Can I secure my child safety seat to my front-facing jump seats?
If the pickup truck has front-facing jump seats, then the question is, "does the safety seat fit there?" We recommend that at least 8% of the base of the safety seat be supported by the vehicle seat, and, in some pickup trucks, the designers have put little tables or almost like beverage holders that are designed to take part of the weight of the safety seat. And they will tell you in the owner's manual, "put this down before you put the safety seat in." The next question is, "does the safety seat fit there?" We're not concerned with a rear-facing safety seat touching the back of the front seat. However, if you have a newborn, you may not be able to get that 45-degree angle to allow the child's head to lie back naturally. Sometimes you can make the safety seat fit properly if it's an infant carseat that can be used with or without the detachable base. Remove the base, make sure that the handle is either allowed to be fully up or fully down in the driving position, and you may find that you can get the space so that the seat will fit in there. When the child's older and can sit more upright then you may not have the same kinds of problems, even though the seat is rear-facing. We also find in some of the smaller pickup trucks that children in forward-facing seats have a problem because their legs are so jammed up against the front seat that they're literally uncomfortable. And an uncomfortable child is not a happy passenger. So you want to check for that as well. Tethering a forward-facing seat in a pickup truck is especially important. Some of the data show that children who are forward-facing in the back of a small pickup truck have a much higher rate of injury because many people do not tether them and some of the older pickup trucks don't have tether anchors and people have not put them in. So those are the kinds of factors to think about.
