Car Seats as Contraception
journals.uchicago.edu
journals.uchicago.edu
Wouldn't the real cause of the depressed birthrates be the requirement to own a car in order to have children? If you aren't a slave to your vehicle there's no problem with the available space for car seats.
> If you aren't a slave to your vehicle there's no problem with the available space for car seats.
The abstract says the effect is limited to households with a car.
I would also add as a car slave that the kinds of cars large enough to fit the kinds of car seats marketed in the US are tens of thousands more than a compact or mid-size sedan, and that in a mid-size sedan having a car seat in the rear-facing configuration significantly constrains how far back you can put the passenger or driver seat. This is true even for the narrower seats that are designed for three-across seating. And worse, you might not have the latch system or an appropriate kind of seat belt on that third seat.
Or you're one of the millions of people who live in developing countries which have low cost of living and low housing costs. Coincidentally this group has very high birth rates.
The alternative - small, crowded population centres where everyone knows everyone and three, even four generations live in the same household can of course be limiting, even suffocating.
But there's a reason why, for all that the 1950s autonomous nuclear family is held up as some kind of ideal by tradwife fetishists, it's also the milieu in which Valium and sleeping pills became popularised.
Where in the USA do you live where I can support my wife and kids on one income? We'll move immediately.
There are plenty of places that can be afforded on a single income if you work in tech and can work remotely.
Examples: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/10-Regina-Dr-Paris-IL-619... https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/804-N-Walnut-St-Pontiac-I...
So a three-bedroom apartment might not be enough if you have three kids.
It's not that you can't, it's just that it's not the standard of living most western people expect.
My mother - I found out years after I'd left home - was worried that I resented the fact I had a small bedroom while my younger sister got a larger one - but in reality I didn't care at all, she's an artist, she makes stuff which actually exists, of course she needs space; I write software, which conveniently takes up no space, whereas if I'd had to share with her that would be extremely problematic and wouldn't have gone well. I could be in my tiny room and that was enough.
I grew up privileged and had my own space, but a shared space between siblings was normalized. But going into high school with that constraint, it seems stifling. I really have to wonder what effects that lack of privacy / autonomy has on a developing mind. There are probably studies but it's not something I'm about to research.
That said, have 3 kids aged within 5 years of one another and we never had to get a double buggy. The older ones would be OK to walk (3 year olds will walk a pretty long way if you're patient) by the time the youngest got too big to be sling-carried.
It comes down to, dealing with three under-5's single-handed while out and about is pretty hectic full stop. Most places with high birth rates "solve" this by not allowing mums the expectation to be away from the house much, and/or they're multigenerational households where grandma or an aunt can be home with some of the kids.
So to your point, I think it's less the requirement to own a car, more the expectation of a kind of lifestyle which often, though not always, in turn requires one. Childcare for 2 year olds here is often upwards of $2500/month, now that's a contraceptive.
Yes. The one-time setup costs for "properly" raising kids are probably around $30k. All the kids stuff is extra expensive (in the west) and for the kids seats you need a large car (in the west) and there's social stigma against kids sharing a room (in the west), so you also need a larger apartment.
The real money goes to:
1) Healthcare (in the US).
2) Childcare or foregone wages.
3) School/housing location (same thing; either tuition, or spending 20+% more for the same amount & quality of house in a nicer school district [and the ongoing cost of servicing the extra mortgage on that]; you can skip this, but if you can at all afford it, you'll not feel like it's optional)
4) Space. Larger housing and larger cars. You can skip this kind of (larger car is less-optional if you have more than three kids) but at significant cost to QOL.
Wrangling 3 or more toddler and up kids in public can be hectic.
Then there is the time cost of wrangling kids in an out of them. My toddler can easily make it 15 minutes to buckle her in just on her own. A third would mean easily 5 minutes of to get everyone buckled in and only if they are cooperative.
A lot of new parents haven't yet realized that a carseat is wider than the average adult. Meaning that cramped middle seat isn't getting a third seat without very careful consideration and the right vehicle.
It's coming to mainstream seats though. Graco has had the Slimfit3 LX out for a couple years now; we had 6 (3-across in a Toyota Corolla and Honda Fit) and they worked great except for the kids not really liking them. Britax has the Poplar and One4Life Slim; Chicco apparently added the Fit3x when I wasn't looking.
The transportation costs are annoying, but worth it.
So, over here car seats may be a much bigger factor than daycare costs.
You could put two children through the local Montessori nursery for three grand a month, but frankly the parents (and children) there are a bit odd. Nice enough, just a bit odd.
Germany first introduced mandatory child car seat laws on April 1, 1993. [1]
That year, fertility was at 1.28 kids per woman. Since then, it has increased to 1.62.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindersitz
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/deu/ger...
But I would be surprised if car seats are the main driver here in any case.
Once you’ve had to lift a stroller into a “high” bus you’ll not want to do it anymore.
I imagine I'd agree, but is that related? You might have more niche knowledge that I'm not aware of in this context. In my city in Canada, all buses lower upon request
The other major change is that in 1990, you had a reunification of east and west germany. Fertility rates in East Germany were low before reunification and collapsed right after reunification. But they recovered from the early 1990s to the late 2000s. So the 1993 aggregate average is artificially low. In neighboring France, the fertility rate in 1993 was 1.7.
Without going into the specifics of car seats, I do think we overemphasize safety. The article mentions saving 57 children. How much are 57 lives worth? The answer is not infinite - a life has a numeric value, ask any insurance company.
Every safety regulation ought to pass a cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis. Few of them do.
This probably won't happen (at least in open) because there's a risk people will start asking for a cost/benefit analysis for everything. Laws that enable mass surveillance, immigration regulations, military spending, wars, political system.
Sure, the value of 57 lives isn't infinite, but this particular comparison is a totally absurd one to make. Births and deaths are completely morally independent, it's not as if those 57 lives could be substituted using the surplus of births.
> Every safety regulation ought to pass a cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis. Few of them do.
Actually I'm pretty sure that is in fact how safety regulations work.
Nonetheless, the concept of a "cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis" is paradoxical. Values are intrinsically subjective, hence we have democracy.
Of course the number "check out". Industry regulations are typically ghost written by some combination of industry groups, lobbying groups and academia. Who funds those? The industry either being regulated or industry that stands to benefit if some other industry is regulated.
80-100yr ago if you were inclined to screech about fire safety you'd have been citing numbers funded by the.... wait for it.... asbestos industry.
>hence we have democracy.
Democracy is a system for ensuring stable-ish power transfers by giving the people some semblance of control over the process and little more.
I think that's the already the ultimate test for any regulation to pass, as it's up against a huge industry trying to prevent costs of compliance.
Of course, the calculation is not to put a price on a human and then compare this against the cost provided by e.g. a car-company.
When you've lost someone in a car-accident it's not much condolence to know that e.g. an airbag could have saved him/her but "back in 2026 it was deregulated because the car-companies have proven that there's no economic benefit to include them"
I know the economy is always important, but human society also shouldn't be taken for granted.
I think it mostly cancels out since the pro regulation side is inevitably bolstered by those who'll sell more shit if alternative goods get worse for the money and those who make a buck on the compliance process.
>When you've lost someone in a car-accident it's not much condolence to know that e.g. an airbag could have saved him/her but "back in 2026 it was deregulated because the car-companies have proven that there's no economic benefit to include them"
What if it turns out that at the societal level that letting airbags, abs, traction control, etc, etc, etc, be optional is actually better because it puts more people into cheaper newer cars that benefit from other safety engineering even if they don't have airbags and all the expensive electronic stuff?
This sort of stuff wherein one tries to anchor the discussion around whole lives (or some other easy to measure thing that makes for good appeals to emotion) and hand wave away anything else is a huge part of the problem.
The core purpose of regulation is to create better lives for society as a whole.
Human lives being lost is usually considered negative for a society, but just a number in economics for insurances, car-companies, etc.
It's an annoying hindrance for companies to be forced into contributing to the well-being of society, they prefer to decide on that by themselves.
Meanwhile, governments suck at communication with their citizens, and their message is drowned by companies who do marketing every day. So the growing assumption also fueled by companies is that we could have much better stuff if the market wouldn't be regulated.
And yeah, there is surely regulation which should be reviewed, but I don't believe this should be done by putting a price on a human life.
I don't think we would have bike helmets on the street and seatbelts in cars if they wouldn't have been required by regulation, driving down the cost of development and production and making them available for everybody. Even vice-versa: If I'm involved in a car-accident, I would also want the OTHER party to have a seatbelt or a helmet.
Looking how "disruptive companies" find ways to do stupid shit because it's not properly regulated (e.g. skipping mechanical door-handles in car-backseats, creating "digital markets" without equal competition,...) tells me that ESPECIALLY these days empowering regulators to make good decisions and communicate better on them would be more important than having "cheaper newer cars".
But that's just my view...
But each of those things has a real cost, one that is borne by each and every individual, whereas the cost of NOT having them is only borne by the unfortunate.
We live in a society, etc, etc. I think it's worthwhile, or even _more_ important, to look at how these impact other people.
In some hypothetical deregulated world, I can choose to buy a car without seatbelts, air bags, ABS/TCS, reverse camera, etc and take that risk on.
My neighbour doesn't get to choose whether or not they want to take on the risk of me backing over their child. The other people on the road don't get to choose whether they take on the risk of me losing control of my vehicle and slamming into them.
The value question isn't purely economic. Regulations that force a general societal care and consideration over selfish individual choices have value in _allowing us to have a society_.
I can accept an argument that there are societal tradeoffs that we must make that involve the sacrifice of human lives (obviously we should not try to remove risk to the extent that we live in sterile protective bubbles), but we should be honest about what we are doing and not hide behind some phony numbers that mask the fact that money, and hence numerical value, isn't an imaginary construct and that lives are fungible under this value system.
I further think that if we have an honest conversation instead of hiding behind quantitative analysis, we may actually have a productive dialogue about risk tradeoff and accountability. Perhaps if there is a wide gap between the bean counters and the bleeding hearts, there is a third possibility that needs to be explored.
https://journalistsresource.org/economics/value-statistical-...
Note also, that we also often talk about statistically life years and statisicsl quality life years; both of which would value the lives of infants higher than an average life.
https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2d83af582...
And none of this have contributed to us not wanting more than 2 children. That wasn't going to happen regardless of any car seats. People not wanting to have more than a 1 or 2 kids has so many other, more important reasons, I very much doubt that car seat size has much to do with it.
Yes and no. It is a bunch of little and big things that add up to that decision.
It is interesting to see how much the car seat issue adds to the decision making.
Yet, those who opt in do have a different opinion. We got two a decade ago, and then a couple years ago through of FOMO that when we are 45 we'd look back and regret missing the window of having another couple of kids. So we did. I'm 39, have four kids, had to get a bigger car, pay the airline tickets through the nose, spend a lot of time on kids' stuff, and love it. My family is the center of the universe and I'm the happiest and wisest dad alive. Everyone else is childish ;-P
But as they start having kids, you start having kids - and you can roughly keep the same group, maybe get a few, lose a few.
But if you get up to 4 (or more) kids, you start finding ... your group changes to one that includes more and larger families.
With kids, unbelievably, needing some form of car seat until the age of 8~12.. you are limited in who can help with pickup/dropoff/after school programs to someone who borrows your car or is doing so often enough to buy the correct sized car seats for each of your kids. The upper limit being 12 is pretty wild considering we then let them drive at 16.
Oddly of course in the US, if your kid is taking the school bus they are entirely unbelted and without a safety seat from the age of.. 5.
As an uncle to multiple kids under 10, I end up only spending time with them in their own home or when they are brought over.
Contrast that with my upbringing spending time with cousins/aunts/neighbors being driven around by whoever I was staying with for the afternoon.
So the guidelines say one thing, but I'd be surprised if a majority of parents are still putting their kids in them even by age 10, let alone 12.
In the UK the limit is 135cm, which is about the right height for the average 9-year-old, so you're talking about a very small 12-year-old indeed - a good 15cm shorter than average.
In NSW the guide is the person should be > 145cm which is somewhere between age 9 and 14 for girls.
https://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/roadsafety/parents/child-ca...
So I guess you need to get something from the early 80s.
Such a car would make for a great product to sell to parents of teenagers, so you can lend them the car but at least make it difficult to fornicate without consent of the king.
I have often thought that car seats are one of the major drags of modern parenting. This study apparently (I don't have time to read it, too busy with kids lmao!) confirms my suspicions.
It is unfortunate that every policy change around them is trading some amount of convenience for every smaller risk eliminations. It is essentially impossible to say perfectly rational things like "I think children should be put in this slightly riskier type of car seat for convenience reasons."
Even if laws are relaxed, there is the peer/manufacturer pressure. As a real example, I think it is pretty annoying to have my three year old facing backwards. It would be somewhat more dangerous to have them facing forwards, but a substantial improvement in quality of life for me and for the child. The manufacturers compete based on max weight that they support/allow/claim for rear facing, something like 45 pounds. So a family member such as a spouse allegedly has decided that the child ABSOLUTELY needs to be rear facing until they reach that weight. That may not happen until age five! By this time there may be manufacturers inching up to 60 pounds rear facing.
The only possible relief I can envision is that computers become so proficient at driving our cars that there are essentially no accidents. Then we may be allowed to sit unbuckled holding our children!
I'm not convinced it's actually safer to have kids in the back. Sure they're safer in an accident, but when I drove another car with rear seats I found myself constantly looking back to deal with the child thus more likely to cause an accident. Yes maybe you should just neglect your child while driving, but they will exact penance if you do so, by non-stop screaming so loud you can't hear emergency vehicles or other possible road hazards.
Studies make so many invalid assumptions (and usually don't even state them) to force the data / statistics to fit clean a/b or null testing.
But to put a dent in the status quo, we really need a greenlight to just dump however many kids in the back again, no matter the number of kids or seatbelts.
And before anyone gut reacts to this- ask yourself why doing that with schoolbuses still isn't a problem?
Because school buses are very large and heavy and the passengers are high off the roadway. Buses also need to stop at all railroad tracks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_South_Jordan_train-bus_co...
I thought that a major reason for placing children in back seat was because of the air bags in the front seat representing a danger to them when they deploy.
(But maybe kids don't trigger the weight needed to activate the passenger side air bag anymore?)
Of course, she drove that car often enough too; not sure why she felt having the driver-side airbag enabled all the time was safe, but not the passenger-side airbag. (Mom was... often inconsistent with how she reacted to her fears.)
Pickup trucks without a backseat have long had the ability to manually disable the passenger airbag.
It might be due to me being in Europe, but every car I've ever seen with an airbag for that seat has had it along with a sticker warning about it in the sunvisor area.
It's based on size (shoulder height measured in sitting position) not age.
I think some 5-point seat belts allow a much wider design zone so won't need boosters by the time the children outgrow the front-facing bucket seat.
Laws are about control[ling citizens]. Politicians are not willing to give up control.
Every family I see with at least 2 kids has a minivan, so maybe we can discuss if minivans are causal.
So we went for (especially in Europe) rather limited subset of cars where all 3 of the 2nd row seats are proper sized, with Isofix on each of them.
Usually same makes/models that offer the option of additional 2 seats in the 3rd row.
145K is roughly the population of Syracuse, NY or Midland, TX. That is far more than the absolute number of US military deaths in World War I (116,516 per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...).
It’s really a perfect allrounder - looks nice, is luxurious, more than enough space for us, even drives like a sports car (or at least as close to a CUV can hope to).
Then said cousin had a baby. People around him scolded him for not selling the car for something much bigger - like a Kia Telluride or a Honda Pilot. But he is doing just fine.
that's one of the bigger problems in todays society. people acting like they know better and judging others for doing things differently.
"Small town" attitudes; grandmothers judging young mothers; elders complaining about youth...
The key is to have people in your life who understand the struggle and don’t just rattle off “easy ways” to solve all your problems.
Jfc my parents raised me and my brother out of a fucking Buick sedan. Modern Americans are spoiled as fuck.
The Focus even had a small aftermarket amp and sub in the trunk. Everybody and their things still fit, although the sub did come out for long trips for that extra cargo.
The Golf Wagon that came later still fit us and the dog. About 90lbs of her would fit in the back and she could drool all over the kids.
Sometimes I wonder what I am missing.
These two options are not equivalent. I will take 8,000 3rd children not being born over 57 kids dying in car crashes every time.
Me and my SO were considering a third for a brief moment, but it was the amount of living space and our age (35+ for the mother) that ultimately made us decide against it.
I was totally in for getting a new vehicle BTW.
Interestingly I have two siblings and we had a serious and expected downgrade as a family in living space just when I started attending grade school - a smaller apartment than mine currently.
As for the car seats the regulations came in when my younger sister was in 3rd grade or so, so he just decided to wing it without the seats.
Families of 5+ have very few options in terms of cars, among them the Peugeot 5008 - reviled both by reviewers and owners alike.
I have 3 babies (ages 0, 2, 4 when we started) in a 2016 Subaru Outback for 1.5 years now and it's been mostly fine. I have 2 "slim" seats from Clek, one is a booster, and it's really not a big deal. I cannot imagine deciding to give up a child because of a minor inconvenience like this.
Buying slim car seats is just not that expensive compared to buying a new car, so we did that. It's hard to believe that people who really want 3 children cannot make it work.
I don't think the article was suggesting that parents sit down together, ask each other "hey, should we have a third kid?" and one of them says, "well, I would say yes, but the only downside I can think of is that fitting a third child seat will be really hard, so let's not do it."
Parents who decide not to have the third kid certainly have other reasons for not wanting one, and the difficulty of a third car seat is a contributing factor, not the only consideration.
And not to disparage you or cast aspersions, but if you think about why you do not have a fourth kid it’s likely that “have to get new vehicle” could be part of it.
Of course, when you come around from the other end (fourth is on the way, what do) you then change the equation and work it out.
To test the theory presented in the study, we should issue minivans with car seats to new parents; since they have a vehicle large enough they should statistically have more kids than the median.
I imagine the typical car accident in which three 'car seat age' children are involved, and at least one is killed. Then I imagine the typical event where a family decide against a third child. I feel quite a substantial qualitative difference! I certainly wouldn't claim one offsets the other.
Personally I don't know if there's any multiplier I'd accept. I find reduction of suffering and trauma much more important to me than offset creation of life and opportunity.
But it is an interesting thing to think about. Sure, 57 children dying would create a lot of misery for a family (and extended family), but would 8,000 other children in the world, presumably giving their families happiness, somehow "make up for it"?
Feels odd to think about it in those terms. Balancing/trading lives is a dirty business.
When I was growing up in the 90s with 2 siblings we had a small hatch. When I had my second child we had to upgrade from a small hatch to an SUV because we simply couldn't fit a car seat behind the driver. Even now, I'm not sure if a third would fit.
Sure, the SUV itself and the extra padding on the car seats might make my children safe in collisions with other big cars, but if we were all still driving hatches then maybe none of that would be necessary.
We are in the stupidest arms race.
(Father of 4, 39 y.o., non-religious.)
> I put my kid up front in my truck that had zero back seats, only a couple people said anything and I told them to pound sand, it certainly wasn't illegal.
Yeah because at that point you're basically advertising that you don't give a shit what they think and so you're a lost cause to the kind of people who'd try and guilt you.
I bet if you showed up wearing both a front and rear kid carrier while riding a motorcycle they would have not said a word and avoided I contact with you entirely.
He already said he told people who were hand wringing to pound sand. What's the point of more hand wringing?
Also, trucks from the 90s typically even have passenger airbags.
They've been known to knock children's head off even. Because of that, they started putting switches in trucks to disable the passenger airbag, and also working to reduce deployment force, esp. if the weight in the passenger seat was low.
It's almost Darwinistic: Offspring has an increased potential of survival and faces less threats, so reproduction is organically adjusted to prevent overpopulation.
5 kids in a car, held, seated, seatbelted, any-which-way. Like on a train.
Maybe people just avoid 3 kids, because it’s hard enough raising one or two kids.
Their causal explanation relies on two additional observations that seem pretty hard to explain by other theories: the effect disappears for single-parent and carless households.