What do you find confusing about buying car seats for your kids?

Hi all!

Here at madeformums, we want to write a piece on car seat buying and so we want to know what do YOU find most confusing or difficult when buying or choosing a car seat for your little one?? 

Send over your answers and opinions over to me at mfm.freelance@magicalia.com

Iformation needs to be made clearer,especially which seats fit well in which cars,i know there are alot of car makes and alot of car seat makes but they should make the information easier to get hold of.To many cars have seats in them that dont rearly fit properly.

Information should be clearer on extended rear facing as no one tells you it's safer, you have to stumble upon the information yourself.  Many parents are unaware you can purchase group 1 & 2 rear facing seats and think they're doing the correct thing putting their child forward facing, when in actual fact they're putting their childs life in danger!  Midwives, health visitors, retailers and manufacturers should be advising this and all information needs to be made clearer as said above.

I agree with Linsey! There is absolutely no information about extended rear facing car seats in any of the major retailers and as it is 5x safer than turning your child forward facing at 9 months you would think this info would be readily available to all parents. It would also be helpful if retailers actually stocked them rather than having to scour the internet and not being able to see it before you buy it.

ERF all the way! Retailers should be knowledgeable about this and the general public should be informed on the safety of extended rear facing in comparison to forward facing. Ok, not everyone wants to rear face, and many people do chose to forward face despite being armed with the facts, but at least then they are given a choice. If people don't know about ERF then the cannot make that choice.

Retailers should not be encouraging parents to change their kids over into a forward facing seat at 9kgs when in reality the babies are well within the weight and height limit for their infant carriers.

We have a car with two three way seat belts in the rear and one lap belt only.  I was looking into changing our car when we were expecting our third child until I found out there are some Britax car seats that can go with a lap belt only - saved myself a fortune!  Only problem was finding someone in Mothercare who knew that you could fit the seat with lap belt only and show me how to do it - that took ages!

main problem that we had was finding something for our little boy when he was ready to move from one stage seat to the next! He was a big baby born and continued with that trend throughout meaning that he reached the weight and height limit much sooner than the age recommendation to move to the next seat. This caused me so many problems, some advisors at stores told me that i had to wait until he was the right weight AND age and then others advised that it was weight and not not. The whole thing was so confusining!

It has happened again when we have moved him out of a harness based seat, some advice was to keep him in there until he was 4, some advice was based on his weight. I specifically asked two seperate people in the same shop (mothercare!) at what point the harness based seats become unsafe, two different lots of advice, one told me that the harnesses werent safety tested after 18kg and the other said that was nonsense and he would be fine in there!

All so confusing, just wanted him to be safe and seems so complicated!

Hi all!

Thank you so much for sharing all your comments with us!

We've taken your thoughts and concerns to the car seat manufacturers themselves AND safety expert RoSPA to get their advice and answers. Check out what they told us here.

Hope you find this useful!