Did you know that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents keep a child rear-facing in their car seat until at least the age of two?
That’s right. Two years old! It sounds crazy, I know, but those are the guidelines as of 2011. It’s no longer on their one year birthday that you should turn the car seat around to forward-facing.ย The reason being is that children are more thanย five times safer when they are riding in a rear-facing car seat.
Five times. Wow! As a parent, that gets my attention.
But how in the world do you accomplish this? How is it possible to keep a child rear-facing until they’re two years old? Won’t staying in a rear-facing car seat drive your toddler crazy?
A new game-changing car seat is the answer to those questions.
The new Graco SnugRide Click Connect 40ย car seat is the only infant car seat that provides rear-facing protection for children from birth to two years old. Is that amazing or what? There’s a car seat that allows you to keep your child rear-facing, as recommended by the AAP, and it has all of these additional benefits to make your life easier:
It includes a kickboard! This will save the backs of your seats from getting filthy dirty when your child puts his or her shoes up against them. The kickboard helps to keep your seats clean. ๐
It has an 8-position base that you can adjust as your baby grows. By adding in this feature, the Graco Click Connect car seat allows you to easily make adjustments to the tilt of the seat to make it as comfortable as possible for your child. For example, the first position is ideal for infants, and the last position would be ideal for your older child to give them the most leg room possible.
It can be used for babies 4 lbs. to 40 lbs. in weight. No more buying multiple car seats for a full two years!
This next feature is one of my favorites! Gone are the days of messing with the straps of the car seat when you need to adjust them as your baby gets older. Or trying to figure out the right way to thread them through again to make the seat more comfortable for your child.
The Simple Safe Adjust harness system on the Graco Click Connect car seat allows you to adjust the harness and the headrest with just one hand! SO easy!
I had the opportunity to attend a fun party to learn all about the SnugRide Click Connect 40, and we’ve been using it for Elisabeth, our 10 month old baby girl.
I’m excited that having this car seat means that we can follow the AAP’s guidelines of keeping her rear-facing until she is two years old in order to keep her safe while riding in the car.
If you’re interested in checking out theย Graco SnugRide Click Connect 40 car seat, at the moment, it is exclusively sold at Babies “R” Us.
What do you think of the new SnugRide Click Connect 40 car seat? What do you think of the the new guidelines? Will you keep your child rear-facing until they’re two years old?
More about the SnugRide Click Connect 40
The Graco SnugRideยฎ Click Connectโข 40 โ the first and only newborn to two-year infant car seat that actually grows with your baby from four pounds all the way up to 40 pounds. The car seat is designed for a parent on the go. The infant car seat can be easily removed from the base and used as a carrier when the infant is small, providing portability and convenience so you can easily move your infant in and out of the car without disturbing them.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recently made the recommendation to keep all children in rear-facing car seats until the age of 2. Graco set out to make this product so parents can keep infants rear facing longer while still keeping them comfortable.
This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Graco.ย I received a free Graco SnugRide Click Connect 40 car seat in exchange for my review. I’m 99% sure my husband and I would have bought one anyway, though. All opinions are my own.
I’m always so happy when I see people spreading the word about keeping kids rear-facing. I happened to read about it on some blogs about four years ago, before the official standards had changed. So I think we turned our first-born around at about a year, but our second son was rear-facing until at least 2, and my daughter is almost 3 and is still rear-facing. Our Britax Roundabout has worked great for this. I will probably turn her around soon, but it really doesn’t seem to bother her. I haven’t had problems with the seats getting dirty, but we have leather seats so that probably helps in that department.
The one problem we did have was with long trips, when the boys would be watching a DVD on the car system and their sister would be craning her neck around trying to see it. That was solved when her granddad bought us a portable DVD player that we hung over the back of the bucket seat that her carseat sits in, so she watches her own movie while the boys watch theirs.
Hi Sarah! Good to know. I think if we would’ve known to keep the kids rear-facing until they were two years old, we would have. Glad to hear that you haven’t had problems with the seats getting dirty either (this is what I was concerned about, especially in the winter with the snow)…I’m sure the leather does help. ๐
The DVD players are a great idea, and I’m sure your daughter is loving having her own. We got DVD players last year on sale during the holidays. ๐
Both of my kids rode rear facing until almost two. My daughter is the oldest and she didn’t weigh 20 pounds until she was about 20 months old so at that time it was a requirement to have the child rear facing until 20 pounds. That was 16 years ago and the car seats weren’t made for such a long child to be rear facing. My son I kept him rear facing because of the weight requirement until he was about 2years old. He had truble with his carseat too as he was getting too long/tall for it but still needed to be rear facing. So it is nice to see improvements with carseat to accommodate a child to be rear facing longer.
Good to know, Shelly. We’ve always just automatically turned our kids forward facing at one year old, because they were around 20 lbs. I hadn’t thought about how many people still had to leave their children rear-facing because they weren’t yet 20 lbs. But it’s actually a good thing that the child was kept rear-facing.
I was surprised by the statistic that kids are more than 5 times safer when riding rear-facing in a car. I think if more people knew that, they’d keep their child rear-facing, too. ๐ I think we need to spread the word more because I know a lot of people don’t even know about the new guideline.