here is a link to rear facing children: http://www.cpsafety.com/articles/RFAlbum.aspx
they aren’t all in Expeditions. I used to have a VW Jetta and had rear facing seats in that.

I’ve been doing mental gymnastics about this study all day. Well, maybe not mental gymnastics, but a few mental sommersaults. And a cartwheel or two.

Add these numbers into the mix. Let’s say I buy a bigger car that will provide enough room for the rear facing convertible seat. I will only be able to use it for maybe a few months, until my enormous offspring hits 35 pounds earlier than most. And during those few months (let’s guess it’s six months), he will only be in that rear facing car seat for about 15 minutes a day, the time it takes to drive him home from daycare. My husband and I can switch cars for any times I’d need to drive longer than that, and I can keep the boy rear facing in our other car.

So, really, could it possibly be worth it to trade up and incur the expense of another car for that short amount of traveling?

Also, I could very easily stick to the streets and stay off the freeway for those 15 minutes a day, which means I would not drive over 35 miles per hour. (Really. I promise.)

So…what are the odds I would be in a car crash during that total amount of driving time? Sixth months, five days a week, 15 minutes a day, driving max 35 miles per hour?

The problem with living in LA is that those numbers don’t compare to the awful thoughts that go through your mind every day when you drive a kid around. We have to drive here. I think my husband and I actually walk to do errands more than any other couple I know, because we’re just New Yorkers at heart. But bottom line, we have to drive, and there’s no way to eliminate risk if you drive.

Okay, here’s another thought. We live close to a freeway, which means particles of exhaust are likely going up our noses every day. I wonder which risk is worse: the risk of death or injury from an auto accident, or the risk of lung cancer from the daily exposure to that stuff over the time I will live in my location?

Anyway, I’ll keep the lad in the rear facing SafeSeat until the second he reaches 30 pounds. Then forward he goes.

The bulk of the data supporting Watson and Monteiro’s call to keep kids rear-facing until age 4 come from the study you mentioned, the 1988-2003 review of NHTSA crash data. A link to that study is below. It discusses crashes up to 23 months, not 48 months. So already we are making a big leap with the headline.

fcs.tamu.edu/safety/passenger_safety/certified-tech/rear-facing2.pdf

The first thing to note is that a full 21% of injured kids were UNRESTRAINED. This is ridiculous to me, and suggests that perhaps most of our public health dollars with regards to car seats should be spent on reducing these incidents.

The second thing to note is that they are using a small sample of data to extrapolate to the general population. In the raw data, just 60 kids 1 year and older were rear-facing. Sixty kids! So we are generalizing from a pretty small sample when we are talking about the benefits of rear-facing seats after the age of one year.

So next, the really good news: when the authors generalize to the crash statistics as a whole, they find the car seats do a really excellent job at protecting kids, no matter which direction they are facing. Results showed that 89.9% of rear-facing kids and 84.8% of forward-facing kids were not injured at all (MAIS score = 0). Yay! The biggest gap between the rear and front facing in terms of raw percentages was for kids who sustained the mildest injuries (MAIS score = 1) — 9.6% for rear-facing versus 14.1% for forward facing. For the rest of the MAIS levels, the results also tended to favor the rear-facing models, but the raw percentages were much, much slimmer. And for the second-highest level of injury (MAIS score = 5), the data favored the forward-facing seats (0.16% versus 0.02%)!

Later, the authors switch things up with a different measurement of injury level, the ISS score of 9 or higher, which represents moderate to severe injuries. We never see any raw percentages for this measurement, but it would seem to translate into an MAIS score of 2 or higher. If we go back to the original breakdown of MAIS scores, how many kids actually sustained an injury of MAIS 2+? The answer is very, VERY few kids. Just 0.5% of kids in rear-facing seats and 1.1% of kids in front-facing seats experienced anything greater than a mild injury. Again, yay for car seats!

What this is telling me is that the vast majority of protection for your child comes from having him/her buckled in to a properly-installed car seat. Might you get some tiny extra percentage of safety by keeping your child rear-facing beyond 1 year? Sure, the data are reasonably convincing on this point. But let’s be clear: it’s a very tiny extra percentage (0.6% to be exact).

If one gets such a small benefit even in 1 year olds, I can only imagine there are diminishing returns for older children who have better neck/spine control. If parents want to keep kids rear-facing to mine that tiny extra percentage point of safety, my hat is off to them. When it’s your kid, you want every extra edge you can get. What I don’t see is enough convincing evidence that the difference is large enough that we should be legislating such a move or making snarky remarks to other parents — “I can’t believe you would prioritize your car over your kids’ safety”, etc.

REAR-FACING CHILD CAR SEATS:
RESPONSE FROM DOREL, MANUFACTURERS OF MAXI-COSI

London, England: 12 June 2009 – Dorel (UK) Ltd, the world’s biggest manufacturer of nursery and children’s products and makers of Maxi Cosi seats, has responded to today’s report – published in the British Medical Journal – which suggests that children should stay in a rear-facing child car seat until the age of four:

“There are some pure safety arguments for the benefit of travelling backwards in the event of an accident. This also applies to adults travelling by rail, for example.

“We recommend parents to keep their child in rear-facing infant carriers for as long as possible and not to switch to a more convenient forward facing seat at the earliest opportunity. However, most parents around the world eventually make the change because rearward facing child car seats are simply impractical in most situations. They take up a huge amount of room in the car, usually necessitating the front seats to be moved forward, and they don’t even fit in some smaller cars. Unless the child is given sufficient legroom, he or she will be cramped against the car’s seatback. It can be incredibly difficult for a parent to get a larger child into such a seat and the fitting system is often very complex, increasing the chance of incorrect fitting.

“The most effective way to improve child safety in car seats is to ensure that the child is correctly fitted into the seat and the seat is correctly fitted into the car. This is why publications such as Which? look at ease of fitting when assessing child car seats along with crash test performance. Maxi-Cosi car seats are consistently ranked in the top few by the European independent testing of car seats as reported in Which? and we strongly believe that real car safety is derived from the best combination of ease of use, ensuring correct fitting and excellent crash test results.

“In addition, although rearward facing is arguably the safest travelling position, most of us prefer not to travel that way. It reduces the growing child’s ability to interact with those in the front seats, to look around and see where they are going.”

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_levitt_on_child_carseats.html

Also, Brendan, CA law says we can turn our kids front facing after age one, if they’re over 20 pounds. So I’ve been looking forward to the first birthday for a while, and then I started hearing about the rear-facing thing. It’s not the greatest news for me, as you can imagine, since you know, I like to try to keep my kid alive and well.