351–360 of 411 posts
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Can you move an upright piano in it? The thing that finally turned me off to SUVs was when I managed to find an upright piano for $200, and none of my friends with SUVs could help me move it -- I ended up borrowing my mom's minivan (with the seats taken out). At that point I decided that sure, an SUV looks more "manly", but I'd rather have a vehicle that can actually get the job done.
Been there, done that in my Sienna!
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Alright, don't leave me hanging -- which Volkswagen?
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.
edit: but neither are sedans
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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…
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…
Overpopulation is not a thing anywhere in West.
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.
It does not reduces sport "I am going to get workout now" trips - the most dangerous ones. (But still pretty safe!)
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"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.
In the US, elderly people have Medicare, so why is this happening?
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 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.
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You kids are funny - I remember sleeping in the back of our station wagon with my sister while we were flying down the autobahn. (Yes, it seems crazy today). My main gripe about the car seat is all the damn waste. We have four of them and you can't sell them or even give them away. I'm not sure about the recycling situation yet, but even in the best case not much can be recycled.
Keep them and give them to family, otherwise donate to charity? Heck, check your local community chats/groups/forums, you can probably sell it for a small amount. Someone will find a way to resell it and make a profit.
My opinion is that it's way overblown, how many people have a serious crash with kids in the car? How many of them would then go on to resell the car seat? How many of those people would go on to have another serious crash to test the theory?
That said, when it comes to protecting our children, it's hard to justify saving a few bucks.
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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.
>"problem isn't that complex."
It's a very conplex problem, people, especially women, had a tectonic shift in their priorities, culture and family size.
All developing and developed countries are on the same trajectory of declining birthrates, and I have not seen any policy that can raise it succesfully.
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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 develo…
Let's explore that after we figured out how to live without destroying the planet.