Center Seating is Safer

Published: 5/28/2008

The passenger side of the rear seat may be the favorite spot for car seats, but a review of accident and insurance data by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania has found that it’s not the safest. They looked at car crashes in which children under four were involved. Children who were placed in the center of the back seat had a 43% lower risk of injury than children placed in either of the more popular rear side-seat positions.

Researchers also found that while about 40% of infants were placed in the rear center, this percentage went down as the children got older, so that less than 20% were being placed in the safer seat by age three.

Oddly, parents who drove minivans were two and three times less likely to put their children 0-3 in the safer center spot than parents driving passenger cars and SUVs, perhaps because of the greater seating options in the rear of a minivan. 

What’s the take-home? Any use of an approved child-restraint system will provide good protection in the case of an accident. But proper positioning can make it even better. While it’s easier to make visual contact with a child strapped behind the passenger seat, your child will be much safer from impacts from the side (and in fact, from any direction) if you click his child-restraint system into the center seatbelts.

Pediatrics, May 2008