A new study showing the potential for children in rear-facing car seats to hit their heads during rear-end crashes worries some safety experts, who say they’re concerned it will wrongly discourage parents from keeping children in the safest rear-facing position.
The study, published in the October issue of the Journal of Traffic Injury Prevention, found that an infant-sized crash-test dummy registered serious head injuries when its rear-facing car seat pitched forward — toward the back of the vehicle — in rear-end crash tests. Test videos show the top of the car seat and the dummy’s exposed head being thrown into the back of the vehicle seat in which the car seat was attached. The estimated head injuries were more severe, the study found, when the car seat was attached via the vehicle seat’s lower “LATCH” anchors compared with seat belts.
