Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

I fully concur on the practicality. The only vehicle more versatile than a minivan is full-size van (my family's conversion van growing up was insanely useful).

Why did the fullsize van fall out of style? (Assuming it did)

It doesn’t seem much bigger than the other goliath SUVs and pickup trucks that saturate our US streets.

We actually got it because it meant we could more easily pack more things to burning man every year. Since then we've done tons of road trips all over the country, and build the back of the van into a bed.

Love that car. Hoping to upgrade to a hybrid with the comma.ai autopilot eventually.

I guess maybe they are less comfortable than traditional car seats, but since car seats are basically build like lazy-boy recliners, that seems unsurprising.

Our kids have never complained about the comfort or lack-thereof. They seem to have pretty equivalent comfort when compared to the back seat itself as far as I can tell.

Financially, no it isn't unreasonable. But it's an added bit of friction to a decision we are already on the fence about.

I think that's the entire point of the article. Adding friction to the decision on whether to have more kids leads to people having fewer kids.

Overpopulation is not a thing anywhere in West.

The rate of children deaths or severe injuries caused by motorbike accidents must have been over the roof in these countries.

It's a pleasant distraction from sitting in a fluorescently-lit cubicle getting diabetes, and facing the dread of going home to another night's existential crisis.

Twist that throttle and there's a gentle tap on the shoulder and a whisper, 'hey buddy, just wanted to remind you that you're actually alive'.

I'll even give a pass to the neighborhood kids who stole the VW badge (yay Beastie Boys!) ....... You know you're out there ... you might now be the CFO for a mid-size logistics company specializing in a modern, flexible forward-thinking unrivaled logistics service but back then my dad was NOT happy that morning when he discovered the badge was missing.

edit: but neither are sedans

[1] I remember reading about a volkswagen bus that had been modified heavily with Porsche components to the point it could drive and accelerate better than any van had a right to.

Suburban 41.5 ft³, 144.7 ft³

Suburban is almost 2 feet longer.

The thing that finally turned me off to SUVs was when I managed to find an upright piano for $200, and none of my friends with SUVs could help me move it -- I ended up borrowing my mom's minivan (with the seats taken out). At that point I decided that sure, an SUV looks more "manly", but I'd rather have a vehicle that can actually get the job done.

Not meaning to counter your point, just pointing out that there are some significant culture differences between metropolises/smaller cities/countryside within the same country

I find renting a car in Tokyo super easy. It enables so many things like small day trips. We got one last week to go to the zoo. Often it’s easier to rent a car than take the train to Saitama. So even when you don’t own a car it’s still very accessible and affordable.

Per the article, minivans kinda suck in the US. Japanese ones are much cooler. I think there wouldn’t be as much minivan stigma in the US of Japan exported some of those designs.

The other point is that you would have to have pretty large generation gaps to have child care while the child is still young if depending on Medicare. Once they're older they generally can stay home alone for a bit. Medicare age is 65. So for example, the grandparent would need to give birth to the parent at age 32.5 and the parent would have to give birth to the child at age 32.5. That would be for the oldest child, so you would be giving birth even later in life for the other children. I believe pregnancy after age 34 is considered to be a geriatric pregnancy.

If you take the generational gap the other direction, then you could have great grandparents providing child care if the next generation starts at 22. Higher education and financial stability might be a barrier in this scenario.

Then if we are talking about raising the birth rate, how sustainable is this model when families have 3 or more children? Meaning 1 set of grandparents would be responsible for 3 sets of parents assuming this model is used on a wide enough scale to affect the birth rate. This is exasperated is using the great grandparent example.

The line of thinking here is that feminism caused 2-worker households, which doubled the workforce, which caused wage stagnation. Basically that doubling the workforce crashed the price of labor, but companies were unable to reduce everyone's salaries, and instead stagnated wages until inflation caused them to fall to the new price of labor.

I find it crass to blame feminism for that, though. Women should have always been free to join the workforce, and the problem is really 2-worker households, not that women are able to work. I think single-worker households address some of these issues, but there's no reason to point and say women were the problem. It's just as valid for the wife to go work and the husband to take care of the house.

Single-worker households aren't going to make a comeback, imo. For one, we, as a society, don't really respect homemakers. It's unskilled labor, and we grant it about as much value as most unskilled labor. And the more likely you are to be able to afford having a single-worker household, the more drastic the gap in prestige between the worker and homemaker becomes, which creates a weird power dynamic. I.e. if you're a hotshot lawyer and your wife stays at home, that's a huge gap in how you're perceived by other people. The second reason is that wages have effectively fallen through stagnation and inflation. Even if we forced all households to only have a single worker tomorrow, I'm doubtful wages would rise to where they might have been. Third and finally, a lot of homemaking is stuff people don't really want to do. Time with the kids is great, but does anyone really enjoy vacuuming, or cleaning the bathroom, or doing dishes? This might just be my perspective bleeding through, but the work itself seems awful. And worse yet, you do it either almost entirely alone, or while children are playing/screaming/fighting around you. It's physically demanding, and generally not mentally stimulating.

Longer-term, I would bet that the solution to this is a) more optimized services (i.e. a cleaning service that cleans all the houses on your street, like landscaping people often do), and b) robotics that are able to handle small bits of this. Roomba is a good example. They're reasonably effective at vacuuming. Give it a decade and they'll probably be able to actually replace vacuuming. We will also need a way for people that can't afford the upfront price to have one, which will probably come forth in the form of a subscription (give us a $100 deposit, and then we'll charge you $1 every time it runs).

Getting a larger Porsche or BMW or Mercedes is going to be harder than getting a larger used Hyundai or Kia. At the extreme, you're just out of luck; there is no Ferrari with more than 4 seats.

Combine that with requirements to keep kids in various car seats and booster seats until they hit arbitrary age and weight limits, which stretch out longer and longer all the time, and it's still a problem.

See https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/research/the-rise-of-th...

That massive green chunk is for crossovers, which typically have space for two adults and two car seats. Fitting a third means graduating to a full-size SUV (or minivan), which means a significantly more expensive vehicle (assuming similar trim levels, etc).

Having had two kids in the age where they needed large car seats, trucks are no help at all and even fairly decent sized SUVs don't handle more than two well. Car seats for young children are a significant issue, and I suspect almost anyone whose had two or more children under the current safety regime would both recognize that fact and likely consider it before intentionally having a third.

> From a pure financial standpoint, I'd look more to the cost of education, healthcare, and housing.

Young children don't necessarily have a big impact on housing costs (they can share some easily), often because of the structure of health insurance costs don't have much impact on healthcare costs after the first, and education costs are largely deferred if you aren't going private/homeschool. Day care costs / career impacts are probably more significant than any of those given the frequency of two-working-parent families, but car transportation logistics are quite palpable.

(“Source”, have two kids under 5.)

Trucks are a mostly useless metric here. Many of those are work trucks, and most won't fit car seats for three kids. While Americans buy lots of SUVs, many Americans do not have one, and for those, transporting three kids is indeed a challenge.

> From a pure financial standpoint, I'd look more to the cost of education, healthcare, and housing.

Housing definitely comes into play, but I don't think the other two end up being major factors in the decision because they are so far out. In the US, you literally cannot leave the hospital with your baby if you don't have adequate transportation and an approved car seat. So Americans are made acutely aware that they need to have a transportation solution for their family right now before choosing to have a baby.

Healthcare is a non-issue for many because their employer-provided insurance covers as many kids as they have. Education is somewhat far down the road and fairly fungible so it's less likely to be a showstopper.

But also partly from a social/environmental point. Two kids means we replace ourselves when we die.

Yes, if you get a Honda Civic you're going to struggle. But sales of sedans are absolutely swamped by SUVs and trucks. The best selling car in America by a long shot is the F-series pickup truck, with about 900,000 units sold. You can easily fit three child seats in it[0]

Oh, the number two and number three best selling vehicles are the RAM 1500 truck and the Chevy Silverado, at 633k and 575k. The Silverado is a bit smaller, but it too will fit three seats[1] across. You have to get to number eight in the list before you find a sedan at all, the Toyota Camry. You have to get to nine and ten on the list before you start finding sedans that would get uncomfortably tight fitting three seats, specifically the Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla, and even those will fit three if you're careful in your shopping. The top selling car that I'm pretty comfortable you simply could not fit three car seats in is the Nissan Sentra at number 19, with only 184k sales last year.

Now, 184K sales isn't nothing. There are clearly cars sold in America that will not fit three car seats. But the sales of those cars are dwarfed by large trucks and SUVs. In 2019 Ford sold more f-series trucks than the top three sedans combined. And that's before we consider the sales of three row SUVs which can easily fit 4-5 child safe seats in them.

So, if Americans are willing to buy massive vehicles capable of seating three seats safely by the literal millions, how in the world is that consistent with "the cost of upgrading to a car capable of seating three seats is a major barrier to having more children"?

0 - Here's a list of all the child seats that'll fit three across in a F-150: https://www.thecarcrashdetective.com/3-across-installations-...

1 - https://www.thecarcrashdetective.com/3-across-installations-...

Not even lack of, just less need to have three children in them at once.

Not exactly. Lighter weight occupants are not supposed to be in the front seat wearing a seatbelt. The same places you're getting the warnings for not placing child seats in the front seat will also tell you not to put children in the front seat.

They try to plug it as a safety thing as a way to protect ignorant consumers from themselves.

Can’t grow forever in a physical system with constraints.

But more than that, even the least capitalist economy is going to have trouble if the ratio of young healthy workers drops too low.

Roy Beck here is far more articulate than I could be in the 6.5 minutes I have to type this answer.