Even while young children may ultimately turn around to face forward in the car, rear-facing is still the most secure posture for infants and toddlers in car seats. Parents should utilize rear-facing car seats as long as possible because they are the gold standard for safety. If you want to choose the best baby car seat for a 3-years-old, we recommend the article — best car seats for 3-year-old.
You must first comprehend what happens in an accident in order to appreciate why you shouldn’t quickly reverse the direction of your child’s rear-facing car seat. A 10-pound toddler can be thrown with the force of around 450 pounds of momentum if a car smashes at a comparatively slow speed of around 30 mph. Comparatively speaking, that has around 40% greater momentum than if a 10-pound bowling ball were dropped from a third-floor window.
We need to make sure that all of that force is used in a way that will safeguard the person because it has to go somewhere. The fact that car seats disperse that force over the largest possible area is one of the most crucial ways they safeguard children. Consider what happens in a crash with a child in a rear-facing seat: the youngster is driven into the seat, and the force of the crash is distributed from head to toe.
The amount of protecting surface area—in this case, a five-point harness—in a front-facing car seat is significantly less. Additionally, it does not adequately safeguard a baby’s delicate head as a rear-facing seat would.
The construction of a rear-facing car seat acts as a barrier to help shelter your child’s head, neck, spine, and body from harm in the event of an accident. The safest course of action is to keep your child in a rear-facing seat for as long as necessary.
