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Comment by erulabs | Hacker News Reader

Kids are certainly less likely to be injured these days - but car seats for a dollar! Raising kids in the last 100 years makes normal consumer inflation look like a cute joke - modern car seats are easily 200x more expensive!

It’s a horrible actuary table to make, especially as a parent, but the engineer in me does some napkin math:

A) Number of children killed in car seat accidents

B) number of children not born due to increased financial burden of any given child

If B > A, we’re down net-children. Is “more kids” better than “safer kids”? Who’s to make a judgement like this?

It’s a gruesome math - and not one that applies to the financially well off: if you can afford it, you’re not complaining about increasing your child's safety.

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It's not just about financial costs, it's also the physical space limitations.

Cars generally can only fit 3 carseats. Regardless of equipment costs, that makes it infeasible for parents to have a 4th child. They wouldn't be able to go anywhere.

This by itself has prevented thousands of births.

I've known people for whom this was a major factor in a decision to not have another child. They are always the most thoughtful, low time preference people whose kids would benefit society the most.

This was still a problem in the 80s after mandatory seatbelts came in and cars got narrower. Some people say that 3 across is too hard with a normal car but I’ve found that even with a small car you can get 3 in without much trouble if you just get narrower seats.

In the early 70's we'd drive down to Cornwall on holiday with my cousins - 3 adults and 3 kids squashed into a bog standard saloon car. It seems completely inconceivable now.

The cars with more than 5 seats do exist. If cost is not an issue as you suggest, it is pretty feasible to have 4+ children. It is even easier if you are not aiming to have them born in a rapid succession. Older kids can ride upfront.

Sure, but they are vans or large SUVs. You have a lot less choice as you can't look at most cars, and they generally use more fuel.

Just going from 2 to 3 kids shocked me at the cost increase, and we already had a minivan (hotel rooms sleep 4, so now we have to get 2 rooms or a suite). There are a lot of other things that go up a lot more than you would expect when you have more than 2 kids. Kids eat free is normally each parent can have one free kid.

Overall kids are not very expensive, and I'm glad I have them. However there are a number of things we can't do anymore. Family memberships are well worth it for us since most of them are one price no matter how many kids you have, and thus cheap entertainment for the rest of the year.

A lot of these car seat laws go until the kids are like 8-10 years old. So you'd have to spread the kids over a 12-13 year span. This isn't biologically feasible unless one starts having kids at 22, which isn't usually a great idea.

Did you read the same essay as me? https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-car-seats-as-contraception

You can buy a car seat that meets the U.S. federal standards for about $60. Sure it won’t be as padded or have the maximum safety or have lots of cupholders, but it will do the job and be much safer than what I had as a kid.

You can also (in the UK at least) buy a second hand 'good brand' for about £20 from Facebook marketplace, or free if you're lucky.

You can't get one from eBay or a charity shop because ridiculously they're not allowed to sell them in case they're unsafe (eg they've been in an accident), but I imagine the actual risk to the child of gambling on a second hand one is miniscule.

We've had all ours second hand, 5 in total including ones bought for the grandparents cars, and we've spent less than £80 in total

In the US secondhand car seats are almost impossible to buy because the expiration date on car seats is so short. You sometimes can't even reuse car seats for a second child because everybody knows that a seat manufactured before 2020 is a total deathtrap and there have been so many safety innovations it is missing.

"total deathtrap" is a wild exaggeration.

The expiration dates are to force you to keep buying them instead of re-using what you already have.

> The expiration dates are to force you to keep buying them instead of re-using what you already have.

Maybe. I do think that the foam they use for impact absorption[1] has a limited life, and degrades over time.

[1] I assume it's the same or similar foam they use in motorcycle helmets, which degrade over time. I personally won't use an old helmet (say, 4 years), even if it has an expiration date in the future (which I also never check - I know when I buy it, so I know when I am going to replace it).

The foam is styrofoam. I've had to tear the seats apart several times to clean bodily fluids out of them, I'm well acquainted with the construction.

> "total deathtrap" is a wild exaggeration.

Sarcasm ;-)

Those expiration dates generate so much waste. We just give ours away on craigslist.. better than a landfill.

Car seats for a dollar when median family income was about $3,500 a year. It's about the same.

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