So I couldn't walk away but I couldn't fight this one out any longer... So I posted on the July 2011 board asking those mommas to share info about their 2 year olds that are rf.... And surprisingly they did, a lot of 2011 babies are rear facing! I would say the majority of them! Woohoo! The best was this response that one mom posted, I couldn't have said it better myself
"DD just turned 2 and i will keep Her RFing till she outgrows the limits of her car seat. Hopefully as close to four as possible.
Aside from extreme car sickness, there is no good reason to turn your child FFing before the age of 2, the longer the better.
Research has shown rear facing to be 500% safer up to two years of age. Do benefits disappear after that? Not at all. Rear facing is always safer, even for adults like you and me.
500% may sound like a lot but numbers can be hard to grasp. In 100 collisions of rear facing kids, 8 rear facing children will die or become seriously injured. 92 will walk away fine. In 100 collisions with forward facing kids, 40 will die or become seriously injured. 60 will walk away fine. Those are large differences which help to save lives.
The neck vertebrae of a young child is very delicate due to the whole neck area being underdeveloped. When a baby is born, neck vertebrae is “composed of separate portions of bone joined by cartilage, in other words, the baby’s skeleton is still soft”. The cartilage turns into bone during the first three years of a baby’s life. The hardening process of the bones, called ossification, continues until puberty. Muscles and ligaments in the neck develop in a similar way.
Young children can’t handle the incredibly high forces in a collision while forward facing. Not even at speeds which we adults may think are minor. Rear facing a child give fantastic protection, so great fatalities are difficult to find in collisions with a correctly installed seat.
In a forward facing seat, a child’s shoulders and body are held back by the harness. But neck and head area are thrown violently forward putting tremendous force on the yet undeveloped head, neck and spine. For a rear facing child a collision is relatively undramatic with the whole back of child absorbing the impact forces. Head and neck and pressed back into the seat and remain well protected.
In Sweden, they've practiced ERFing since 1965. The law is 3 and 33 pounds but most Rf till 4. In the past 30 years, there have been under 5 deaths with children who were in a properly installed RFing car seat. Reading further, those deaths were in unsurvivable accidents, usually where the vehicles were submerged in water.
Do your research. When we know better, we do better."