How Our Family Fits 5 Kids and 4 Car Seats Into a Single Vehicle

For nearly a decade, you could find me or my husband bent over some fussy car seat, trying to install a base for an infant seat, or worse, fighting with a convertible car seat to ensure it was tight enough. What changed with my final baby was the discovery that there is a better way.

The mental gymnastics that went into determining the best car seat setup was exhausting, and involved a complex drawing based on who goes where, when, and what seats they’d need. Ultimately, the seats we chose were the most helpful in multiple scenarios. 

Here’s an example: Our booster seat has a back that pops off, making it a backless booster for older kids. We selected it because it converts between the two, so if our 5-year-old is bringing a friend along to a practice, we can pop the back on again and be able to accommodate a wider range of younger kids.

We’ve prioritized not only lightweight seats, but also those with a slim width, so we can fit three in a row if we need to. This is especially true for our day-care provider, who takes our kids on outings and needs our rear-facing and forward-facing convertible car seats to be the slimmest possible models. As any caregiver of multiples knows when playing car-seat Tetris, every inch counts.

Given this, I’ve landed on three brands that consistently offer slim, easy-to-install, user-friendly car seats for the toddler to preschool years where the five-point harness reigns, and my favorite booster seats for after that. Those include:

Britax Poplar Convertible Car Seat: This is only 17 inches wide. You can also consider an additional similar model, the Britax Marathon ClickTight Convertible Car Seat.

Graco SlimFit3 LX 3-in-1 Car Seat: It has two cup holders!

Graco TurboBooster 2.0 Highback Booster Car Seat: The TurboBooster 2.0 becomes a backless booster for older kids. I love the retractable cup holders on the front corners of the base of these for optimal space-saving.

These car seats don’t have to be the slimmest ones around, because you can still use my next trick.

As my due date for my fifth baby approached, I looked around our already crowded minivan and, after deciding that it wasn’t big enough, traded it in for an SUV. But, a few months later with a much larger car payment than I wanted, I realized we’d just gained a few more inches, and none in any real places that mattered. For example, we had an extra seat in the bench format in the second row, but kids were launching over the seat to get to the back because all the car seats made it difficult to use the reclining feature.

We took the loss and went back to a minivan, investing in a newer model—the 2024 Honda Odyssey—that allowed second-row seats to move left to right in the car, not just front to back. Now I can push the baby in an infant or convertible seat toward the second captain’s chair in the middle row when needed, such as if we are on a long trip and someone is going to play with her or hand her toys.

So, as the saying goes, bigger isn’t always better, a lesson I learned the hard way when it comes to fitting our family of 7.

It’s not whether three car seats fit side by side; it’s whether you can configure them to do so. For example, when you select who will sit by whom, take into account a few things: who gets along (and doesn’t), which kids get in and out most frequently, who needs help, and how your seats themselves can and can’t move.

I care most about placing the most difficult kids closest to the door, such as the toddler who refuses to get into his seat. Because it’s always a battle, I don’t want to be crawling into the back of a minivan every time he yells he’s a “big boy” and tries to get into a booster instead. So he’s right by the door.

“One of the tips if you have to do three across is that we tell you to alternate orientations,” Thomas says. “So if you have an infant seat that’s rear-facing, you don’t want to put another rear-facing seat right up against it because you can think about it almost like a puzzle—the pieces will fit better if they’re opposites.” We do this alternating strategy whenever possible as well.

We shuffle all our car seats between multiple cars—mine, my husband’s, my mom’s, and our day-care provider’s, to name a few—which means there’s a lot of stuff in our garage.

Given this, like other home projects, the car seat conundrum also led to a trickle-down effect of needing to get anything extra out of our car and garage to make space. For example, sometimes we’re transporting a bigger kid who doesn’t need a car seat, or another adult is in the third row, meaning a car seat needs to ride in the trunk/cargo area when not in use. 

To solve this, we looked up, using our vertical space like never before. First, we realized how limited our “extra” room would be in the van when we were traveling, and opted to use a Thule Motion 3 cargo box to house our beach gear, camping bags, suitcases, and a travel baby bed. No amount of shifting and rethinking would fit all our stuff, with all of us, in the van comfortably for a trip.

In addition, to store the extra car seats and van seats not in use, and to preserve their quality instead of leaving them on the garage floor, we got a Husky Adjustable Height Garage Ceiling Rack. We also anchored large hooks into the garage wall to hold strollers that would have otherwise taken up space in the trunk/back cargo area of the van. 

Emily Oster, ParentData scientist and CEO, once taught me that there is no secret awesome Option C that you’ve been searching for when it comes to making decisions. When you are talking cars, car seats, strollers, and storage gear purchases, there might not be a perfect solution, especially with more than three kids. Instead, it comes down to prioritizing what’s safe, and what’s easiest for you. As I’ve come to find out, the kids aren’t going to remember where they sat and bickered with their siblings in the car. But I’m going to remember if I was stressed and overwhelmed by baby gear, or if I was using it to serve my family and myself to the best of my ability, which is enough.