On Car Seats as Contraception
thezvi.wordpress.com
thezvi.wordpress.com
Like many of the other Freakonomics conclusions, this one is at best oversimplified, and at worst actively dangerous. To simply quote it as uncontested fact is ridiculously incompetent.
For convenience, I’ll just link to the breathless (but sourced) assessment of the earlier study by a pediatrician at https://thecarseatlady.com/freakonomics-fallacy-an-economist...
Irrespective of statistics, common sense would dictate that using your neck region to restrain any human at multiple G's impact, is most definitely not a good idea.
The problem comes when you have multiple small children that need an actual fixed car seat.
In my experience it’s harder to find a good narrow booster than a narrow five-point-harness car seat. The problem is that boosters don’t have their own belts and can block the seat belt path if seat spacing is tight.
Yes! Thank you!
They are about as bad as Malcolm Gladwell. And yet I know plenty of finance guys who take it as gospel.
Plus IMO 30 seconds is a better estimate than 2-3 minutes unless they are fighting you or somewhere hard to reach. It’s one check buck and two leg buckles.
I will say that installing car seats is an absolute pain of a task.
Not sure why the "don't drive" sibling comment got flagged out of existence, but bikes, transit, and walking don't have the same hassle as driving with children. They entail different hassles, to be sure, but the "get everyone to sit down and buckle them in" tedium isn't one of them.
Still better than a dead or handicapped for life kid, that would take much more than a few minutes per day
Having kids always has been a logistical nightmare, and increasingly so thanks to modern lifestyles, the real nightmare is having to depend on cars for everything, that's the root of all evil, the rest is just a natural consequence.
Car seats are a minor annoyance. With certain children, managing the headstrong children is time consuming around getting into and out of cars, but car seats themselves are easy.
Unless you are putting them in and and taking them out after every trip, but why would you do that?
These psychological safety burdens - and accompanying negotiations between caretakers - make it so hard to provide mutual aid. We're lucky to have found other parents with similar understandings, but the moralizing on safety makes it hard to even discuss.
They are my biggest investment.
Yes, properly fastening the youngest ones is a hassle, but one I'll happily take again and again as long as necessary.
we already have that.
>Bouldering is a form of free climbing that is performed on small rock formations or artificial rock walls without the use of ropes or harnesses.
A bit of Googling turns up a company doing that [1], but those are not legal in the US. They are legal in Europe, though. Does Europe have looser standards for child car seats? Do US standards preclude doing something like this in the US?
The Multimac 1000 fits 3 kids in the back seat of a Fiat 500.
I’d guess they either don’t want to go through the US regulatory approval process or simply aren’t ready to do so yet. It’s massively painful.
Car seat use reduces the risk for injury in a crash by 71–82% for children, when compared with seat belt use alone.
Booster seat use reduces the risk for serious injury by 45% for children age 4–8, when compared with seat belt use alone.
So you're often left looking for articles or anecdotes that list both specific vehicles with a specific make/model of car seat. It does exist, it is just painful and annoying.
Even shops that sell car seats and will let you "test fit" them rarely have three of the same model to demo.
X
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Otherwise it doesn't fit. So far so good? No! The middle seatbelt isn't long enough so we had to buy an extension, which in theory is illegal in France :-(
And don't get me started on the stupid 'foot trunks'..
Carseats are incredibly wide.
If you’re in a situation as a society where your income as real purchase power is rising then the solution to this problem is to buy another car (which people do anyway) or outsource your transport. At one point the author mentions some people dislike minivans. If avoiding minivans and SUVs is the reason to avoid a third child, I doubt their heart was in it. Most of the top ten vehicles sold this year are large, expensive, SUVs and Trucks.
That’s not the situation we’re in as a country.
Housing is a larger expense and more broadly felt problem than car seats. There are some comparable increases in birth rate linked to decreases in home prices i the linked NBER paper.
Real Wages are flat for most.
Is that car seat really the deal breaker if the rest of expenses for a third child can’t be covered?
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g39628015/best-selling-car...
https://www.nber.org/papers/w17485
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/09041...
Yes, you can't fit 3 of Graco's convertable car seat/stroller/play place/activity centers into a typical sedan, but if you plan ahead you can do it easily.
I suppose now the primary issue is that one might have to plan ahead and buy slim carseats from the beginning, since as I recall it, the process was: buy a baby seat, turn it around, then buy a bigger seat passing the baby seat down for the next one, turn that one around, then buy a second bigger seat, and... that's the point of issue unless one planned ahead--or plans to buy all-new seats.
It is true that you will probably need to plan ahead and buy slim car seats. But even if you don’t, three car seats is still far less expensive than many other child things. Three car seats is less than half as expensive as daycare for a single child for a single month, in my area at least.
Yes but cars and driving are so holy to people. While the effect discovered was small, it seems subjectively true to me that people spend way more time thinking about car and car shit than they ought to.
Car seats are just one example of a barrier.
I completely agree with the comment and I have 4 teenagers.
In fact having children has made me more acutely aware of the issue, not less. Because now I have more things I want to do, and face more barriers of both time and money that I have to trade off.
We’re debating the merits of reducing the bump while ignoring the much much bigger issues.
Because no one is setting their expectations (including child welfare agencies) on “what was practical 100 years ago”.
I think only: can I afford this? What will I need to give up to afford this? Is it worth it?
Car seats are minor over the long haul, for sure, but they're often the first expense parents face. Especially, as is the focus of this article, parents of two children, who presumably already have many of the non-consumable items they need.
Also I'm not sure what this comparison between the number of lives saved and the number of births not happening is worth. Where in the world is it a fine to sacrifice baby lives so that more people can be born? Feels like they are optimizing cattle ^^
They're just highlighting a case where a) they believe regulation is depressing fertility rates and b) the author presents the regulation as not very effective at improving safety outcomes. So the justification for making the change is:
> It is often said that governments can do little to increase the birth rate.
> I find this implausible. We do lots of things as the government that decrease the birth rate. We could Stop It. Or do the opposite.
The article advocates that loosening car seat restrictions for older children is a way the government could improve fertility rates just by ceasing an action it is currently taking ("Stopping It").
Safety regulations are one of those things. Thats why there's been a decades long propaganda campaign against Health and Safety laws and regulations.
https://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/01/let-it-bleed-libertaria...
Cutting to the core of the article, though, is it any wonder that a hypercapitalist society doesn't prefer having children? There's no contract saying that children must contribute back to their parents in any economic way so they are a poor investment compared to bonds or stocks. A large fraction of children go to college (often at their parents' expense) and move out of the local community, newly minted economic units destined to enrich the already super-rich with their labor, which promises no tangible benefits to potential parents. The article touches on the lack of economic incentives for higher fertility but seems to treat it as more of an externality than a fundamental problem. Children used to be a capital investment and are now a cost center.
It seems to me one of the biggest things is the pace of change and potential for criminal charges. Especially considering that many people are likely breaking the laws (not just car seats, but supervision, etc), with no ill effects, and the laws are only selectively enforced. Is there an actual net benefit? And all the while parents have to keep up with increasing and changing laws, which I doubt many do. There's a risk of civil or criminal penalties related to children, and increasing costs (including mental) associated with compliance.
I have a truck. You cannot have more than one rear facing seat in the back if you have two adults in the front. When I was a kid (not too long ago) I was riding without a booster seat well before age 8 and we'd occasionally ride with a friend's family in a station wagon or SUV with the add-on cargo seats. It wasn't unusual to occasionally ride in a pickup bed on private roads, or pile 8-9 people in the old Caprice for short (< 1mi) trips. Safety was a relative term and left to the discretion and best judgment of the participants. I guess it's being increasingly codified, like many other areas of life.
Another thing to point out that many might not know is that the state has an interest in your children and they merely entrust you to raise them to their standards and can take them away if you don't. Many people feel their children are their own to raise as they see fit, but it's more akin to a title of a house - the government owns the rights to the property and merely gives you title to use is so long as you comply with their will/laws.
Edit: why disagree?
Car accidents are the #1 cause of death of kids in Mexico. People have 0 literacy about car seats there.
> I was riding without a booster seat well before age 8 and we'd occasionally ride with a friend's family in a station wagon or SUV with the add-on cargo seats.
This story could have been very different if your car was hit and you were disabled because of, I don't know, something totally preventable.
There are other traffic differences as well. We can't tie all of it just to the car seat. Even with car seats (and other measures not in MX), it's still a leading cause in the US.
"This story could have been very different if your car was hit and you were disabled because of, I don't know, something totally preventable."
Totally preventable? You do understand that even kids in car seats are susceptible, right?. I was in an accident as a child and had no ill effects. We can play the "could" game all day, like outlawing cars would make all traffic deaths preventable.
Do you have any data on the net benefit of the laws? What percentage of people would not use the devices without the laws? Which instances would the devices be beneficial - the article thinks 90% of the issues would be covered at age 4, and note that rear facing is still a safer form of travel, so should we have cars with all rear facing seats except for the driver? Sure there are preventable deaths that could be avoid this way. Where is the line drawn and why? How many people's lives have been ruined by enforcement of the laws.
In the US, the absolute number (not just the rates) of child deaths as vehicle passengers have dropped almost monotically since 1989, to less than half by 2019 what they were in 1989.
> the article thinks 90% of the issues would be covered at age 4,
details vary by state, but beyond age 4, most states only require boosters (to deal with shoulder belt height) which do not have the bulk or other issues of safety seats, not actual safety seats. (In some states, this is actually earlier than age 4.) So, while abandoning rules isn't going to have much benefit on fertility, if the burden of safety seats is the source of the problem you are trying to address.
We are on that trajectory now. No need to do anything special. It's baked into demographics and unavoidable at this point.
The environment will be ok. Concerns about overpopulation destroying sustainability are 'fighting the last war.'
This is a great example of literal survivorship bias
The point is to draw a line somewhere that makes sense. The Overton window has been shifting an a rapidly increasing pace for child "safety" laws in the past two decades or so. If we make it an absolute about "Even one child", then we ignore promoting net benefit and can end up with detrimental effects, which is essentially the point of the article.
As I understand it the rear facing childseats are only required until the age of two. If you can only fit one in the back of your truck, doesn't that mean that really you just need to stagger out your children if you want to have multiple?
On a private road (my example) at low speeds <15mph, it seems acceptable to me, especially with older kids (not talking about <7 or so). This is quite common in some areas and really shouldn't be a safety issue.
"As I understand it the rear facing childseats are only required until the age of two. If you can only fit one in the back of your truck, doesn't that mean that really you just need to stagger out your children if you want to have multiple?"
Which is covered in the article and goes over the inconvenience and how that leads to lower birth rates. For example, as those kids get older and are spaced out you have a logistical issue due to different age groups meaning different friend groups and different sports teams.
If you're responding to my comment about everyone being rear facing in the prior comment, my point is that being rear facing is safer even for adults yet we don't enforce that in car design. Thus the laws are largely not based on safety but on society's views of what is safe enough. With fewer laws, those determinations are left up to the individual. With more laws, society is making that determination and imposing it via force (criminal laws), removing the person's discretion. I think this ignores edge cases, and leads to more people feeling ostracized, powerless over their own life, and oppressed by the masses.
OK, so that's an anecdote entirely unrelated to the question at hand regarding child seats.
> With fewer laws, those determinations are left up to the individual. With more laws, society is making that determination and imposing it via force (criminal laws), removing the person's discretion. I think this ignores edge cases, and leads to more people feeling ostracized, powerless over their own life, and oppressed by the masses.
Well unfortunately for them they are responsible for another human being. It's not just their own self interest in question, and when the other party can't effectively advocate for itself it only makes sense to create minimum standards of care.
Yes, they are responsible for aborher human. The question is who sets those minimum standards and what should they be. If the caregiver can't be trusted with simple everyday things like this, then can they be entrusted with this child at all?
Neither of these were optimal safety choices. We were definitely at a higher risk of death or injury. If everyone did this society wide, the number of child fatalities in traffic accidents *would* be higher. Yes, people who relate such anecdotes and then say, "...and we survived" are literally demonstrating survivorship bias.
Times change and I don't think I'd make these same safety trade-offs with my kids. I'm also not sure taking these kind of risk/reward trade-off decisions out of the hands of parents is a net positive either.
It's hard to talk about whether the current status quo is reasonable because for many of us, that status quo predates us and "wait, you're saying you are FOR more kids dying in car wrecks" is a pretty natural reaction. For that reason, I think it's easier to consider the reasonableness of an incremental, hypothetical change to the current status quo. Imagine a study comes out tomorrow that shows that children in wrecks have a 3% higher fatality rate in cars manufactured before 2015, so a law is passed saying that as of 2024 driving a pre-2015 car with children in it will be a ticketable offense. Is there anything that would give you pause about this scenario, is it an unalloyed good thing, or is it another "I mean, I GUESS it's for the best, it's complicated tbh" situation?