Over the last half-decade or so, the prevailing wisdom has been that allowing small children to sit in the front seat of a car is equivalent to throwing them bodily into the middle of the freeway or pushing them off a cliff. I’ve even heard of states outlawing child safety seats in the front.
The usual reason given for this is that airbags are dangerous to small occupants. Fine. I don’t dispute that. But what about cars that don’t have passenger-side airbags? Is there anything else, besides a passenger-side airbag, that makes the front seat any more dangerous for children than the back seat is?
I posted this question to SDMB a few months ago, but couldn’t get a straight answer. (In fact, one of the answers was, “Sitting in the back seat is just part of growing up. Deal with it.” I’ll bet the person who posted that answer refused to let her kids use the dishwasher, because by golly she had to wash dishes by hand when she was a kid. )
Well, before airbags came out, I never heard of any real epidemic about kids dying by sitting in the front seat during an accident. So to answer your question about there being anything else – I’d say no.
I think it’s because seat belts don’t protect kids as well as adults. They end up positioned wrong on the body because of their small size. I don’t see why frontseat safety seats should be a problem if there are no airbags in the car.
Actually, Derleth, I was thinking more of really small children – the ones small enough to require a child safety seat.
I see these horriffic drawings on the back of a modern car’s passenger-side window visor, showing the top of a rear-facing child safety seat getting broken off by the airbag and snapping the poor baby’s neck. Below this diagram, the visor always says “Put your kids in the back seat so that THIS won’t happen!”. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to deactivate the passenger-side airbag? Then the driver could have his/her baby within arm’s reach while driving.
The absolutely safest place for a child is in the middle of the back seat. This puts as much of the car around the child as possible in case of an accident. Barring that, anyplace in the back is safer than the front in the most dangerous collisions – head-on.
Think of the different types of accidents.
Head-on: A person in front is in more danger than one in the back.
T: A person on the side that is hit is in more danger than somebody in the middle.
Rear-end: A person in front is probably in slightly less danger (depending on the speed of the collision, which is usually less than in other types), but can get bashed into the dash or windshield.
DAVID; I gotta disagree with you one this one. Yes, the middle of the back seat is somewhat safer IF you get in an accident, but as one who has ridden with 2 single moms who had their babies in the back seat: well, it’s hard to describe. Let’s just say I was LESS scared when I was being shot at. :D. Both of them (3 occ) were constantly turning around to wipe the kids nose, hand her a pacifier, wipe the drool, say “stop that”, etc etc etc etc, ad phobos
We almost crashed several times. Now, neither car had a passenger side air bag, so the kid in the front passengers seat would have been FAR safer.
If you don’t believe me, try it sometime, but be sure all insurance is paid up. Oh, and both of these ladies were OK drivers without the babies.
It sounds like it’s more dangerous for anyone – baby, child, or adult – to be in the front seat in the event of an accident.
Why then are the words “Always put your kids in the back seat!” hammered into our skulls so often (I heard Big Bird saying this, for crying out loud), but not one word is said about how adults should also sit in the back seat?
When they were growing up there was no such thing as airbags but I NEVER let them ride in the front seat. They were not front seat passengers until they were 13. I was a single mom so the front seat was empty 98% of the time.
My job has a lot to do with auto accidents and I have know too many people to suffer closed head injuries by hitting their heads on the windshield. With a child not fitting correctly in the shoulder harness and not having the height of an adult think about where their head would hit… the dashboard. There are also instances of people FLYING THROUGH THE WINDSHIELD. Why would people want to subject their children to this?
Not letting my kids ride in the front seat did not get me elected coolest mom on the block but they always understood why I was so firm on this.
Now that my kids are older they have both told me they know I did it out of love and concern. After they become parents they have both told me that they will also not let their children ride in the front, airbags or not. It makes sense to them now.
As far as a baby in a car seat and needing to put the bottle in the baby’s mouth, etc., Pleeze… give me a break. If the baby is crying it, let it. If it gets to the point where you need to check on the baby or whatever, pull over. My kids were always worth 10 minutes of my time.
Surprising “Figures my first post is all about taking a stand on something” Woman
What about if they’re really little kids strapped into a properly mounted child safety seat?
BTW, I now have an idea why public-service announcements tell you to put your kids in the back seat but say nothing of putting adults back there: Because, it’s the same “theme” as States that have laws against children riding bicycles without a helmet but no laws against adults riding bicycles without a helmet.
Yup. But see if you can convince your co-worker to sit in the back because it’s safer that away…
Seriously, I just saw TV footage of an accident yesterday. Two adult women were killed when a pickup crossed the center line and plowed into them, head-on. The front of the car looked like it had been completely crushed. However, the back didn’t look to bad. I am forced to wonder if the passenger would have lived if she was in the back seat.
Everthing we do involves some sort of risk vs. inconvienience calculation, and there is no doubt that as a culture we generally consider a higher level of risk to be acceptable for adults than for children. Obviously, the safest thing of all would be to not drive, or to only drive 20 mph, but the inconvience seems disproportianite to the risk.
I have only anecdotal evidence, but my general impression from various junkyards I have been to is that the fronts of cars that end up in such a place are usually considerably more mangled than the backs. It makes sense to want to keep kids away from the mangleing.
I also want to echo what Surprising Woman said: you can let a kid cry for five minutes! People that are disturbed enough be the noise but too fantic to pull over are probably going to be just as distracted and agitated by the same noise coming from the front seat–because it is still going to be there.
On a sidenote, I do have to agree that a carseat belted in the front is still better than nothing. My sister-in-law used to drive around with her six-week old daughter in the infant carrier wedged in between the front seats of her van. When I said something 9I couldn’t keep my mouth shut on this one) she assured me that the girl was wedged in “real tight”–she wouldn’t come loose. This is why we shouldn’t let people opt out of physics.
Exactly. When we had our second child, we originally put both carseats in our little Mercury Tracer. We quickly realized that this was not a good situation. (Ok, we figured ahead of time that it probably wouldn’t be, but this spurred us into action.) So we bought a minivan. The youngest child is in the center, with the older on one side – but since it’s a van, he’s higher up and in less danger because of that. Was it inconvenient to have to shell out the bucks for a minivan? Hell, yes. But the risk factor was such that it was, in our minds, necessary.
I also agree about letting the kid cry or pulling over. I have had to do both at one time or another.
Besides the preferable seating arrangements, minivans are also a safer place to be in an accident than cars are. They’re built on light truck chassis and weigh more than cars do, just like SUVs.
Hmmm … I remember there was a big to-do about how SUVs were making the roads more dangerous for small cars because of their greater weight, but no one ever pointed a finger at minivans for doing the same thing. Maybe this is because people usually buy SUVs to show off their machismo, but buy minivans “for the sake of the children”, so therefore any greater danger posed to other cars by minivans must be beyond reproach.
Probably that, Tracer, plus the fact (I think) that SUV bumpers are up higher than even minivan bumpers (and definitely higher than cars). This means they don’t get too damaged but the other car is in trouble.
Well, we didn’t trade in the Tracer – it’s my car now. I got rid of the Pontiac Sunbird I had before (which was about 10 years or more old). But here’s a scary story for you:
I sold the car through my mechanic (he does that for regular customers). He found a buyer – a customer whose daughter was old enough for a car of her own. That was that. This was about a year ago.
A couple of months ago, there was an accident in a nearby town. At first, it was thought that some teens had been drag racing down both lanes of a two-way road when a pickup truck came the other way and slammed into one of the cars, killing the passenger (who was, of course, in the front seat). It turned out that the driver of the car in which the passenger was killed wasn’t racing but had just passed another car to try to catch up to some friends.
The car in which the passenger was killed was my old Sunbird. The car was severed into two pieces by the force of the accident. The news story described it as: “The back half of the crumpled Sunbird was in the same ditch, with the motor, dashboard and windshield on the other side of the road.”
Just do what I always do, y’all… don’t have kids. It’ll save you a lot of trouble. 'Course, it also means all humanity is screwed in sixty or seventy years… but I figure, by then, cloning and accelerated growth techniques will be perfected and… oh, nevermind…
Seriously, though… David, that’s a pretty creepy story. My car was an old Mercedes… I got into an accident, another car hit me right on the drivers’ side door, and if I was in anything else, I’d have been killed (or at least maimed really horribly).
ANYWAY… not to get off topic (well, okay, I did), but the whole “the front seat is a deathtrap” story is probably based on minor accidents, which are much more common than those that will completely annihilate your car. In a minor accident, the airbags can deploy, causing the aforementioned risk to those smaller occupants in a child safety seat, which is an unnecessary risk. In a major crash, it doesn’t matter where you’re seated, EVERYONE’s screwed.
I think that, logistically, the front seat wouldn’t be that much of an added danger for a kid if there isn’t an airbag. Of course, it’d probably be a hassle to move the seat around whenever you want to have a friend come along. In that case, it probably makes more sense to keep the safety seat in the back.
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