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Car Seats as Contraception

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Re: Car Seats as Contraception

#91

Post by aleph_minus_one »

aaronax wrote: post #13

(Have 3yo and 1yo, another one the way, goal is 4) I have often thought that car seats are one of the major drags of modern parenting. This study apparently (I don't have time to read it, too busy with kids lmao!) confirms my suspicions. It is unfortunate that every policy change around them is trading some amount of convenience for every smaller risk eliminations. It is essentially impossible to say perfectly ration…

> The only possible relief I can envision is that computers become so proficient at driving our cars that there are essentially no accidents. Then we may be allowed to sit unbuckled holding our children!

Laws are about control[ling citizens]. Politicians are not willing to give up control.

Re: Car Seats as Contraception

#92

Post by kelnos »

danielodievich wrote: post #11

I had a Mazda 3 hatchback, fun little car with stick shift, when our second child arrived. It was not possible to fit in a second rear-facing car seat behind driver AND have the driver seat be in any acceptable position for me or my wife, there was just no space left in front. We researched the seats and ultimately it was easier to get a bigger car than mess with it, so we got a Volvo XC70 that had plenty of space. O…

You're not really arguing against the paper; the study showed a lower birth probability of only 0.73% in places with car seat laws. That suggests that yes, sometimes it does deter parents from having a third kid, but most of the time it does not. And the paper doesn't say that the third car seat issue is the only consideration parents might use to dissuade them from a third child.

Re: Car Seats as Contraception

#93

Post by rickdeckard »

bradley13 wrote: post #78

Wow, talk about the law of unintended effects! Without going into the specifics of car seats, I do think we overemphasize safety. The article mentions saving 57 children. How much are 57 lives worth? The answer is not infinite - a life has a numeric value, ask any insurance company. Every safety regulation ought to pass a cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis. Few of them do.

> Every safety regulation ought to pass a cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis. Few of them do.

I think that's the already the ultimate test for any regulation to pass, as it's up against a huge industry trying to prevent costs of compliance.

Of course, the calculation is not to put a price on a human and then compare this against the cost provided by e.g. a car-company.

When you've lost someone in a car-accident it's not much condolence to know that e.g. an airbag could have saved him/her but "back in 2026 it was deregulated because the car-companies have proven that there's no economic benefit to include them"

I know the economy is always important, but human society also shouldn't be taken for granted.

Re: Car Seats as Contraception

#94

Post by tialaramex »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #66
throwway120385 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you aren't a slave to your car, you likely live in a walkable area where the cost of a 4-bedroom apartment or house is going to be pretty high. I'm not saying you can't raise kids in a 2 or 3 bedroom apartment, and when I lived in apartments many families had kids in a 1-bedroom apartment, but it's very tight and many people would consider it a significant hardship for both the kids and the parents. I would also a…

A __3-bedroom apartment__ is considered very tight for raising kids? How many bedrooms do you need to raise kids?

If you make kids share a bedroom it drastically decreases the margin for tension between children because they don't have anywhere else. That can work, of course, but it might not and too fucking late for the kids if it doesn't. That can mean physical abuse, but it can mean things like one kid loves loud music and the other wants to read quietly alone, or their sleep schedules naturally don't align well - if you were an adult house share you'd say well, we're just incompatible, it's nobody's fault, I'll move out, but kids can't do that, they are stuck with the situation their parents created and it's all they know.

My mother - I found out years after I'd left home - was worried that I resented the fact I had a small bedroom while my younger sister got a larger one - but in reality I didn't care at all, she's an artist, she makes stuff which actually exists, of course she needs space; I write software, which conveniently takes up no space, whereas if I'd had to share with her that would be extremely problematic and wouldn't have gone well. I could be in my tiny room and that was enough.

Re: Car Seats as Contraception

#95

Post by kelnos »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #62
drdec wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not convinced it's actually safer to have kids in the back. I thought that a major reason for placing children in back seat was because of the air bags in the front seat representing a danger to them when they deploy. (But maybe kids don't trigger the weight needed to activate the passenger side air bag anymore?)

You can also usually just turn off the passenger-side airbag. I know there's been a button on every car I've owned to do so, for when you've got something heavy in the front seat that isn't a passenger.

I've never had a car where you could disable the passenger-side airbag. We did have a car like that in the 90s, but it didn't come that way from the factory: my mother had a mostly-irrational fear of them (she was on the shorter side, but not so short that it could actually be a danger for her if it deployed), so we somehow got an aftermarket mod that let her disable it when she was riding in that seat.

Of course, she drove that car often enough too; not sure why she felt having the driver-side airbag enabled all the time was safe, but not the passenger-side airbag. (Mom was... often inconsistent with how she reacted to her fears.)

Re: Car Seats as Contraception

#96

Post by kelnos »

simonsarris wrote: post #65

Is this really true in 2026? Even 10 year old cars are simply big now, and not that expensive. I could believe it in 1990 maybe. I have 3 babies (ages 0, 2, 4 when we started) in a 2016 Subaru Outback for 1.5 years now and it's been mostly fine. I have 2 "slim" seats from Clek, one is a booster, and it's really not a big deal. I cannot imagine deciding to give up a child because of a minor inconvenience like this. Bu…

> I cannot imagine deciding to give up a child because of a minor inconvenience like this.

I don't think the article was suggesting that parents sit down together, ask each other "hey, should we have a third kid?" and one of them says, "well, I would say yes, but the only downside I can think of is that fitting a third child seat will be really hard, so let's not do it."

Parents who decide not to have the third kid certainly have other reasons for not wanting one, and the difficulty of a third car seat is a contributing factor, not the only consideration.

Re: Car Seats as Contraception

#97

Post by yread »

reeredfdfdf wrote: post #74
yread wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Daycare is like 3000eur/month for 3+ years. You can probably lease a double decker for that money

I guess that's how it is in America. If you are lucky enough to live in the Nordics, you pay far, far less, sometimes nothing at all. I don't think anywhere near 3000 a month for 3 kids is normal in most of other EU either. So, over here car seats may be a much bigger factor than daycare costs.

3000 eur/month/kid is in the Netherlands. You do get state support (~50% so it's still expensive) if both parents work enough hours.

Re: Car Seats as Contraception

#98

Post by kelnos »

paulmooreparks wrote: post #73

Interesting moral discussion: An estimated 8000 fewer births in 2017 attributed to a law that saved an estimated 57 lives in the same year.

It's also unclear if it's the laws alone that saved those 57 kids. If the laws didn't exist, presumably some of those 57 kids would still have been in rear-facing child seats, and would have survived, no? (Unless their study accounted for that, and the end result was 57.)

But it is an interesting thing to think about. Sure, 57 children dying would create a lot of misery for a family (and extended family), but would 8,000 other children in the world, presumably giving their families happiness, somehow "make up for it"?

Feels odd to think about it in those terms. Balancing/trading lives is a dirty business.

Re: Car Seats as Contraception

#99

Post by Earw0rm »

orthoxerox wrote: post #51
Earw0rm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, socially conservative, multi-generational households (sharing labour and childcare between women relatives), less expectation for mothers of young kids to be away from the home, and a much lower expectation of what "housing" means in terms of both building quality and the amount of living space per person.

Who expects mothers of young kids in the US to be away from the home?

Work and wider social participation, and a sprawling suburban geography that has people living far from friends and family.

The alternative - small, crowded population centres where everyone knows everyone and three, even four generations live in the same household can of course be limiting, even suffocating.

But there's a reason why, for all that the 1950s autonomous nuclear family is held up as some kind of ideal by tradwife fetishists, it's also the milieu in which Valium and sleeping pills became popularised.

Re: Car Seats as Contraception

#100

Post by hbs18 »

magarnicle wrote: post #69
aaronax wrote: post #13

(Have 3yo and 1yo, another one the way, goal is 4) I have often thought that car seats are one of the major drags of modern parenting. This study apparently (I don't have time to read it, too busy with kids lmao!) confirms my suspicions. It is unfortunate that every policy change around them is trading some amount of convenience for every smaller risk eliminations. It is essentially impossible to say perfectly ration…

Built-in 5-point harnesses in the back seats would be safer than car seats and far easier, but there is a whole industry working against that idea.

Assuming the kids would be facing forward, wouldn't that require a helmet and a HANS device as well?
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