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Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

economist.com

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Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

#71

Post by oramit »

testfoobar wrote: post #33

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 pr…

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.

Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

#72

Post by giantg2 »

testfoobar wrote: post #33

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 pr…

"Multigenerational households where grandparents provide childcare are one solution around this problem that I've seen."

Except many grandparents are still working, especially to cover healthcare costs.

Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

#73

Post by dragonwriter »

ashtonkem wrote: post #22
munificent wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 s…

> Americans buy way more large SUVs and trucks than the rest of the world, even those with fewer than three kids

Having had two kids in the age where they needed large car seats, trucks are no help at all and even fairly decent sized SUVs don't handle more than two well. Car seats for young children are a significant issue, and I suspect almost anyone whose had two or more children under the current safety regime would both recognize that fact and likely consider it before intentionally having a third.

> From a pure financial standpoint, I'd look more to the cost of education, healthcare, and housing.

Young children don't necessarily have a big impact on housing costs (they can share some easily), often because of the structure of health insurance costs don't have much impact on healthcare costs after the first, and education costs are largely deferred if you aren't going private/homeschool. Day care costs / career impacts are probably more significant than any of those given the frequency of two-working-parent families, but car transportation logistics are quite palpable.

(“Source”, have two kids under 5.)

Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

#74

Post by kube-system »

0942v8653 wrote: post #46
kube-system wrote: post #14

> They discovered that tightening those laws had no detectable effects on the rates of births of first and second children, but was accompanied by a drop, on average, of 0.73 percentage points in the number of women giving birth to a third while the first two were young enough to need safety seats. That may not sound much, but it is a significant fraction of the 9.36% of women in the sample who did become third-time…

Newer cars disable the passenger airbag if the weight of the occupant is less than a certain threshold (65 lbs according to https://owners.honda.com/vehicles/information/2018/Civic%20S... ).

The idea is to protect lighter weight occupants who are wearing seatbelts; they're not particularly reliable in the case that someone has yanked the seat belts tight on a car seat that is sitting on the seat bottom.

Some quotes from your source:

> Placing a forward-facing child seat in the front seat can be hazardous, even with advanced front airbags that automatically turn the passenger’s front airbag off.

> WARNING Placing a forward-facing child seat in the front seat can result in serious injury or death if the front airbag inflates.

> WARNING Placing a rear-facing child seat in the front seat can result in serious injury or death during a crash.

Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

#75

Post by giantg2 »

0942v8653 wrote: post #46
kube-system wrote: post #14

> They discovered that tightening those laws had no detectable effects on the rates of births of first and second children, but was accompanied by a drop, on average, of 0.73 percentage points in the number of women giving birth to a third while the first two were young enough to need safety seats. That may not sound much, but it is a significant fraction of the 9.36% of women in the sample who did become third-time…

Newer cars disable the passenger airbag if the weight of the occupant is less than a certain threshold (65 lbs according to https://owners.honda.com/vehicles/information/2018/Civic%20S... ).

Yet some states have outdated, one-size-fits-all laws against it.

Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

#76

Post by souprock »

Nacraile wrote: post #58
fosap wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please RFA. "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.

Please RFA more ;) "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 poo…

With increasing wealth, per-child cost goes up. It's self-imposed of course.

Getting a larger Porsche or BMW or Mercedes is going to be harder than getting a larger used Hyundai or Kia. At the extreme, you're just out of luck; there is no Ferrari with more than 4 seats.

Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

#77

Post by ashtonkem »

kube-system wrote: post #32
ashtonkem wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is not easy to fit three car seats in the back of seat of the average vehicle in the US. 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.

The median vehicle in the US is fully capable of seating three child safe seats.

Yes, if you get a Honda Civic you're going to struggle. But sales of sedans are absolutely swamped by SUVs and trucks. The best selling car in America by a long shot is the F-series pickup truck, with about 900,000 units sold. You can easily fit three child seats in it[0]

Oh, the number two and number three best selling vehicles are the RAM 1500 truck and the Chevy Silverado, at 633k and 575k. The Silverado is a bit smaller, but it too will fit three seats[1] across. You have to get to number eight in the list before you find a sedan at all, the Toyota Camry. You have to get to nine and ten on the list before you start finding sedans that would get uncomfortably tight fitting three seats, specifically the Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla, and even those will fit three if you're careful in your shopping. The top selling car that I'm pretty comfortable you simply could not fit three car seats in is the Nissan Sentra at number 19, with only 184k sales last year.

Now, 184K sales isn't nothing. There are clearly cars sold in America that will not fit three car seats. But the sales of those cars are dwarfed by large trucks and SUVs. In 2019 Ford sold more f-series trucks than the top three sedans combined. And that's before we consider the sales of three row SUVs which can easily fit 4-5 child safe seats in them.

So, if Americans are willing to buy massive vehicles capable of seating three seats safely by the literal millions, how in the world is that consistent with "the cost of upgrading to a car capable of seating three seats is a major barrier to having more children"?

0 - Here's a list of all the child seats that'll fit three across in a F-150: https://www.thecarcrashdetective.com/3-across-installations-...

1 - https://www.thecarcrashdetective.com/3-across-installations-...

Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

#78

Post by giantg2 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #64
toomuchtodo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The hard question would be how to maintain the existing programs that provide social assistance to the elderly without a larger population of working people to pay the taxes to fund them. The existing solution is to run preposterously large deficits every year, which seems problematic/unsustainable. This boils down to “how much GDP are you willing to burn to keep the elderly cohort comfortable.” How each country ha…

Unfortunately in a democracy it also demonstrates how large a percentage of likely voters are elderly, which also seems like it could cause serious problems during that sort of demographic shift. (Notice that almost everywhere, people over 65 get a vote but people under ~18 don't.)

Who was that Scottish economist that had a famous quote about something like once the citizens in a democracy realize they have the keys to the treasury they grant themselves services/money?

Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

#79

Post by dragonwriter »

giantg2 wrote: post #78
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately in a democracy it also demonstrates how large a percentage of likely voters are elderly, which also seems like it could cause serious problems during that sort of demographic shift. (Notice that almost everywhere, people over 65 get a vote but people under ~18 don't.)

Who was that Scottish economist that had a famous quote about something like once the citizens in a democracy realize they have the keys to the treasury they grant themselves services/money?

Economists have enough trouble trying to predict economic behavior, they probably should be more restrained when branching out of their field into predictive political science.

Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

#80

Post by ashtonkem »

thrower123 wrote: post #40
ashtonkem wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Even in a full-size SUV, you can't fit three car seats in one row of the back seats. Combine that with requirements to keep kids in various car seats and booster seats until they hit arbitrary age and weight limits, which stretch out longer and longer all the time, and it's still a problem.

Here is a list of car seats that'll fit 3 across in a F-150. https://www.thecarcrashdetective.com/3-across-installations-...

Several on that list will fit children up to 57-62" in height and up to 120lbs.

This (https://www.thecarcrashdetective.com/diono-radian-r120-revie...) seat will fit 3 across in my Subaru Forester, a Honda CRV, or a Fiat 500L, and support a kid up to 57" tall and 120lbs in weight.

It might be more convenient to have a three row SUV with three kids, but the idea that you can't fit 3 seats in these cars is nonsense.

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