Don’t Turn Around

The big news for the parenting set this week is that the American Academy of Pediatrics has just decreed that children should stay in rear-facing car seats until they are 2 years old, or even longer if they reach age 2 and still fall below the maximum height and weight allowed for their particular safety seat.

The old recommendations as I understood them suggested that it was OK to turn a child's seat so she was facing forward once she was a year old and also weighed at least 20 pounds. I'll admit that we fudged this a bit with Lucy, our 3 year old, who hit 20 pounds by the time she was around 9 or 10 months old (she's going to be annoyed with me someday for putting that out  on the Internet). She was also pretty tall for her age and her legs were all bunched up against the back seat of the car, looking rather uncomfortable back there. So we turned her seat around at that point because she was definitely big enough to do so even if she was a tad under the age requirement at the time.

Three years later, Isaac, her little brother, is also over the 20 pound mark already and has been for a few months, but he's a little stumpier than his sister was and still looks comfortable in her old rear-facing Britax Roundabout with the pink flowered seat cover (again, something a child of mine will probably be embarrassed about during a future Google search). So we haven't been compelled to turn his seat around to forward-facing just yet. But in a way, we were looking forward to doing so around his first birthday.

As the writer of a New York Times story on this topic pointed out, turning a child's car seat around to face forward is often one of those little milestones we parents tend to celebrate along the way like we do when the first tooth appears, or first words are uttered. In fact, I know I have a fuzzy cell phone photo of smiling Lucy in that same pink flowered car seat Ike is using now, when she faced forward for the first time.

But I'm also a huge worrywart, so I'll follow the American Academy of Pediatrics advice to keep my son in a rear-facing car seat for as long as possible. We'll just have to find another mini milestone for Isaac to celebrate in the next couple of months, besides his first birthday of course.