. A large number of collisions in my area are caused by deer running out in front of the car. There are definitely times when those buggers change direction and dart in front of you, leaving you no recourse other than to hit them or go off the road.

This has been such an enlightening discussion…car seats, wow. From the “if it keeps one child safer, we should do it camp” to the “let me do as I deem fit” It’s a perfect example of the free range philosophy wherein if “it saves just one child, we should do it” without any considerations to the overall cost to society and whether it really is a ‘safer’ outcome. This is free range in a nutshell.

I personally think the car manufacturers bear more responsibility to keep passengers of varying heights safer. Which is what the Freakonomics team was trying to point out. For the most part, if you’re buckled in, you’ll be safer. But short of a roll cage, 5 point harness, and helmet you won’t be as safe as you could be. And I don’t know about anyone else, but I’d prefer to keep a lap belt and my head helmet free while driving. But if we go with the “worst case” thinking we’d all be in roll cages and 5 points…..which is exactly the discussion we’re having with kids being in more and more restrictive car seats.

2 cents.

If I could get a rear-facing driver’s seat for my car, I would. It’s far and away the safest orientation in a collision.

Not reading all the comments, just mentioning that last month Wal-Mart and Target had the Cosco Scerena on sale for $40. I don’t know if the sale is still going on or not. I bought four! 🙂 ……. Also, I hope all of you who FF your kids early are at least putting the chest clip on their chests, not leaving it down on their bellies.

“How can I tell my children that people are basically good, but don’t believe those AAP pediatricians for a minute?”

I don’t tell my child not to believe AAP pediatricians. I tell her that she has a brain and critical thinking abilities and can decide what works best for her. Blind loyalty to anyone’s recommendations is idiotic.

Science is usually tested in a vacuum. They test their own hypotheses in a lab under perfect conditions. And, yes, they do it with a hypothesis that they want to prove, not for their own edification just to see what happens. When you go into any scenario with an idea of what you believe the outcome should be, you will interpret any results open to interpretation to support that outcome. We see it in the law all the time. My cohort at the DA’s office and I look at the exact same facts and exact same laws and the exact same cases and come up with different results because we are looking at all of it from different angles.

And even the best doctors and scientists are not infallable. When I was a child AAP told parents to put their children to sleep on their stomachs. When my brother was an infant, parent were told to put them to sleep on their sides. Now it’s their backs.

The fact is that in perfect lab conditions using crash test dummies, rear-facing car seats are probably the safest (except in particular car accidents when they’re not). Fact is that in the real world where kids move, kids get uncomfortable, babies scream, kids get carsick, seats don’t fit properly, etc., you have to balance lab safety vs real world implications.

Rear-facing car seats are minimally safer than front-facing car seats. VERY FEW children die in car wrecks and most of those are attributed to improperly installed car seats or improperly secured children rather than the placement of the car seat. Each person should use their own critical thinking skills to determine if the risk that they will be in an accident in which their child would be saved by being rear-facing car seat instead of a properly installed front-facing car seat surpasses the other implications in their life of using rear-facing car seats and make a determination accordingly rather than blindly following AAP recommendations.

*garner attention

Hopefully most people have moved on from this thread (because it would be sad to just sit around waiting to continue arguing). But for anyone who is left, let me try this one more time.

If I were to suggest to you that Dreyer’s Rocky Road ice cream is “the best” flavor of ice cream, of course you have the right to disagree. Because the preference of flavor of ice cream is SUBJECTIVE to the person eating it. However, if I were to suggest to you that Dreyer’s Rocky Road ice cream could exacerbate diabetes, you could disagree with me, but you would be wrong. That’s because no matter how much you want your personal opinion to matter, when it comes to OBJECTIVE TRUTH, personal opinion is always irrelevant.

I noticed that someone above suggested that the data from which the RF recommendations were made came from science that was performed “in a vacuum”. Again – the RF recommendations came from nearly a decade of studying the outcomes from real-world crashes. It doesn’t matter what your age, or income level or race or personal beliefs are when it comes to this: rear-facing, for children up to age 2, is safer.

Anytime you try to put it in the context of a personal, parental decision, you look like an idiot. OBJECTIVE/SUBJECTIVE. Look them up, learn them, and then stop suggestion that one is interchangeable with the other.

@SKL – The whole point is, some people don’t have an option not to drive. Sure, plenty of people have access to public transportation systems, but others live in cities or suburbs where, by definition, they could not survive if they didn’t drive.

I think that everyone here (at least those who aren’t trying to be a smartass and prove an unprovable point) would agree that for the majority of those who do drive, there aren’t other ways for them to get to their job, make money, buy food, etc. No one has ever suggested that the solution here is to stop using vehicles. In fact, everyone here seems to inherently agree that the vehicles are just going to be a part of the equation, simply by skipping over that argument entirely.

*I* never suggested on this forum that anyone needs to stay rear-facing infinitely. My only claim is that, OBJECTIVELY, rear-facing is safer up to a specific age. And anyone who says “what’s safest for you doesn’t make it safest for me” is (wrongly) turning an OBJECTIVE FACT into a SUBJECTIVE DECISION. The point is, whether you choose to turn your child around forward-facing at 9 months or 18 months, using the argument that “we’re going to do what works best for us” is suggesting that somehow your personal preference (whether it’s based on space in the car, a child who hates rear-facing, needing to purchase a new seat, etc.) overrides the scientific fact that rear-facing is safer. It doesn’t MATTER whether you have been in a crash, or somehow think you can predict whether you will be in a crash. It doesn’t MATTER whether your child is bigger for his age, smaller for his age, more mature or less mature or any other of the half-dozen arguments listed here. The FACT still remains that rear-facing is safer.

So instead of going off on tangents, and continuing to use all sorts of fallacies to make their points, the people who have made the choice to put their child forward-facing early need to just own up. They need to say, “I know that it is not as safe. I am choosing what is best for ME, and not what is best for my child.”

Anything else is just a bunch of false rhetoric.

Wow, you guys all have a tremendous amount of data on car seats, collision and child death statisitics. Are you guys all safety expert or are you spending your free time researching car safety in the US or are you just randomly googling statistics to fuel this pretty pointless argument. I have four kids and had them rear facing for an extended amount of time. I feel confident in how I protect my children and so do you. Honestly, you can and will do whatever want with your kids, so this entire debate in silly…

@ Adrienne
You put your finger on the most important point; though you get it wrong. Americans cannot “do whatever [we] want” with our kids. As Lenore consistently demonstrates, we are the custodians of our children, but they belong to the government. It takes a bureaucrat.

Actually Jennifer, no, I still don’t think you understand my point and maybe you never will. You have a right to weigh the risks affecting your kid however you want. However, by insisting you need a car (when you could actually get a job and an apartment near each other in a safe city neighborhood if you “really cared” about 100% physical safety) you are in fact thinking the way I’m thinking, structurally.

I turned my kids because it was not best for them, in my opinion, to stare at a patch of sky for so many of their waking hours, after their bodies were relatively sturdy compared to a wee baby, and given our extremely low risk of having a catastrophic front-impact collision.

My kids were very good RF travelers and never complained about it. Their seats fit OK RF in my backseat and their bodies fit the seats, so buying a new seat or car was not the issue either, for me. If my kids’ mental development were not a factor, it would have been easy for me to continue RF. So no, my decision was not for “my” convenience. Just because you personally weigh risks differently than I do, that doesn’t mean your motives are higher than mine.

Your “data comparison” argument is just like every other argument that this site fights against – being alone with Grandpa is statistically less safe than with Grandma, hence parents should keep their kids away from Grandpa – statistics say so! Falling out of trees can’t happen if you don’t let your kids near trees! Kids who are never allowed outside without a leash almost never get hit by cars! It’s all the same basic logic. In all cases, the person doing the risk/benefit analysis gives too much weight to an extremely unlikely risk. And that is the result of emotional, not objective, thinking.

Since this is just a guideline, I don’t see any problem with it. Especially in light of the fact that it increases ACTUAL safety, not just the perception of safety. Kids really are less likely to be injured, or at least are likely to have less severe injuries, in a rear-facing carseat. Someone may have already mentioned it (I’m not going to read all 250+ comments to check), but the younger a child is, the more likely they are to experience internal decapitation in a forward-facing carseat. They may be more likely to break their legs in a rear-facing carseat, but that’s a heck of a lot easier to fix. So assuming your 1-2 year old still FITS in a rear-facing carseat and doesn’t experience severe motion sickness from doing so (as Jennifer T. describes), why the heck not?

“Again — the RF recommendations came from nearly a decade of studying the outcomes from real-world crashes. ”

Except that you can’t truly study real world outcomes to know the difference between rear-facing and front-facing in any particular accident. Each accident is different – different speeds, different cars, different impact zones, different structural defects in the cars, etc. You can look at a particular accident and SPECULATE that the child would have died/lived had the car seat been a different orientation. You can put the car in the lab with crash dummies and try to simulate an similar accident with the car seat in different orientations. But you can’t actually go back in time and recreate the exact same accident with the only difference being that a child was rear-facing instead of front-facing to see what the outcome would actually be for that particular accident.

Further, you can only speculate as to the injuries to the child. You can’t consider any of the myriad of other things that goes into a decision as to what is in the best decision. Again, it is not truly safer for anyone on the road if a driver is distracted because her child is screaming non-stop. Likewise, it is not best for a child to be physically ill every second that he is in the car. It is not safe for the parent to be eating the steering wheel to give the rear-facing car seat enough room. It is not always affordable to buy a new car to fit the car seat. And, we’ll probably have a heap of adults with hip dysplasia and knee problems due to sitting criss-cross applesauce without being able to move for much of their lives in young childhood (because american kids spend a lot of time in the car).

So, yes, the recommendations are being made in a vacuum. The recommendations are based SOLELY on the speculation as to the potential injuries to the child in the small chance of a serious car accident. They don’t consider real world problems that may effect the safety of everyone in any one particular situation. It makes its recommendation based on a perfect world in which everyone has a car that fits a rear-facing car seat while still allowing the front occupants to be a safe distance from the steering wheel, where toddlers are perfectly quiet in the car, where toddlers don’t get car sick and where the serious accident is not a rear-end collision.

“And anyone who says “what’s safest for you doesn’t make it safest for me” is (wrongly) turning an OBJECTIVE FACT into a SUBJECTIVE DECISION. ”

That is NOT TRUE. I don’t think anybody (other than maybe you) would argue with the fact that a screaming baby distracts the driver. I don’t think anybody would argue with the fact that a puking toddler distracts the driver. I don’t think anybody would argue with the fact that the placement of the driver’s seat impacts visibility. I don’t think anyone would argue with the fact that a distracted driver is more likely to get into an accident. I don’t think anyone would argue with the fact that decreased visibility increases the likelihood of an accident. Finally, I don’t think anyone would actually disagree with the fact that your chances of suffering injuries related to a car accident increase when you increase the risk of actually getting into a car accident. Ergo, it may very well be OBJECTIVELY that a child is safer in a front-facing car seat in a car with a non-distracted driver with full visibility than he is in a rea-facing car seat with a distracted driver who can’t see worth a damn.

Donna — bravo!

Here are some staggering numbers from 2009:

*There were just shy of three TRILLION miles driven in America that year.
*There were 6,770 fatalities to passengers (as any child in a car seat would be) during those three trillion miles.
*There were 430 fatalities of kids aged less than five.

So let’s do some math here. Assuming an equal distribution of age among the sub-five-year-old children (a more than fair assumption, as I would think a four year old would need to be driven around a lot more than a one year old), that means that there were 129 fatalities of children aged between 12 months and 30 months in 2009. Which means that, if forward facing children are 75% more likely to die in a crash than rear facing children, 47 of those kids were rearward facing, and 82 of those kids were facing forward.

THREE TRILLION VEHICLE MILES.
260 million registered vehicles.
33,808 total traffic fatalities.
6,770 passenger fatalities.
EIGHTY-TWO front facing dead children aged one year to two and a half years. Tops.

So for any given mile you drive with your kid in the car facing forward, you have a roughly one in 37 billion chance of your kid dying.

In other words, it would take a 187 mile drive with your forward facing 1 to 2.5 year-old child to give you the same odds of that child dying as you would have of winning the Powerball jackpot with a $1 ticket.

Even if you drive 10,000 miles with your child facing forward, you still only have a 1:3.7 million chance of killing your child with this decision (compared to 1:1.2 million for rear facing) over the course of this entire period.

From reading half the comments here you’d assume that a child will spontaneously explode from just TOUCHING a car! I have a 3 month old at home. When he gets old enough to face forward, if this is something that will improve his life in the car or ours, I’ll not hesitate to do it. He’s far more likely to die of pneumonia than he’ll ever be of dying in my car. There’s just not bubble wrap that we could wrap them in that would be thick enough to protect them from everything, and odds so astronomical I can’t comprehend them just leave me rolling my eyes.

I remember a situation like that antsy. I was at a park with a friend and her kids. I had walked there (10 minutes or so) with my kids, she had driven. While we were there a thunderstorm developed. Pouring, driving rain, lightning, thunder – think Noah’s flood here. She offered me a ride home, and I took it. Yes it meant that (gasp) my kids were not in car seats. Heck, my little one was on my lap in the front seat. However, I felt that the chances of us getting in a car wreck during that 5 minutes were pretty slim. The chances of us getting completely soaked and/or struck by lightning, or hit by a car crossing the street who couldn’t see us in the rain were a lot higher. Clearly, not something I would do every day. But in a similar situation, I would probably do it again.

So much for the EPIDEMIC of children DYING, huh Tom?

“And whether you post a million pieces of data or none at all, it still remains a fact that car crashes are the MOST LIKELY thing to kill my child”

Actually even that is a false statistic. While MV accidents are the SINGLE leading cause of death (and only top birth defects by 3 kids in 2002), they still only account for approximately 11% of the deaths of children between ages 1 and 4. Therefore, if your child is going to die between ages 1-4, he is more likely to die of something other than a car accident. Since all the other accidents total add up to 22%, he is even more likely to die of some accident other than a car accident than he is to die in a car accident. He is almost as likely to die by homicide as to die in a car wreck.

Compare that to the 15-19 age group in which almost 40% of the deaths are attributed to car accidents, with the next closest cause of death (homicide) being only 13.7%.

OK, I’m going to join the minority here. It is completely unreasonable to expect that any of us can drive around in huge steel contraptions at high rates of speed and NOT die. The fact that we often don’t is amazing, not “required”. I have no wish to die, nor do I want to unduly risk my child’s life, but I have to drive, as i am not Amish and I’m not so sure about the safety of those buggies, either.

Here’s an interesting idea proposed by one of my better Economics professors, weld a dagger onto the center of the steering wheel pointing directly at the driver’s chest. That should drop the accident rate to zero pretty darn quick.

Donna you are right we need a car seat designed to protect 15 to 19 year olds. PS it needs to have a phone jamming device built in if it is a rear facing driver seat for those teens with a license who drive themselves to school