> Enthusiasm for these laws has not been curbed by studies showing that child car seats are no more effective than seat belts in preventing death or serious injury for children above age two (e.g. Levitt 2008, Doyle and Levitt 2010).
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.
Without even jumping into the detail of the study, for most toddlers under 3 year old with an average height, a three point seatbelt would have the chest strap crossing at neck height.
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.
For those that might be unaware, the cited papers are by the Freakenomics Author Steven Levitt and this is a decades long campaign on this with Ted talks and Op-eds and everything.
This resonates with me. It’s beyond tedious to get the kids in and out of the car seats all the time, and needing to buy a larger car to fit more than two kids gave me significant pause. We eventually decided to have more kids, and the positives far outweigh the negatives for us, but to this day the hassle of loading and unloading the car to go places is the single biggest negative experience of raising children. It adds an extra 5-10 minutes on each end of every trip compared to adults just being able to get in and out on their own.
With one single child I barely notice, but thinking about it it does probably take 2-3 minutes so your 5-10 minutes estimates is probably spot on for multiple kids. Living in a midwestern city and relying on street parking I do dread the loading/unloading in the winter, has there been any attempt at improving this product category on the speed of use dimension?
Mine were able to buckle themselves by at 2.5 or so. It’s not that hard. So even having 4 kids under 6, I rarely had to deal with buckling more than one at a time.
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.
> It adds an extra 5-10 minutes on each end of every trip
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.
My wife and I have a Doona (https://www.doona.com/car-seat-stroller/discover-doona), and we refer to it as a the Ferarri of push chairs. Loading and unloading the stroller (when using their base), is super easy, takes seconds, and we can keep our baby asleep while transporting to/from the car.
pretty much any infant seat is easy to deal with but you can only use those for a year at most. its all the bigger car seats for the next 5-12 years of their lives that are annoying
... and then it's an even bigger impediment to sharing responsibility for children, as you try to move seats around or make sure grandparents have duplicate equipment. Hard to spontaneously have another parent bring a kid home from school. We had to get special car seats to carpool with my sister, just so we could fit it all in.
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.
> It’s beyond tedious to get the kids in and out of the car seats all the time
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?
I don't know how old your kids are, but mine are 3 & 5 and they can seat and buckle on their own, so that extra time doesn't last for too long at least (seats are mostly annoying when I need to transfer the seats to another car and then back to mine)
Speaking to some other kid-having cargo bike owners, one reason they like the cargo bike with the children is that it's significantly easier to get the kids in and out of it.
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.
This is about child safety seats; not the big bench seats that cars used to have where one could more easily arrange the act of conception, than one can in modern cars with bucket seats, consoles, and etc. You could get farther in the back seat of a '72 Cuda than you could on a minivan bench seat.
I think rock climbing is the best thing ever. In the long run, the experience of rock climbing will spiritually reinvigorate the public. I want more people to rock climb. It’s the knots that are the problem. They take so long to tie, and every gym you go to makes you take tests to make sure you know how to tie them and then vocally double check that they are secure. Studies show that if people didn’t have to spend time tying knots, they’d be more inclined to try rock climbing. At the same time, studies show that excessive safety standards only save a handful of rock climbers each year. It’s not worth it. We should remove any regulations around ropes and knots for rock climbing gyms so more people will rock climb.
Thank you, I’m glad I’m not the only one; this seems like insanity to compare forecasted potential birth numbers with actual child fatalities. Could car seat regulations be erring on the side of over-zealousness? Sure, but the way to show that is that the safety isn’t increased, not to say “think of the potentially born!”
I have no kids nor have I ever had to transport kids so have no experience in this area, but I would guess it would be possible to design a multi-child car seat that can fit N kids in less space than N 1-child car seats.
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.
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.
It's fascinating how deeply automobiles affect every aspect of our lives to the point where seatbelt vs safety seat even matters. To consider a world without significant car commuting each day seems insane to most people because it's what we grew up with and take for granted, as our population grows and new suburbs expand outwards we just need more roads and more cars. What are the alternatives? A different approach to society and urban planning that minimised commute distance between essential locations within cohorts would surely result in far fewer road fatalities but it does seem like few people are willing to make the lifestyle changes needed.
Very funny: we had a hard time finding a car wide enough to accomodate three child safety seats without being too long to park..
Now our children are getting older so this is less an issue, but (Europeans) car are still quite bad for three children: the one in the middle has often a reduced place and/or an unconfortable seat.
People who haven't actually tried, or haven't had kids at all, really don't grasp how problematic three car seats across actually is. Car seats are wider than most adults, and there's little standardization (either car or seat design).
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.
Gosh, yes. When my third child was due to be born, I was driving a 1998 Toyota Camry, a mid-sized car, and it was literally impossible to fit three carseats into the backseat. To accommodate a three-year-old, a two-year-old, and a newborn, we had to upsize to a minivan. There was no lesser option!
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'..
Maybe it’s different in Europe. In the US it’s pretty easy to find narrow car seats that can fit three across, in my experience. We just went on Amazon and bought them.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouldering
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.
[1] https://www.multimac.com/home
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.
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.
Carseats are incredibly wide.
X
__X
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'..