CarSeat Safety

Even though this doesn't affect me personally these days, this article caught my eye. 

Babies (and toddlers) should stay in a rear-facing car seat until age 2?  Wowzers.  Do you know what the law was when Katelyn was born?  Once she was two years old, she wasn't even required by law to be strapped into a car seat!  Just a seat belt!  Of course, that was when she was born, and by the time she had turned two, I think they were recommending keeping her in a carseat until age four.  I've always found it interesting how quickly these standards change.  Now I'm supposed to keep my six-year-old in a booster--and that doesn't always happen.

Isn't it ironic that the more advances we make in safety, the more difficult it becomes to maintain the new standards?  I mean, cars are built with more safety features than ever, and yet, in order to ride in them, we have to take more precautions than we ever before!  It's like I tell my kids: before everybody had vacuums, they only had to clean their carpets seasonally; but now that we have newer conveniences, we also have higher standards of cleanliness!

Don't get me wrong--I like living in a safe and clean environment.   I'm glad we have vacuums and seat belts and carseats and airbags.  I just can't help but notice the irony.

When Katelyn was about eight or nine months old, Doug borrowed a pickup truck from work for a service project we were helping with one weekend.  In the truck, we had to put Katelyn into a forward-facing carseat.  It was amazing how much she enjoyed that little ride!  Katelyn was a baby who hated riding in the car.  She would typically scream through any car ride lasting longer than a couple of minutes.  So it was like a small miracle to see her happy during drive, with the difference being that she was facing forward.  So, at her nine-month check-up with her pediatrician, I asked him about how stringent the "1year/20 pounds" guideline was.  Here's what he told me:

We would all be safer in a collision if we were strapped into a rear-facing (at that time, only 3-point) harness.  But at some point, it becomes very impractical for everyone to be riding that way.

I don't necessarily think it's impractical to keep a one-year-old rear-facing until they turn two.  I think that's reasonable, frankly.  But what I wonder is, where will we go from here?  And how soon? 

I predict the guidelines will continue to become more and more strict, and it won't take very long for that next step to be "recommended".