This is an actual conversation I had to have with my wife, having a third kid definitely requires a larger vehicle as the vast majority of cars today simply don't work for a family of five. Child car seats are too wide and the backseats of most cars are too narrow, and the price jump to a vehicle that would be able to handle three child car seats at once is enormous. Throw in some dogs, a couple pieces of luggage that any nuclear family would have to tote around, plus a stroller and it becomes prohibitively tight.
It took me MONTHS of shopping and playing child-seat-jenga in various car dealership lots before I finally found a sedan that was actually able to hold everything (thank you, Volkswagen, for making an actual family sedan that could fit a family!).
I replaced my 3-series BMW with a Honda Odyssey, and I've spent two years singing its praises. Part of the problem is that we have created a culture that uses cars as a form of self expression, and many early parents aren't ready to "be" a minivan. But the minivan is what you actually want as a parent: room for six people of any size, or four people and at least twice as much cargo as an SUV, with safe, remote control doors that can be operated by kids. It's a living room on wheels, including the TV.
Honda is trying to bridge the identify gap a little with paddle shifting, ventilated seats, and almost 300hp, but really we should try to step back from seeing the car as an expression of who we are, and try to optimize for the functionality that we use every day. As much fun as it was to drive the BMW, finding a way to fit my growing family into it was a stressful mess and I'm happy to have found, perhaps unintentionally, a much better situation.
Some of this insight came to me from Steve Kaufer of TripAdvisor, who at the time I was there was running a $4B company and driving an old minivan, because that's what his family fit in. He never cared for a fancy new car because fancy meant small and he wasn't out to impress anyone on the road anyway.
But I also can't pretend that Honda's naturally aspirated 6-cylinder and perfectly matched 10-speed (domestic!) paddle shifter didn't help seal the deal in my garage.
I own a Porsche 911, a Mercedes GL 550, and a Toyota Sienna XLE. I like cars. However, one of my best friends never told me he was going to the annual car show, despite the fact that we often have lunch together. When I asked why he said it was because I had mentioned that I think the minivan is a peak of automotive greatness. He comes from the Detroit area, and literally assumed I didn’t care about cars simply because I like minivans!
Also, I may be a bit on the spectrum because I simply do not think about cars as a means of self expression. I don’t spend $120,000 on a car because I think it would impress somebody. I am a lousy mind reader and have no idea what people would think about what I drive, nor do I judge people on what they drive. That is bizarre to me.
When my wife and I were discussing whether to have a third kid, the "we can justify a minivan now" argument was a big push in favor!
If you think it's uncool, just remember -- if you buy a sports car, there is always someone out there with a cooler sports car. But you can buy THE BEST minivan in the world for ~$40k. Minivans also tend to go heavy on tech and comfort features relative to their price point. Yes, they suck to parallel park in the city, but 360 cameras and ultrasonics have made that much easier than it used to be. Really recommended!
I find it interesting just how much cars are part of certain cultures. Living in Tokyo of my hundreds of acquaintances I think I know 3 that own a car. Family or no. I know that's not possible in many places though I kind of wish it was more common.
I recommend an aftermarket trailer hitch as well for the minivan. Our last vacation we fit 2, adults, 2 kids, our dog in his full sized crate, all of our luggage, and 4 bicycles on a hitch rack. Pretty sweet!
Im all about the minivan, and completely agree with everything you're saying here. Ive been getting my wife prepped for one when the time comes, and i think shes come around to see how much they just make sense. Also doesnt hurt that a few friends actually expressed their regret going suv over the van.
Twice as much cargo as an SUV? We have both a minivan (Toyota sienna) and an SUV (Chevy Suburban) and the SUV easily has quadruple the cargo space as the minivan.
We ended up buying Diono Radian carseats [1], which are marketed as "the 3-across car seat"
We can fit our three kids in the back of our Honda Civic perfectly well.
But we've had exactly the same conversation. In order to have a fourth kid, we'd need to swap out our vehicles. House is fine, insurance is fine, income is fine, but we'd need to upgrade vehicles, and that seems to be just enough friction to make the idea unappealing.
The Radian is definitely king of three across. But they're premium priced ($200 each, or $600 for three), and sacrifice comfort particularly for longer trips.
In general people who have never had kids don't seem to grasp that the average (non-Radian) car-seat is BIGGER than an adult side-to-side. The Radian series has a niche because they produced a car-seat the same size as an adult (with no loss of safety), but had to sacrifice comfort to do so.
Let's say it costs you $200k to raise a kid to adulthood [0]. A Honda Civic costs $25k new [1], an 8-seater Honda Odyssey costs $31k new [2]. A car lasts 10+ years so conservatively that's $12k extra in transportation costs for your fourth child. Maybe you can argue it's $20k with fuel.
That...doesn't seem unreasonable? As a society, we like people to start families and continue the human race, but we know overpopulation is a thing and we don't want everyone to have huge families. 10% extra marginal cost is small, and offset by other economies of scale.
Except National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) rated Dino carseats with 2 stars for ease of use. Which means you're more likely to injure a child when using the seat.
> the vast majority of cars today simply don't work for a family of five
I recently visited Pakistan for the first time, and was amazed to see a family of five riding around on a small Honda motorbike. The father was driving, a small child sat in front of the father, the was mother hanging on behind the father, and the oldest daughter sitting on the far back with both legs hanging off to the left while holding an infant. None of them were wearing helmets. It was both terrifying & impressive.
I was in Ukraine in the mid-00s. Saw a five person motorcycle. No helmets, but they had an open side-car so a bit more space. Youngest kid was in a bucket held by big sister.
>> the vast majority of cars today simply don't work for a family of five
My wife and I had the minivan discussion. They are amazingly practical when you need to carry vast amounts of crap. Neither of us was particularly interested in driving around in one though, so we optimized by carrying less crap around.
I'd say about 99% of our usage of our 4 door sedan or small SUV requires no additional cargo capacity for our family. For the other 1% of the time, we're able to optimize by carrying less stuff. I think there has been 1 or 2 times in 13 years where cargo capacity was insufficient. For us, it was a tradeoff worth making.
We totally respect those who make different choices, though. Everyone has their own preferences and needs.
There's an individual on YouTube who does a great job reviewing carseat fits into various vehicles. The example below he fits 3 car seats in the back of a Ford Focus, which most people wouldn't consider to be a large car.
It can be done. There's also a great product called the MultiMac sold in the UK and I think the EU. Fits 4 in the back seat, worth checking out if available in your locale. It won't ship to the US for regulatory reasons.
https://youtu.be/zybM8cltCxU?t=179
Let's not forget the expiration dates on Car Safety Seats. C'mon, really? Seats with Styrofoam may deteriorate eventually but I haven't heard of a casualties due to expired car seats.
All the car seats for my kids were chiefly composed of plastics. I'm sure there is quite a high factor of safety for car seat design, but there are quite a few time and temperature related failure modes for plastics (i.e. getting brittle over time as the plasticizers outgas, UV exposure, etc.).
To be fair, how do you test this - as a system - effectively. The consequences of failure on a child seat are not like, say, a stand mixer. That being said, I suspect it has more to do with the manufacturer attempting to limit their liability window. It's wasteful right, but in a litigious world, I get it.
Not quite the same thing (adult seats vs car seats, and it's possible they were just faulty from the factory rather than expired), but the last time I was rear-ended the seats snapped behind me. Quite the experience really -- to stop you from going forward you have seat belts, air bags, and all kinds of fancy engineering. Inertia is a cruel mistress when the car moves forward out from under you though, and the only things ensuring your forward motion are a couple of broken seats (thankfully there weren't any passengers or children in car seats for me to smash into) and the 2-ton metal projectile poking through the ass end of your car.
Some tests have found that brand new seats break when loaded near their stated limits. I think it is reasonable to say that plastic weakened due to the relatively harsh thermal and UV conditions in a car would fare worse.
It isn't the exception; it is the rule. Bodies that govern an industry are _inevitably_ captured by the industry they govern, because that industry has the absolute highest incentive to write the rules it has to follow.
Minivans are only un-cool until you are forced to appreciate their practicality. They can transport groups of kids and all their gear, a bunch of dogs, a surprising amount of furniture or even large sheets of lumber or drywall. I would only consider replacing my minivan with an electric minivan.
Sure but when I was young it wasn't mandated for children to be in car seats until the age of 8 like TFA mentions. I was sitting in the back seat but I was definitely not in a car seat once I was around 4-5.
When I was young you could fit 6 in a sedan and 8 in a station wagon. Bench seats in the front have gone away (I assume due to airbags). We didn't have a big family, but on car-pools, I was the smallest so I always got stuck straddling the stick shift for the cars that had the shifter on the floor.
Throw in one kids best friend who is always around and maybe a grandparent who lives alone, going up to a 7 seater starts to get appealing pretty quickly.
The Sharan fits seven persons (possibly seven adults, but the two back seats could be a bit tight for some), and is wide enough in the middle row for three kids in kids' seats.
It still looks and handles like a normal car rather than a bus.
When my partner and I had our third, the Mazda 5 was our compromise vehicle— still has sliding doors and the overall aesthetics of a minivan, but drives like a car, gets decent gas mileage, and has a footprint comparable to a CUV for the purposes of parking and so-on.
We may well go to a full size van at some point, but once the kids are no longer babies, they actually travel somewhat lighter— no stroller, playpen, diaper bag, etc being shlepped everywhere.
> the vast majority of cars today simply don't work for a family of five
Yes, but only if you count by unique line items. If you count by market share, the large family market is well served.
“S.U.V.s made up 47.4 percent of U.S. sales in 2019 with sedans at 22.1 percent,” said Tom Libby, automotive analyst at IHS Markit. “By 2025, we see the light-truck segment that includes S.U.V.s, vans and pickups to make up 78 percent of sales compared to 72 percent now.”[1]
Even if you find a seat configuration that fits, the next hassle that drove me nuts was getting access to seatbelts easily. Taking the kids anywhere is that much more annoying when you can't rely on the oldest at least sorting out their own buckles. (Only just occurred to me that a seatbelt extender would probably help bring the receiving part of the latch up from the depths between the seats -- too late now, bought a different car.)
Almost worth staggering births so that after three years the eldest is able to handle buckling themselves and then siblings. Worth finding every advantage like this when you're outnumbered by children.
I guess that's why Minivans are popular here in the US. I have a Mazda 5, which is like a mini-minivan and it's probably big enough for 3 car seats. I really like this car, too bad Mazda gave up on them here in the US.
Your comment leads me to wonder if car safety laws also contribute to this. Back in the day cars were large and you could fit four kids in the back of a station wagon. In sedans, there was a platform behind the seats in the rear that kids could stretch out on (no seatbelt of course).
Seems like a good opp. Make a bench seat attachment that fits into most cars, with interchangeable carseats for different aged kids. Could have a 3-wide and a 4-wide model for different sized cars.
I've been thinking about whether, when we have our fourth, to get a minivan, or just jump straight to a 15 passenger van. I know I'll need one eventually.
I own a Cosco from Walmart (for travel), and while they're the smallest and lightest legal seats on the market the build and safety is inferior.
There's a reason we own it, and don't use it day-to-day. It is a fine occasional "grandparent seat" or for travel, but if it is your daily driver and need three across, the Radian is a safer & much better built alternative.
I once read a convincing argument that, in some cases, American's resistance to helmets caused helmet laws to have a net negative effect on health. The author claimed that the laws caused enough of a reduction in ridership that the lost exercise outweighed the reduction in injury. I've attempted to find the paper again, but I can't seem to track it down.
That's the one! From the conclusions: "A (positive) net health benefit emerges only in dangerous bicycling environments under optimistic assumptions as to the efficacy of helmets and a minor behavioral response."
could be on the books but not enforced. in my city helmets are required when riding those electric scooters. you're also exposed to the same DUI laws that apply to actual cars. doesn't stop a bunch of drunk college kids from riding them around with no helmet every night.
In the comments on my post about the paper when it originally came out (https://www.jefftk.com/p/three-car-seats) people pointed out that the methodology cannot determine whether there is a common cause, and a common cause is actually quite plausible. Posit that over time people are becoming more protective of children, for whatever reason. This (a) makes parenting substantially more work/money (closer supervision, more childcare hours), leading to people having fewer kids on the margin, and (b) makes people supportive of legislation to protect children (car seat laws). So while it looks that car seat laws are causing fewer children, they could actually both be caused by changing societal attitudes toward child protection.
The reality for a lot of families is that having children is frighteningly expensive.
The twin costs of childcare and a reduction in parental work hours (often mom's) and as a result future career and income advancement potential can be substantial drag on a family's income. Each additional child just prolongs this drag.
Multigenerational households where grandparents provide childcare are one solution around this problem that I've seen.
A lot of people move away from home to find work, especially if educated, and don't have access to grandparents. Also, as people are waiting longer to have kids, the grandparents are older and not as capable -- or may even be in need of care themselves.
In addition to childcare, there's also health care and education to pay for. Middle class families get virtually no help on either front.
Also, as people wait longer to have kids, the mother's body is less and less able to bounce back from pregnancy. I know tons of couples who have 2 kids in their 30s, but 2 only so that the first kid can have a sibling. CDC recommends 3 years between births for a woman's body to recover, and I don't know many women eager to continue having kids past 35.
A coworker and his wife just had a child. They got on wait-lists before the child was even born because of the huge demand. They also told me that they were lucky to find a place (work subsidized) that was less than $1k.
Yeah, that's mostly due to feminism as some of the already buried comments here point out. You only have to look back a short time and there was no such thing as "child care". The children were cared for by their mothers. Imagine that! A mother having time to raise her own children! Now they are "free" to be drones in the corporate machine instead and can't get out because the family needs that money. The children now get the privilege of being raised in a child care farm instead of by loving family. Oh, and nobody has time to cook or clean any more so it's ready meals and takeaways every night. What progress...
Pretty sure the economic impact of doubling the workforce as well as decades of frozen wages has had a significant effect on social acceptance of 2-worker households, but blame whatever boogeyman/woman you'd like to.
Multigenerational does help, and it helps immensely if they had kids (you or partner) when they were younger (20s), or else they are more likely to have health issues and low energy themselves.
There is no reason to give a career — a poor abstraction built around the simple concept of doing work for money — higher value than rearing a child, something millions of years of evolution has gender specifically selected for.
In general there's a strong negative correlation between development of a society and birth rate. Also income. It's extremely powerful, and applies literally all over the world. I suspect that in America over the last few decades, development continued. Child-safety laws came along for the ride. [1, 2]
Income is a less compelling argument in America as wages have remained totally constant on an inflation adjusted basis for ages.
I can see this as being correlated, but I don't see this as being causative. And that's from someone who thinks some of the child/society safety laws are a bit absurd.
I think maybe it could go something like this: child safety laws are more prevalent/stringent in advanced society, living in an advanced society carries a higher cost of living, as the cost of living goes up (without matching income raises, like the US for the past 30+yrs) the people who feel they can't afford children rises. I think there are other underlying causes and the overall effect is a combination.
This reads like a textbook example of "correlation is not causation". You think there'd be ...some? people talking about how they decided not to have a child because she/he wouldn't fit in the car if it's going to have a measurable effect on birth rates but at least personally I have never, ever heard this one.
I have elementary school age kids, so I know lots of parents. Anecdotally, there is a big jump between having two kids and having more than two. I've had a lot of conversations with friends on their third pregnancy about having to upgrade to a bigger car because with the size of car seats, you can't fit three of them in one row of a typical sedan. And I've likewise had conversations with parents who decided (like my wife and I did) to stop at two, and many of the reasons are fundamentally about logistics and resources. Transportation is a real component of that.
If you take a step back, it does make sense. The difference between zero kids and one is a major qualititative lifestyle change. It's the transition from parent to non-parent. It means not easily going out at night, schooling, etc. Everything changes.
The transition from one to two kids is a qualitative change for the kid because it means going from no siblings to siblings. That transitively makes it somewhat of a qualitative change for parents. It means the kids always have a playmate and someone their age on vacations. But for parents, it's mostly a change in degree. More work, more cost, more time parenting, but the overall lifestyle is basically unchanged.
The transition from two to three is really just quantitative. 33% more space in the house for sleeping, 33% more food costs, 33% more car space for transportation, etc. So the decision about when to stop is mostly just "how much of this experience do you want?" The transportation overhead here in the US where you do a lot of driving is a pretty big piece of that.
> The transition from one to two kids is a qualitative change for the kid because it means going from no siblings to siblings. That transitively makes it somewhat of a qualitative change for parents. It means the kids always have a playmate and someone their age on vacations.
... Or fightmates, as my mother herself warned me. :-)
I absolutely buy the step-wise argument, especially for housing, but I do not buy it for cars. Americans buy way more large SUVs and trucks than the rest of the world, even those with fewer than three kids (or no kids). The idea that car size is a meaningful barrier to the number of children one has, especially compared to housing and education costs, simply does not pass the sniff test to me.
From a pure financial standpoint, I'd look more to the cost of education, healthcare, and housing. All of which have been growing much more rapidly than the cost of cars or gasoline.
"the third-child deterrent appears stronger among wealthier families"
So this has both the most and least effect on families that have little reason to care about needing a bigger car (because they can easily afford it, or they can't afford any car at all, respectively). When you go fishing for a correlation, form a post-hoc hypothesis for its mechanism, and then other data fits that hypothesis poorly, it's a strong sign you've found yourself a red herring. Which is the usual result of failing to properly understand the distinction between correlation and causation.
> You think there'd be ...some? people talking about how they decided not to have a child because she/he wouldn't fit in the car if it's going to have a measurable effect on birth rates but at least personally I have never, ever heard this one.
We have 3 kids. When talking to friends with only 2 kids, this comes up all the time and is a non-trivial concern in having a third child.
You need a bigger car, a bigger house and bigger everything, and many things are not geared towards families of 5 - family passes at museums/zoos are often 2 adults + 2 children etc.
When we had our third we upgraded our car (from 5 seats to 8 seats) and our house. If we had a fourth we'd need to upgrade the house in a few years again. It's definitely a concern and is definitely talked about by people who are affected by it.
This is good news then. We should be thinking hard about having more kids. 2 is more than enough. The damage each extra child does, especially in the west is insane.
I wasn't going to have more than 2 kids, partly for reasons around travel logistics, and car seats play a surprisingly large role in that. Car seats needs to be rear facing until children are big enough, but most cars expect everyone to be leaning back and so rear facing car seats can be tricky for tall drivers. Part of our planning involved spacing children so we'd only have 1 rear facing car seat at a time. I'm tall enough that I can't have a rear facing car seat behind me in most cars (even SUVs). If I hadn't had twins the second go round my calculus would have stuck. Instead we had to get a minivan.
Now I'm not saying this is a strong effect nationally, the effect wasn't particularly strong for me since other costs were a bigger deterrent than a new car payment, but there is an effect and I'm sure I'm not the only one who did that math.
I did and find it completely normal? "What everything we would have to buy" is completely normal consideration. So is "if we dont fit in a car we need to stop doing all these things" is another completely normal consideration.
Just to reinforce your point: the idea that Americans are deciding not to have children because they can't fit modern child seats in their cars is outright laughable. Americans drive massive cars compared to the rest of the world; if there is any society where car size would not prove to be a hindrance to having children it would be America.
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It took me MONTHS of shopping and playing child-seat-jenga in various car dealership lots before I finally found a sedan that was actually able to hold everything (thank you, Volkswagen, for making an actual family sedan that could fit a family!).
Honda is trying to bridge the identify gap a little with paddle shifting, ventilated seats, and almost 300hp, but really we should try to step back from seeing the car as an expression of who we are, and try to optimize for the functionality that we use every day. As much fun as it was to drive the BMW, finding a way to fit my growing family into it was a stressful mess and I'm happy to have found, perhaps unintentionally, a much better situation.
Some of this insight came to me from Steve Kaufer of TripAdvisor, who at the time I was there was running a $4B company and driving an old minivan, because that's what his family fit in. He never cared for a fancy new car because fancy meant small and he wasn't out to impress anyone on the road anyway.
But I also can't pretend that Honda's naturally aspirated 6-cylinder and perfectly matched 10-speed (domestic!) paddle shifter didn't help seal the deal in my garage.
Also, I may be a bit on the spectrum because I simply do not think about cars as a means of self expression. I don’t spend $120,000 on a car because I think it would impress somebody. I am a lousy mind reader and have no idea what people would think about what I drive, nor do I judge people on what they drive. That is bizarre to me.
If you think it's uncool, just remember -- if you buy a sports car, there is always someone out there with a cooler sports car. But you can buy THE BEST minivan in the world for ~$40k. Minivans also tend to go heavy on tech and comfort features relative to their price point. Yes, they suck to parallel park in the city, but 360 cameras and ultrasonics have made that much easier than it used to be. Really recommended!
I remain bemused at the idea a tv is a necessity for family car journeys. I would not want one in anything I was driving.
We can fit our three kids in the back of our Honda Civic perfectly well.
But we've had exactly the same conversation. In order to have a fourth kid, we'd need to swap out our vehicles. House is fine, insurance is fine, income is fine, but we'd need to upgrade vehicles, and that seems to be just enough friction to make the idea unappealing.
[1] https://www.diono.com/us/product/radian-3r-2020/
In general people who have never had kids don't seem to grasp that the average (non-Radian) car-seat is BIGGER than an adult side-to-side. The Radian series has a niche because they produced a car-seat the same size as an adult (with no loss of safety), but had to sacrifice comfort to do so.
That...doesn't seem unreasonable? As a society, we like people to start families and continue the human race, but we know overpopulation is a thing and we don't want everyone to have huge families. 10% extra marginal cost is small, and offset by other economies of scale.
[0] I don't have a better estimate for this than Bill Waterson putting it at $100k. In 1987. https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1987/07/24
[1] https://www.edmunds.com/honda/civic/
[2] https://www.edmunds.com/honda/odyssey/
I recently visited Pakistan for the first time, and was amazed to see a family of five riding around on a small Honda motorbike. The father was driving, a small child sat in front of the father, the was mother hanging on behind the father, and the oldest daughter sitting on the far back with both legs hanging off to the left while holding an infant. None of them were wearing helmets. It was both terrifying & impressive.
I can't emphasize this enough.
They are no automobile, and are not comparable.
My wife and I had the minivan discussion. They are amazingly practical when you need to carry vast amounts of crap. Neither of us was particularly interested in driving around in one though, so we optimized by carrying less crap around.
I'd say about 99% of our usage of our 4 door sedan or small SUV requires no additional cargo capacity for our family. For the other 1% of the time, we're able to optimize by carrying less stuff. I think there has been 1 or 2 times in 13 years where cargo capacity was insufficient. For us, it was a tradeoff worth making.
We totally respect those who make different choices, though. Everyone has their own preferences and needs.
It's one way the lethality of poverty is visible.
Alex on Autos https://youtu.be/RTh06yWql_s?t=223
It can be done. There's also a great product called the MultiMac sold in the UK and I think the EU. Fits 4 in the back seat, worth checking out if available in your locale. It won't ship to the US for regulatory reasons. https://youtu.be/zybM8cltCxU?t=179
https://www.sintef.no/globalassets/project/ffs/dokumenter/se...
https://www.amazon.com/Plastics-Failure-Guide-2E-Prevention/...
https://www.consumerreports.org/toddler-booster-seats/child-...
It isn't the exception; it is the rule. Bodies that govern an industry are _inevitably_ captured by the industry they govern, because that industry has the absolute highest incentive to write the rules it has to follow.
This is the new Wagon Queen Family Truckster. This is a damn fine automobile.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzXN5sQ5g-U&ab_channel=Foste...
It still looks and handles like a normal car rather than a bus.
We may well go to a full size van at some point, but once the kids are no longer babies, they actually travel somewhat lighter— no stroller, playpen, diaper bag, etc being shlepped everywhere.
Minivans have locked this market segment up for years. Honda Odyssey & Toyota Sienna are the market leaders.
Yes, but only if you count by unique line items. If you count by market share, the large family market is well served.
“S.U.V.s made up 47.4 percent of U.S. sales in 2019 with sedans at 22.1 percent,” said Tom Libby, automotive analyst at IHS Markit. “By 2025, we see the light-truck segment that includes S.U.V.s, vans and pickups to make up 78 percent of sales compared to 72 percent now.”[1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/business/suv-sales-best-s...
Almost worth staggering births so that after three years the eldest is able to handle buckling themselves and then siblings. Worth finding every advantage like this when you're outnumbered by children.
- Different countries have different standards, so car seats vary accordingly
- Models change over the years
So finding out if you can get three car seats into a car is a massive headache.
There's a reason we own it, and don't use it day-to-day. It is a fine occasional "grandparent seat" or for travel, but if it is your daily driver and need three across, the Radian is a safer & much better built alternative.
Nearly half of Seattle’s helmet citations go to homeless people https://crosscut.com/news/2020/12/nearly-half-seattles-helme...
[1] https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/health/violence-injury-prev...!
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It does not reduces sport "I am going to get workout now" trips - the most dangerous ones. (But still pretty safe!)
In the comments on my post about the paper when it originally came out (https://www.jefftk.com/p/three-car-seats) people pointed out that the methodology cannot determine whether there is a common cause, and a common cause is actually quite plausible. Posit that over time people are becoming more protective of children, for whatever reason. This (a) makes parenting substantially more work/money (closer supervision, more childcare hours), leading to people having fewer kids on the margin, and (b) makes people supportive of legislation to protect children (car seat laws). So while it looks that car seat laws are causing fewer children, they could actually both be caused by changing societal attitudes toward child protection.
The twin costs of childcare and a reduction in parental work hours (often mom's) and as a result future career and income advancement potential can be substantial drag on a family's income. Each additional child just prolongs this drag.
Multigenerational households where grandparents provide childcare are one solution around this problem that I've seen.
In addition to childcare, there's also health care and education to pay for. Middle class families get virtually no help on either front.
Except many grandparents are still working, especially to cover healthcare costs.
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Income is a less compelling argument in America as wages have remained totally constant on an inflation adjusted basis for ages.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Total-fertility-rate-TFR...
[2] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/december/link...
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/11/28/...
It was recently discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25445643
See here for disposable real income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0
I think maybe it could go something like this: child safety laws are more prevalent/stringent in advanced society, living in an advanced society carries a higher cost of living, as the cost of living goes up (without matching income raises, like the US for the past 30+yrs) the people who feel they can't afford children rises. I think there are other underlying causes and the overall effect is a combination.
If you take a step back, it does make sense. The difference between zero kids and one is a major qualititative lifestyle change. It's the transition from parent to non-parent. It means not easily going out at night, schooling, etc. Everything changes.
The transition from one to two kids is a qualitative change for the kid because it means going from no siblings to siblings. That transitively makes it somewhat of a qualitative change for parents. It means the kids always have a playmate and someone their age on vacations. But for parents, it's mostly a change in degree. More work, more cost, more time parenting, but the overall lifestyle is basically unchanged.
The transition from two to three is really just quantitative. 33% more space in the house for sleeping, 33% more food costs, 33% more car space for transportation, etc. So the decision about when to stop is mostly just "how much of this experience do you want?" The transportation overhead here in the US where you do a lot of driving is a pretty big piece of that.
... Or fightmates, as my mother herself warned me. :-)
not from the perspective of the women who bear the health risk.
From a pure financial standpoint, I'd look more to the cost of education, healthcare, and housing. All of which have been growing much more rapidly than the cost of cars or gasoline.
"The reduction they saw was confined to households that did actually have access to a car"
"They discovered that tightening these laws had no detectable effects on the rate of first and second children".
Also, if i understand it correctly, you have about 50 quasi experiments, one for each state.
"the third-child deterrent appears stronger among wealthier families"
So this has both the most and least effect on families that have little reason to care about needing a bigger car (because they can easily afford it, or they can't afford any car at all, respectively). When you go fishing for a correlation, form a post-hoc hypothesis for its mechanism, and then other data fits that hypothesis poorly, it's a strong sign you've found yourself a red herring. Which is the usual result of failing to properly understand the distinction between correlation and causation.
We have 3 kids. When talking to friends with only 2 kids, this comes up all the time and is a non-trivial concern in having a third child.
You need a bigger car, a bigger house and bigger everything, and many things are not geared towards families of 5 - family passes at museums/zoos are often 2 adults + 2 children etc.
When we had our third we upgraded our car (from 5 seats to 8 seats) and our house. If we had a fourth we'd need to upgrade the house in a few years again. It's definitely a concern and is definitely talked about by people who are affected by it.
Now I'm not saying this is a strong effect nationally, the effect wasn't particularly strong for me since other costs were a bigger deterrent than a new car payment, but there is an effect and I'm sure I'm not the only one who did that math.
I did and find it completely normal? "What everything we would have to buy" is completely normal consideration. So is "if we dont fit in a car we need to stop doing all these things" is another completely normal consideration.
I bet this is not a hinderance in the rest of the world because many of those other places have either:
1. a lack of child seat laws
2. effective public transportation.
It's not like Europe is full of A-segment cars with 3 car seats in the back.