More on child seat safety: New guidelines
Just when I switched the car seat for 15-month-old Jake from rear facing to forward facing, the American Academy of Pediatrics today issued new guidelines that advise car seats to remain rear facing until the child is 2 years old. (Thanks reader MadCow for the alert!)
AAP advises parents to keep their toddlers in rear-facing car seats until age 2, or until they reach the maximum height and weight for their seat. It also advises that most children will need to ride in a belt-positioning booster seat until they have reached 4 feet 9 inches tall and are between 8 and 12 years of age.
Like many parents, I followed AAP's previous policy, which recommended that infants and toddlers ride rear-facing up to the limits of the car seat, but it also cited age 12 months and 20 pounds as a minimum.
Because Jake weighs more than 25 pounds and his legs seem to be squeezed, I decided to finally make the turn the car seat to forward. I'm going to read the car seat's manual again and find out its maximum height and weight before I decide whether to switch the seat to rear facing.
Dennis Durbun, AAP's lead author of the new car seat policy statement, says a rear-facing child seat is better at supporting the head, neck and spine of infants and toddlers in a crash because "it distributes the force of the collision over the entire body."
Comments
I was in a similar situation with my first child...I had just switched him FFing when I heard about how much safer RFing is.
I did the research and I couldn't believe how much safer it was...up to 500% safer for a child 12-24mo who is RFing! I quickly turned the seat back around.
I find that a lot of parents say that they can't do RFing because their child doesn't like it, but my kids don't like vegetables, or vaccines, or bedtime either. In fact, they'd probably rather not have any carseat - no matter which way it's facing! But kids are much more flexible then we give them credit for and once they know that you're sold on RFing they'll be fine with it.
Here's a link with more info...
http://www.cpsafety.com/articles/stayrearfacing.aspx
Posted by: MJ | March 21, 2011 3:46 PM
The minimums were never AAP's policy. They have been recommending rear-facing to two years for quite a while now. It's NHTSA that has now changed their language in this regard.
Posted by: Jeremiah | March 21, 2011 3:58 PM