This article argues that the birthrate is too low, and that car seats discourage couples from having more than two children. It doesn't seem to offer any justification for the idea that this is the right way to adjust the birthrate (versus, for example, addressing some of the challenges that stop couples from having children in the first place).
On Car Seats as Contraception
61–70 of 121 posts
Re: On Car Seats as Contraception
#62I 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 preclu…
> Does Europe have looser standards for child car seats? Do US standards preclude doing something like this in the US?
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.
Re: On Car Seats as Contraception
#63> 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.
Booster seats exist to solve exactly that problem, and are much more reasonable on their width.
The problem comes when you have multiple small children that need an actual fixed car seat.
Re: On Car Seats as Contraception
#64This 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…
> 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.
Re: On Car Seats as Contraception
#65I 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.
Re: On Car Seats as Contraception
#66Apparently, West Virginia doesn't enforce this. The only requirement is that parents properly secure any child under age 6 in a seat (https://carseattraveler.com/west-virginia-car-seat-laws/). So we should see higher birth rates in that state (I doubt it).
Re: On Car Seats as Contraception
#67Hum I think I read a while ago an article on how the limited constraints/rules there where in the US for child seats were causing many unneeded death, compared to the EU where we have iSize/isofix/etc. But I cannot find the article now.
Also I'm not sure what this comparison between the number of lives saved and the number of births not happening is worth. Where in the world is it a fine to sacrifice baby lives so that more people can be born? Feels like they are optimizing cattle ^^
Re: On Car Seats as Contraception
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> While I feel we need to be gradually reducing the number of people on the planet We are on that trajectory now. No need to do anything special. It's baked into demographics and unavoidable at this point. https://quillette.com/2022/08/20/the-unexpected-future/
Trajectory to what exactly? I can't find anything about the sustainable carrying capacity, only the max which seems to be unsustainable based on current scenarios.
Trajectory toward a long, slow population collapse. It's hard to imagine what gets world population back up to replacement rate (2.1 children per woman) once it dips below. Children are expensive and technology makes having them far more optional than it ever has been in history. The world's population is aging out of its fertility years. Once we're below 2.1 the trajectory will be down, short of some severe cultural or societal change.
The environment will be ok. Concerns about overpopulation destroying sustainability are 'fighting the last war.'
Re: On Car Seats as Contraception
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are whales full of plastic and the rain isn't safe to drink. How can adding more humans help??
We can have population growth and still solve the impending environmental disaster. On top of that, a declining human population results is an increasing young:old ratio. Fewer younger working age people supporting an increasingly older population. Socially and economically that will be a disaster, which will make solving ecological issues significantly harder.
We can have growth, but the growth rate must decline over time. For example the current growth rate of world population is around 1.1% per year. It is easy to see that it cannot remain above 1% for more than 12101 years (assuming FTL travel is not discovered).
Proof: Right now every living human is either on Earth or close to Earth. Without FTL it follows that 1 year from now every living human must be within 1 light year of Earth, 2 years from now every living human must be within 2 light years of Earth, and so on. 12101 years from now every living human must be within 12101 years of Earth.
If you calculate the volume of a sphere of radius 12101 light years centered on Earth and divide that volume by what the population would be after 12101 years of 1% annual growth you get 0.04 m^3 per person.
But the volume of an average human is ~0.06 m^3, which is greater than 0.04 m^3.
At 0.1% annual growth it would take a little over 127000 years to run out of room.
At 0.01% annual growth we've got 1.34 million years.
Of course the actual limits are much lower because the above is assuming that we can pack humans so that there is no space that is not occupied by humans which we cannot do because, among other things, (1) our shapes don't fit together perfectly to allow such tight packing, (2) there isn't enough mass in the 12101 light year sphere to make that many humans, and (3) we would need to use much of that space for the infrastructure needed to support humans.
Re: On Car Seats as Contraception
#70Very 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 sho…
Yes, we had two move the seats like this:
__X
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'..