Forward-Facing Child Safety Seats

At what age can my child use a forward-facing child safety seat?
Many parents will see materials that state that when a child is a year old and weighs twenty pounds, it's “time” to turn them forward. That was true when we didn't have any safety seats that went beyond twenty to twenty-two pounds rear-facing. Today all convertible safety seats are certified for use to at least thirty pounds rear facing. We do not recommend turning the child forward until you have used a convertible seat as long as possible; have as an estimate at least 18 to 24 months. Many children can stay in a safety seat rear facing much longer than that, and do that if you can because you are increasing your child's protection in that case of both frontal and side impacts, and these are the crashes in which children are hurt or killed. In these crashes, children have over seventy percent of their injuries to the head and neck, and we are still not very good at fixing brain damage. So, give your child the best break and use the safety seat rear-facing as long as possible.

How do I secure my child in a forward-facing child safety seat?
After you have the forward-facing safety seat tightly in the car so that it doesn't move more than an inch to the sides or front of the vehicle, place the child in comfortably. By the way, at a certain point you should let the child climb in because you want the child to feel "this is my special space and I know how to manage it". Yet you should always check what they're doing. Make sure they're sitting back and that the safety harness on the forward-facing safety seat is at or above shoulder level, not ear level. If you find that your child can't have the safety harness at, or just a little bit above, the shoulders, maybe that child still needs to be rear-facing. Once you have the harness in the proper slots, you snug the harness by pulling on the attachment. This is important: if you chose a forward-facing safety seat where you can't reach the harness adjuster when the safety seat is in there tightly, you're going to make errors and your child will not be safe. So be sure when you select the forward-facing safety seat that you can reach the adjustment for the harness easily when it's in tightly forward-facing or, if it's a convertible, in both directions. Once you have the harness on the child properly you do a pinch test. Just as if you're trying on a pair of trousers or a skirt and you wanted to see if the waist of the trousers or skirt fit you properly, take your fingers and try to pinch the fabric of the harness between your fingers. If you can pinch fabric, it's not snug enough so snug it more. Then push the retainer clip up to armpit level. Particularly, we recommend that when you're getting used to how much to snug it, you keep the retainer clip down while you're adjusting the harness so you don't run it up into the child's neck and then become worried about hurting the child with a part of the harness. But always push it to armpit level, so it's not too high and not too low. It helps to remind you to position the harness in the centers of the shoulders, not out on the tops of the arms and never down on the arms. You want to make sure that the hip straps are low on the child's hips, not up on the abdomen. With a forward-facing seat with a harness, you also want to make sure that, whether you're using the LATCH attachments or the safety belt system to hold the forward-facing safety seat in, you do attach that top tether strap. That reduces how far forward your child's head will go in a crash, and again, your child's head is the most important part of the body. You want to protect the child from brain damage.

Can I secure my child safety seat to my side-facing jump seat?
You can never use a safety seat properly in a side-facing seat. In many pickup trucks, especially the small ones, the back seat is actually a pair of side-facing jump seats. We don't recommend side-facing seats for anyone. Safety seats are not tested except on a forward-facing vehicle seat, so they're never legally used on a side-facing seat or a rear-facing seat.

Can I secure my child safety seat to my front-facing jump seats?
If the pickup truck has front-facing jump seats, then the question is, "does the safety seat fit there?" We recommend that at least 8% of the base of the safety seat be supported by the vehicle seat, and, in some pickup trucks, the designers have put little tables or almost like beverage holders that are designed to take part of the weight of the safety seat. And they will tell you in the owner's manual, "put this down before you put the safety seat in." The next question is, "does the safety seat fit there?" We're not concerned with a rear-facing safety seat touching the back of the front seat. However, if you have a newborn, you may not be able to get that 45-degree angle to allow the child's head to lie back naturally. Sometimes you can make the safety seat fit properly if it's an infant carseat that can be used with or without the detachable base. Remove the base, make sure that the handle is either allowed to be fully up or fully down in the driving position, and you may find that you can get the space so that the seat will fit in there. When the child's older and can sit more upright then you may not have the same kinds of problems, even though the seat is rear-facing. We also find in some of the smaller pickup trucks that children in forward-facing seats have a problem because their legs are so jammed up against the front seat that they're literally uncomfortable. And an uncomfortable child is not a happy passenger. So you want to check for that as well. Tethering a forward-facing seat in a pickup truck is especially important. Some of the data show that children who are forward-facing in the back of a small pickup truck have a much higher rate of injury because many people do not tether them and some of the older pickup trucks don't have tether anchors and people have not put them in. So those are the kinds of factors to think about.