CHILD SAFETY IN THE REAL WORLD: - SAFE – BUT NOT SORRY, A SPECIAL REPORT

As A Parent, Choosing The Right Approach To Child Safety Isn’t Easy – As Jonathan Crouch Discovered…

One of the most vivid pictures I have of child safety is of the front cover of a baby seat catalogue showing a newborn in nappies crawling around a workshop full of replacement car parts. The slogan underneath is simple: “There’s one thing you can’t replace.”


But, if we all agree that child safety is not an option, why is it that I see so many youngsters in moving cars crawling around all over the back seat? Or is it that safety becomes optional as soon as our offspring get to school age?


Having your first child makes you reconsider all these things afresh. Sure, you want to get the best seat you can afford, but that can be pretty hard when you begin to look at all the bills involved.
Traditional advice is that you get a baby seat, then replace it with a child seat, then go on to a booster cushion. Not cheap – and frustrating when you get to a year old and have to consign a perfectly good (but by now rather cramped) baby seat to the cobwebs in the loft.
When young Caris was born last June, I wish I’d known that it doesn’t have to be quite like that. A number of manufacturers are now offering seats that claim to be able to take your little ones through everything from the trip home from the hospital to the first hesitant day at school. If you were then to go and buy one of those cars where the central rear armrest doubles as a booster cushion (why isn’t this a more common option?), then you really could get away with a single child seat outlay. Which would mean you could afford to buy the very best – in theory anyway.
Whether such an all-purpose seat really is the very best is something I shall be finding out over the coming months. Ten-month old Caris is testing out the Klippan Futura seat, the first three-way child seat to be launched in the UK. For a modest £99.99, it claims to take your child all the way from birth to six years of age.
For babies up to 13kgs in weight, it can function as a rearward facing seat but can be turned around to be forward facing as soon as your child reaches 9kgs, complete with a height-adjustable, one-pull harness for maximum support.
At 15kgs (around three years), parents can simply remove the harness to create a booster seat, complete with one-pull belt adjuster. Alternatively, if parents want to keep their child rearward facing for longer, the Futura can do that too, with optional extra tether straps keeping the child comfortable right up to 18kgs in weight.
A pity this couldn’t have been a seat of the new Isofix variety. These plug into their mountings just like a seatbelt and save you all the hassle of battling with belt straps and slotting them into little notches. Apart from anything else, I’ve been amazed to discover over the last few months that even brand new models very often don’t have belts long enough to go around the back of a baby seat. Or, if they do, there’s an inertia reel mechanism that sticks so often that you’re left crying with frustration.
At present, we’re just about to turn the Klippan seat into forward-facing – which will be a new experience for us, having had Caris facing the rear window for the last ten months, oblivious to what’s going on behind her. Now, with Mummy and Daddy in view and all those interesting-looking knobs and buttons not too far away, our days of almost guaranteed peace en route could be behind us.
As someone who’s often behind a desk when my wife and little girl are on the road, that potential increase in the volume of noise coming from the back brings other worries. There’s always the temptation for whoever’s driving to sneak a look back to placate the little one – with awful possible consequences. An extra rear view mirror - driver instructor style – might be one answer, but then the dangers of a lapse in concentration might be even greater.
I’ve thought for some time that from this perspective, the rise in the popularity of front passenger dash-mounted airbags could be the best thing that’s ever happened to child safety. In forcing parents to mount their child seats at the back, it’s also forced them to keep their concentration on the road, rather than on the cooing youngster in the seat beside them. Airbag or no airbag, in my view, carrying any child in the front seat ought to be illegal.
It’s tempting still to do so, of course, for many manufacturers now fit convenient locks that enable you to deactivate the passenger ‘bag with the ignition key. I’m not at all convinced that this is a good idea – and not only for the reasons already mentioned. Quite apart from the possibility of forgetting to deactivate the thing - or, indeed, omitting to reactivate the airbag when an adult takes the seat again - there’s the issue of side airbags, now standard on many larger cars and optional on many smaller ones. What would happen to a child seat if one of these went off against it? And how would a four-year old on a booster cushion fare?
The major manufacturers provide few answers to questions like these – and it’s about time they did, not least because it’s not long before both front and side airbags will start to become commonplace as fitments in the rear.
By then, I hope that every manufacturer will have got their acts together and will be offering proper fold-out fully integrated child seats as optional equipment, fully certified to withstand airbags from every angle. Those with such an idea still on the drawing board could do much worse then get hold of the Klippan seat I’m using. Getting it wrong isn’t an option. After all, as the ad says, there’s one thing you can’t replace.