Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate • Hacker News Board

Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

#271

Post by ashtonkem » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 3:46 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #73

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…

> 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 wou…

> 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.

Nonsense. They don't fit your seats maybe, but that's not the same as it not being possible. 15 seconds of Googling finds tons of lists with car seats that'll fit 3 across, including tests for a Honda Civic. Some on the list include convertible ones that'll work up to 120lbs.

Bigger SUVs might be more convenient, especially when loading and unloading, but the idea that you can't fit three car seats into a larger vehicle is simply not grounded in reality.

> 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.

My understanding, at least from people I know with 3 or more children, is that daycare and career costs dominate, depending on your location. All my colleagues had to decide between paying out the nose for city daycare, punching an even longer gap in someone's career (obviously reducing earnings), or simply not having a third.

Well, except for that one colleague who had five. According to him logistics got very expensive very quickly. Even "cheap" flights for a family of seven hits the $1K mark very quickly.

Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

#272

Post by ImprovedSilence » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 3:58 AM UTC

ynniv wrote: post #262

irateswami wrote: post #15

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 tha…

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 contro…

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.

Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

#273

Post by bpodgursky » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 4:03 AM UTC

This is all rings very true, but there's a lemma which might not play well on HN: how much does requiring people to use public transit reduce the birth rate?

Getting 3+ children around town to school, errands, etc in a minivan isn't a trivial job. Dragging around 3 under-six children by bus, or train? That's nearly Herculean.

I would expect the fertility hit to large families from the _lack_ of cars to be far, far greater than the hit from requiring larger cars. This also aligns with the (traditional) higher US fertility rate, where the US has been traditionally (large) car focused, whereas small cars and mass transit dominated in Europe.

Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

#274

Post by denosawr » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 4:04 AM UTC

bobthepanda wrote: post #172

angst_ridden wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal anecdote, probably irrelevant. When we were kids in the 80s, we bicycled to school. My parents heard about bike helmets (which were pretty new at that time) and bought them for us. I kept mine on the back rack, because I thought they were utterly uncool. Then one day, a guy wasn't paying attention, ran a stop-sign at high speed when we were still in the intersection, and hit my sister's bike's front wheel. T…

I don't think anyone argues that in specific incidents helmets are safer. The question is whether or not the second order effects of compulsory helmets outweigh the benefits for the individual, namely; - helmets make biking more inconvenient and compulsory usage of helmets suppresses cycling rates. In addition to the argument that is is a net negative because people get less exercise, there is also a second argument;…

I live in Australia, and I’ve always been taught to wear a helmet. It’s just a thing everybody knows now. Every bike you buy even has a sticker saying “use your head, wear a helmet.”

I think many of the side effects you mention arise from systemic biases when people aren’t used to helmet wear. Drivers wouldn’t overestimate safety when all cyclists wear helmets; this would take time to set in, but with compulsory helmet wear it would certainly occur.

As for inconvenience, and comfort, it’s hard to know the long-term effects of this. Once compulsory, future generations or cyclists may not mind as much because they don’t know an alternative. Anecdotally, nobody I know has ever complained about helmets being bulky or uncomfortable, because... it’s just how it is.

Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

#275

Post by amurthy1 » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 4:04 AM UTC

SulfurHexaFluri wrote: post #258

dmurray wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 overpopula…

We still have a birth rate that is too high. It will be a long long time before we need to work on raising the birth rate and the problem isn't that complex.

The world overall might have too high a birth rate but almost all Western countries have a birth rate below the replacement level of 2.1 (e.g. US, UK, AUS all at 1.7 [0] and falling [1]).

Unless you make up this difference with immigration, you have a declining population, which creates all sorts of short term issues.

Given that western countries have become increasingly hostile to immigration, especially from developing countries, trying to increase birth rate in western countries is a reasonable thing to explore imo.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...

Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

#276

Post by phobosanomaly » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 4:07 AM UTC

safetyengineer wrote: post #191

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 inf…

Helmets work but after working in automotive safety, motorcycles are death traps. I can't emphasize this enough. They are no automobile, and are not comparable.

That's why so many people like them.

It's a pleasant distraction from sitting in a fluorescently-lit cubicle getting diabetes, and facing the dread of going home to another night's existential crisis.

Twist that throttle and there's a gentle tap on the shoulder and a whisper, 'hey buddy, just wanted to remind you that you're actually alive'.

Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

#277

Post by PopeDotNinja » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 4:08 AM UTC

SulfurHexaFluri wrote: post #257

nethunters wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What other precautionary methods could help reduce mortality rates of motorcycles?

Keeping your speed under 40km/h would do a lot. And removing cars from streets.

Yeah, the average speed of traffic in Pakistan, at least in the areas I visited, was much lower that I'd expect to see in the USA.

Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

#278

Post by ImprovedSilence » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 4:08 AM UTC

blhack wrote: post #128

nsxwolf wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the heads up on the PHEV and the stow-and-go seats. That one would be a no-go for us because we it to haul stuff all the time. With the seats fully stowed it's practically as good as a pickup truck. Of course, you have to get all the toy cars and goldfish crackers off the floor first if you want the seats to actually stow.

BETTER than a pickup in my opinion! You can lock the doors.

I called my parents minivan the indoor pickup truck, the seats spent more time stowed to haul stuff then not (after kids were grown)

Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

#279

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 4:08 AM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #236

Dylan16807 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one, the word "above" is unfounded. At or slightly below works too. You can have a consumption-based economy where the population drops 1% per decade just fine. But more than that, even the least capitalist economy is going to have trouble if the ratio of young healthy workers drops too low.

I agree it's mostly about the ratio of workers. It can be below for relatively short periods (a few generations maybe). But if it stays below for long periods of time, you will run into some structural issues. Like the young workers you mentioned, tax burdens, some consumer durable industries, and possibly housing/real estate.

A slow rate of decrease doesn't really run into issues. To use the number of 1% per decade again, if we kept that up for 300 years we'd have no worker shortages as we slowly crept down to a "mere" 240 million people. (For reference, the population in 1950 was 152 million.)

Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate

#280

Post by lotsofpulp » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 4:09 AM UTC

lastofus wrote: post #214

bigmattystyles wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Start crash testing expired seats and compare results to new ones of the same make/model. They expire relatively quickly, so they would not be difficult to find. For example, our Graco Keyfit 30 expires after 6 years.

Chicco Keyfit 30