I believe it's a factor, but not the dominant one.
Me and my SO were considering a third for a brief moment, but it was the amount of living space and our age (35+ for the mother) that ultimately made us decide against it.
I was totally in for getting a new vehicle BTW.
Interestingly I have two siblings and we had a serious and expected downgrade as a family in living space just when I started attending grade school - a smaller apartment than mine currently.
As for the car seats the regulations came in when my younger sister was in 3rd grade or so, so he just decided to wing it without the seats.
Families of 5+ have very few options in terms of cars, among them the Peugeot 5008 - reviled both by reviewers and owners alike.
> We show that laws mandating use of child car safety seats significantly reduce birth rates, as many cars cannot fit three child seats in the back seat.
Wouldn't the real cause of the depressed birthrates be the requirement to own a car in order to have children? If you aren't a slave to your vehicle there's no problem with the available space for car seats.
Double-buggies on public transport and more than two kids on a typical cargo cycle aren't fun either. Granted the age-span that's necessary is a little shorter than car seats.
That said, have 3 kids aged within 5 years of one another and we never had to get a double buggy. The older ones would be OK to walk (3 year olds will walk a pretty long way if you're patient) by the time the youngest got too big to be sling-carried.
It comes down to, dealing with three under-5's single-handed while out and about is pretty hectic full stop. Most places with high birth rates "solve" this by not allowing mums the expectation to be away from the house much, and/or they're multigenerational households where grandma or an aunt can be home with some of the kids.
So to your point, I think it's less the requirement to own a car, more the expectation of a kind of lifestyle which often, though not always, in turn requires one. Childcare for 2 year olds here is often upwards of $2500/month, now that's a contraceptive.
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 add as a car slave that the kinds of cars large enough to fit the kinds of car seats marketed in the US are tens of thousands more than a compact or mid-size sedan, and that in a mid-size sedan having a car seat in the rear-facing configuration significantly constrains how far back you can put the passenger or driver seat. This is true even for the narrower seats that are designed for three-across seating. And worse, you might not have the latch system or an appropriate kind of seat belt on that third seat.
Only on very modern times would you feel the need to have that many bedrooms for 3 kids. Of course that’s because you can’t banish the kids from the house until sunset anymore
> 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.
Or you're one of the millions of people who live in developing countries which have low cost of living and low housing costs. Coincidentally this group has very high birth rates.
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.
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.
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.
Raising one child is fine, raise two or three means sharing rooms not having a guest room (e.g. relatives can't stay easily) or an at-home office space.
It's not that you can't, it's just that it's not the standard of living most western people expect.
It depends on how many kids you have, no? I did know other kids when I was growing up who shared a room with one or more siblings, but some parents want to be able to give each child their own bedroom.
So a three-bedroom apartment might not be enough if you have three kids.
Or you are poor enough you get paid to pop out more kids and it's cheaper to uber twice a month to the grocery store because you have no job for which you'd need a car nor the cash to buy it.
I think the car is a proxy/correlation for a level of wealth. If you make little enough the marginal cost of the next kid "seems" cheap because you basically make it back in state benefits in a lot of cases.
"Wouldn't the real cause of the depressed birthrates be the requirement to own a car in order to have children?"
Yes. The one-time setup costs for "properly" raising kids are probably around $30k. All the kids stuff is extra expensive (in the west) and for the kids seats you need a large car (in the west) and there's social stigma against kids sharing a room (in the west), so you also need a larger apartment.
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.
>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.
I think it mostly cancels out since the pro regulation side is inevitably bolstered by those who'll sell more shit if alternative goods get worse for the money and those who make a buck on the compliance process.
>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"
What if it turns out that at the societal level that letting airbags, abs, traction control, etc, etc, etc, be optional is actually better because it puts more people into cheaper newer cars that benefit from other safety engineering even if they don't have airbags and all the expensive electronic stuff?
This sort of stuff wherein one tries to anchor the discussion around whole lives (or some other easy to measure thing that makes for good appeals to emotion) and hand wave away anything else is a huge part of the problem.
The core purpose of regulation is to create better lives for society as a whole.
Human lives being lost is usually considered negative for a society, but just a number in economics for insurances, car-companies, etc.
It's an annoying hindrance for companies to be forced into contributing to the well-being of society, they prefer to decide on that by themselves.
Meanwhile, governments suck at communication with their citizens, and their message is drowned by companies who do marketing every day. So the growing assumption also fueled by companies is that we could have much better stuff if the market wouldn't be regulated.
And yeah, there is surely regulation which should be reviewed, but I don't believe this should be done by putting a price on a human life.
I don't think we would have bike helmets on the street and seatbelts in cars if they wouldn't have been required by regulation, driving down the cost of development and production and making them available for everybody.
Even vice-versa: If I'm involved in a car-accident, I would also want the OTHER party to have a seatbelt or a helmet.
Looking how "disruptive companies" find ways to do stupid shit because it's not properly regulated (e.g. skipping mechanical door-handles in car-backseats, creating "digital markets" without equal competition,...) tells me that ESPECIALLY these days empowering regulators to make good decisions and communicate better on them would be more important than having "cheaper newer cars".
> Every safety regulation ought to pass a cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis. Few of them do.
This probably won't happen (at least in open) because there's a risk people will start asking for a cost/benefit analysis for everything. Laws that enable mass surveillance, immigration regulations, military spending, wars, political system.
> 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.
Sure, the value of 57 lives isn't infinite, but this particular comparison is a totally absurd one to make. Births and deaths are completely morally independent, it's not as if those 57 lives could be substituted using the surplus of births.
> Every safety regulation ought to pass a cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis. Few of them do.
Actually I'm pretty sure that is in fact how safety regulations work.
Nonetheless, the concept of a "cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis" is paradoxical. Values are intrinsically subjective, hence we have democracy.
>Actually I'm pretty sure that is in fact how safety regulations work.
Of course the number "check out". Industry regulations are typically ghost written by some combination of industry groups, lobbying groups and academia. Who funds those? The industry either being regulated or industry that stands to benefit if some other industry is regulated.
80-100yr ago if you were inclined to screech about fire safety you'd have been citing numbers funded by the.... wait for it.... asbestos industry.
>hence we have democracy.
Democracy is a system for ensuring stable-ish power transfers by giving the people some semblance of control over the process and little more.
As a parent of 2 a big reason we won’t have a third is the massive step up in transportation costs. Having to get a third car seat would require us to go from our Kia to a minivan. And then there is the cost of the car seat alone.
Then there is the time cost of wrangling kids in an out of them. My toddler can easily make it 15 minutes to buckle her in just on her own. A third would mean easily 5 minutes of to get everyone buckled in and only if they are cooperative.
Yep, there is like two brands that specialize in three across.
A lot of new parents haven't yet realized that a carseat is wider than the average adult. Meaning that cramped middle seat isn't getting a third seat without very careful consideration and the right vehicle.
As a father of four (2+2: third one was born after 8 years since the second one), I thought all the trouble in the world would come and go, but what'll stay is us having a second life with kids when older ones get all independent teenagers. And we are not 40 yet.
The transportation costs are annoying, but worth it.
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.
It’s this everywhere: the constant fear of not raising children perfectly in every aspect puts downward pressure on a family’s desire (and perceived ability) to have more children.
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. Once the kids could face forward, the typical Graco style seats were too wide and the middle rear passenger seat was not usable, so we invested into 2 narrow-profile seats that left the middle seat more useful. I can't remember the brand anymore, but it took a lot of research to find the narrow ones and they weren't cheap.
And none of this have contributed to us not wanting more than 2 children. That wasn't going to happen regardless of any car seats. People not wanting to have more than a 1 or 2 kids has so many other, more important reasons, I very much doubt that car seat size has much to do with it.
> People not wanting to have more than a 1 or 2 kids has so many other, more important reasons, I very much doubt that car seat size has much to do with it.
Yes and no. It is a bunch of little and big things that add up to that decision.
It is interesting to see how much the car seat issue adds to the decision making.
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.
My wife and I are DINKs. We drive a smallish CUV. Her cousin drove it, fell in love, and bought the same car.
It’s really a perfect allrounder - looks nice, is luxurious, more than enough space for us, even drives like a sports car (or at least as close to a CUV can hope to).
Then said cousin had a baby. People around him scolded him for not selling the car for something much bigger - like a Kia Telluride or a Honda Pilot. But he is doing just fine.
I remember the day I measured my youngest, find they didn't need a seat anymore and drove it straight to the rubbish tip. It was pure elation. I could fold the seats down in 10 seconds to carry stuff. I could fold them back up and put a kid straight in. Awesome
(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 rational things like "I think children should be put in this slightly riskier type of car seat for convenience reasons."
Even if laws are relaxed, there is the peer/manufacturer pressure. As a real example, I think it is pretty annoying to have my three year old facing backwards. It would be somewhat more dangerous to have them facing forwards, but a substantial improvement in quality of life for me and for the child. The manufacturers compete based on max weight that they support/allow/claim for rear facing, something like 45 pounds. So a family member such as a spouse allegedly has decided that the child ABSOLUTELY needs to be rear facing until they reach that weight. That may not happen until age five! By this time there may be manufacturers inching up to 60 pounds rear facing.
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!
My child moved to front facing at around 2 or maybe 2.5 at the oldest (had to go back and lock at old pictures to confirm, she’s 12 now). Parents who obsess over things like keeping their kid rear facing until 5 or in a booster seat until 12 are just neurotic, IMHO. They’re probably the same ones who won’t let them ride their bikes around the neighborhood unsupervised or walk/ride the bus to or from school.
>
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.
I had a vehicle with no back seats when my child was in a car seat. It was great because I could attend to them while driving. Since there were no back seats they could not cite me as it was an exception to the law.
I'm not convinced it's actually safer to have kids in the back. Sure they're safer in an accident, but when I drove another car with rear seats I found myself constantly looking back to deal with the child thus more likely to cause an accident. Yes maybe you should just neglect your child while driving, but they will exact penance if you do so, by non-stop screaming so loud you can't hear emergency vehicles or other possible road hazards.
This common sense mindset would invalidate so many 'safety' laws and I'm all for it.
Studies make so many invalid assumptions (and usually don't even state them) to force the data / statistics to fit clean a/b or null testing.
But to put a dent in the status quo, we really need a greenlight to just dump however many kids in the back again, no matter the number of kids or seatbelts.
And before anyone gut reacts to this- ask yourself why doing that with schoolbuses still isn't a problem?
Probably for the same reason government trucks aren't required to have emissions controls on them, at the end of the day the King will do whatever they like and reason backwards why it applies to the subjects but not the crown.
> 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.)
It's definitely possible to put 3 car seats across in the back seat of pretty much any car available in the American market. The appropriate narrow seats just aren't very popular or well known...
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.
I don't want to put words in your mouth etamponi, but if we take the trolley problem to classically mean choosing between different numbers of deaths; then I wouldn't describe it as a trolley problem.
I imagine the typical car accident in which three 'car seat age' children are involved, and at least one is killed. Then I imagine the typical event where a family decide against a third child. I feel quite a substantial qualitative difference! I certainly wouldn't claim one offsets the other.
Personally I don't know if there's any multiplier I'd accept. I find reduction of suffering and trauma much more important to me than offset creation of life and opportunity.
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.
Buying slim car seats is just not that expensive compared to buying a new car, so we did that. It's hard to believe that people who really want 3 children cannot make it work.
> 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.
> We show that laws mandating use of child car safety seats significantly reduce birth rates, as many cars cannot fit three child seats in the back seat.
It's almost Darwinistic: Offspring has an increased potential of survival and faces less threats, so reproduction is organically adjusted to prevent overpopulation.
I thought this was going to be about a car being uncomfortable to have sex in.
Such a car would make for a great product to sell to parents of teenagers, so you can lend them the car but at least make it difficult to fornicate without consent of the king.
Let’s just focus on how cars and car culture are reducing birth rates. Nobody wants to chuck their kids into the back seat without a carseat any more. Laws aren’t the problem.
These seem like particularly specific excuses. If you are not into having kids, there are many different ways to rationalize that (but why?). If you are into kids, you'd have to overcome all sorts of pain and suffering, car culture is by far not the worst of them.
I was going to have more kids, but I didn't for the particular exact reasons I always am harping on about (in my case, nerfing beast hunter in WoW in 2018) ;)
I also think that modern car seats are one of the main factors driving the adoption of unnecessarily large cars, which have far worse safety outcomes in crashes for everybody except the people inside them.
When I was growing up in the 90s with 2 siblings we had a small hatch. When I had my second child we had to upgrade from a small hatch to an SUV because we simply couldn't fit a car seat behind the driver. Even now, I'm not sure if a third would fit.
Sure, the SUV itself and the extra padding on the car seats might make my children safe in collisions with other big cars, but if we were all still driving hatches then maybe none of that would be necessary.
It's just not cool to have kids. There are many more ways to have fun and status in society, so having kids is either coming as a social burden ("i am expected to by my spouse/relatives"), or a religious thing. Rationally, it's such a pain in the ass to have kids, while you can have some much more fun without them: travel the world, meet people, learn and explore! Clearly, having kids is net cost and suffering.
Yet, those who opt in do have a different opinion. We got two a decade ago, and then a couple years ago through of FOMO that when we are 45 we'd look back and regret missing the window of having another couple of kids. So we did. I'm 39, have four kids, had to get a bigger car, pay the airline tickets through the nose, spend a lot of time on kids' stuff, and love it. My family is the center of the universe and I'm the happiest and wisest dad alive. Everyone else is childish ;-P
> We estimate that these laws prevented fatalities of 57 children in car crashes in 2017 but reduced total births by 8,000 that year and have decreased the total by 145,000 since 1980.
The law in my state doesn't require car seats be in the back if it's full or not possible. IIRC they also aren't required if there's no more room. I put my kid up front in my truck that had zero back seats, only a couple people said anything and I told them to pound sand, it certainly wasn't illegal.
Legal or not, there are real safety reasons not to put a small child up front. I bet your car's user manual says not to put kids up front. The safety systems are designed with minimum height & weight assumptions. The front seat belts aren't designed for a car seat. But most importantly, airbags explode with serious force that can break bones in a kids face. If they're in a rear facing car seat it can strike the seat (which will be close to the dashboard) with enough force to snap their spine.
>Legal or not, there are real safety reasons not to put a small child up front. I bet your car's user manual says not to put kids up front. The safety systems are designed with minimum height & weight assumptions. The front seat belts aren't designed for a car seat. But most importantly, airbags explode with serious force that can break bones in a kids face. If they're in a rear facing car seat it can strike the seat (which will be close to the dashboard) with enough force to snap their spine.
He already said he told people who were hand wringing to pound sand. What's the point of more hand wringing?
Also, trucks from the 90s typically even have passenger airbags.
It was never about the limit of the law. It was always about what will get you scolded or otherwise harassed by other parents or people in the "children" profession. Any sort of place lots of kids are (daycare, doctor, etc, etc) are absolute hives of those kinds of people.
> I put my kid up front in my truck that had zero back seats, only a couple people said anything and I told them to pound sand, it certainly wasn't illegal.
Yeah because at that point you're basically advertising that you don't give a shit what they think and so you're a lost cause to the kind of people who'd try and guilt you.
I bet if you showed up wearing both a front and rear kid carrier while riding a motorcycle they would have not said a word and avoided I contact with you entirely.
A theory that at least is consistent with the observed correlation seems vastly superior to a midbrow dismissal that doesn't. Your "raising kids is hard" theory would explain why people don't have a third child, but raising kids is hard universally. What was observed was that a third child was delayed for longer (even indefinitely) in states with higher age thresholds for mandatory car seats (even when controlling for demographics).
Their causal explanation relies on two additional observations that seem pretty hard to explain by other theories: the effect disappears for single-parent and carless households.
It is also the number at which your reproduction exceeds that of only replacing your own life. This is very important to some parents to leave the world with more people in it.
Me and my SO were considering a third for a brief moment, but it was the amount of living space and our age (35+ for the mother) that ultimately made us decide against it.
I was totally in for getting a new vehicle BTW.
Interestingly I have two siblings and we had a serious and expected downgrade as a family in living space just when I started attending grade school - a smaller apartment than mine currently.
As for the car seats the regulations came in when my younger sister was in 3rd grade or so, so he just decided to wing it without the seats.
Families of 5+ have very few options in terms of cars, among them the Peugeot 5008 - reviled both by reviewers and owners alike.
Germany first introduced mandatory child car seat laws on April 1, 1993. [1]
That year, fertility was at 1.28 kids per woman. Since then, it has increased to 1.62.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindersitz
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/deu/ger...
Wouldn't the real cause of the depressed birthrates be the requirement to own a car in order to have children? If you aren't a slave to your vehicle there's no problem with the available space for car seats.
That said, have 3 kids aged within 5 years of one another and we never had to get a double buggy. The older ones would be OK to walk (3 year olds will walk a pretty long way if you're patient) by the time the youngest got too big to be sling-carried.
It comes down to, dealing with three under-5's single-handed while out and about is pretty hectic full stop. Most places with high birth rates "solve" this by not allowing mums the expectation to be away from the house much, and/or they're multigenerational households where grandma or an aunt can be home with some of the kids.
So to your point, I think it's less the requirement to own a car, more the expectation of a kind of lifestyle which often, though not always, in turn requires one. Childcare for 2 year olds here is often upwards of $2500/month, now that's a contraceptive.
I would also add as a car slave that the kinds of cars large enough to fit the kinds of car seats marketed in the US are tens of thousands more than a compact or mid-size sedan, and that in a mid-size sedan having a car seat in the rear-facing configuration significantly constrains how far back you can put the passenger or driver seat. This is true even for the narrower seats that are designed for three-across seating. And worse, you might not have the latch system or an appropriate kind of seat belt on that third seat.
Or you're one of the millions of people who live in developing countries which have low cost of living and low housing costs. Coincidentally this group has very high birth rates.
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.
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.
It's not that you can't, it's just that it's not the standard of living most western people expect.
So a three-bedroom apartment might not be enough if you have three kids.
> If you aren't a slave to your vehicle there's no problem with the available space for car seats.
The abstract says the effect is limited to households with a car.
Yes. The one-time setup costs for "properly" raising kids are probably around $30k. All the kids stuff is extra expensive (in the west) and for the kids seats you need a large car (in the west) and there's social stigma against kids sharing a room (in the west), so you also need a larger apartment.
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.
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.
I think it mostly cancels out since the pro regulation side is inevitably bolstered by those who'll sell more shit if alternative goods get worse for the money and those who make a buck on the compliance process.
>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"
What if it turns out that at the societal level that letting airbags, abs, traction control, etc, etc, etc, be optional is actually better because it puts more people into cheaper newer cars that benefit from other safety engineering even if they don't have airbags and all the expensive electronic stuff?
This sort of stuff wherein one tries to anchor the discussion around whole lives (or some other easy to measure thing that makes for good appeals to emotion) and hand wave away anything else is a huge part of the problem.
The core purpose of regulation is to create better lives for society as a whole.
Human lives being lost is usually considered negative for a society, but just a number in economics for insurances, car-companies, etc.
It's an annoying hindrance for companies to be forced into contributing to the well-being of society, they prefer to decide on that by themselves.
Meanwhile, governments suck at communication with their citizens, and their message is drowned by companies who do marketing every day. So the growing assumption also fueled by companies is that we could have much better stuff if the market wouldn't be regulated.
And yeah, there is surely regulation which should be reviewed, but I don't believe this should be done by putting a price on a human life.
I don't think we would have bike helmets on the street and seatbelts in cars if they wouldn't have been required by regulation, driving down the cost of development and production and making them available for everybody. Even vice-versa: If I'm involved in a car-accident, I would also want the OTHER party to have a seatbelt or a helmet.
Looking how "disruptive companies" find ways to do stupid shit because it's not properly regulated (e.g. skipping mechanical door-handles in car-backseats, creating "digital markets" without equal competition,...) tells me that ESPECIALLY these days empowering regulators to make good decisions and communicate better on them would be more important than having "cheaper newer cars".
But that's just my view...
This probably won't happen (at least in open) because there's a risk people will start asking for a cost/benefit analysis for everything. Laws that enable mass surveillance, immigration regulations, military spending, wars, political system.
Sure, the value of 57 lives isn't infinite, but this particular comparison is a totally absurd one to make. Births and deaths are completely morally independent, it's not as if those 57 lives could be substituted using the surplus of births.
> Every safety regulation ought to pass a cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis. Few of them do.
Actually I'm pretty sure that is in fact how safety regulations work.
Nonetheless, the concept of a "cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis" is paradoxical. Values are intrinsically subjective, hence we have democracy.
Of course the number "check out". Industry regulations are typically ghost written by some combination of industry groups, lobbying groups and academia. Who funds those? The industry either being regulated or industry that stands to benefit if some other industry is regulated.
80-100yr ago if you were inclined to screech about fire safety you'd have been citing numbers funded by the.... wait for it.... asbestos industry.
>hence we have democracy.
Democracy is a system for ensuring stable-ish power transfers by giving the people some semblance of control over the process and little more.
Then there is the time cost of wrangling kids in an out of them. My toddler can easily make it 15 minutes to buckle her in just on her own. A third would mean easily 5 minutes of to get everyone buckled in and only if they are cooperative.
A lot of new parents haven't yet realized that a carseat is wider than the average adult. Meaning that cramped middle seat isn't getting a third seat without very careful consideration and the right vehicle.
The transportation costs are annoying, but worth it.
So, over here car seats may be a much bigger factor than daycare costs.
And none of this have contributed to us not wanting more than 2 children. That wasn't going to happen regardless of any car seats. People not wanting to have more than a 1 or 2 kids has so many other, more important reasons, I very much doubt that car seat size has much to do with it.
Yes and no. It is a bunch of little and big things that add up to that decision.
It is interesting to see how much the car seat issue adds to the decision making.
It’s really a perfect allrounder - looks nice, is luxurious, more than enough space for us, even drives like a sports car (or at least as close to a CUV can hope to).
Then said cousin had a baby. People around him scolded him for not selling the car for something much bigger - like a Kia Telluride or a Honda Pilot. But he is doing just fine.
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 rational things like "I think children should be put in this slightly riskier type of car seat for convenience reasons."
Even if laws are relaxed, there is the peer/manufacturer pressure. As a real example, I think it is pretty annoying to have my three year old facing backwards. It would be somewhat more dangerous to have them facing forwards, but a substantial improvement in quality of life for me and for the child. The manufacturers compete based on max weight that they support/allow/claim for rear facing, something like 45 pounds. So a family member such as a spouse allegedly has decided that the child ABSOLUTELY needs to be rear facing until they reach that weight. That may not happen until age five! By this time there may be manufacturers inching up to 60 pounds rear facing.
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!
It's based on size (shoulder height measured in sitting position) not age.
I think some 5-point seat belts allow a much wider design zone so won't need boosters by the time the children outgrow the front-facing bucket seat.
Laws are about control[ling citizens]. Politicians are not willing to give up control.
I'm not convinced it's actually safer to have kids in the back. Sure they're safer in an accident, but when I drove another car with rear seats I found myself constantly looking back to deal with the child thus more likely to cause an accident. Yes maybe you should just neglect your child while driving, but they will exact penance if you do so, by non-stop screaming so loud you can't hear emergency vehicles or other possible road hazards.
Studies make so many invalid assumptions (and usually don't even state them) to force the data / statistics to fit clean a/b or null testing.
But to put a dent in the status quo, we really need a greenlight to just dump however many kids in the back again, no matter the number of kids or seatbelts.
And before anyone gut reacts to this- ask yourself why doing that with schoolbuses still isn't a problem?
Because school buses are very large and heavy and the passengers are high off the roadway. Buses also need to stop at all railroad tracks.
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?)
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.)
So we went for (especially in Europe) rather limited subset of cars where all 3 of the 2nd row seats are proper sized, with Isofix on each of them.
Usually same makes/models that offer the option of additional 2 seats in the 3rd row.
Every family I see with at least 2 kids has a minivan, so maybe we can discuss if minivans are causal.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
I imagine the typical car accident in which three 'car seat age' children are involved, and at least one is killed. Then I imagine the typical event where a family decide against a third child. I feel quite a substantial qualitative difference! I certainly wouldn't claim one offsets the other.
Personally I don't know if there's any multiplier I'd accept. I find reduction of suffering and trauma much more important to me than offset creation of life and opportunity.
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.
Buying slim car seats is just not that expensive compared to buying a new car, so we did that. It's hard to believe that people who really want 3 children cannot make it work.
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.
It's almost Darwinistic: Offspring has an increased potential of survival and faces less threats, so reproduction is organically adjusted to prevent overpopulation.
Such a car would make for a great product to sell to parents of teenagers, so you can lend them the car but at least make it difficult to fornicate without consent of the king.
(Father of 4, 39 y.o., non-religious.)
When I was growing up in the 90s with 2 siblings we had a small hatch. When I had my second child we had to upgrade from a small hatch to an SUV because we simply couldn't fit a car seat behind the driver. Even now, I'm not sure if a third would fit.
Sure, the SUV itself and the extra padding on the car seats might make my children safe in collisions with other big cars, but if we were all still driving hatches then maybe none of that would be necessary.
We are in the stupidest arms race.
Yet, those who opt in do have a different opinion. We got two a decade ago, and then a couple years ago through of FOMO that when we are 45 we'd look back and regret missing the window of having another couple of kids. So we did. I'm 39, have four kids, had to get a bigger car, pay the airline tickets through the nose, spend a lot of time on kids' stuff, and love it. My family is the center of the universe and I'm the happiest and wisest dad alive. Everyone else is childish ;-P
But as they start having kids, you start having kids - and you can roughly keep the same group, maybe get a few, lose a few.
But if you get up to 4 (or more) kids, you start finding ... your group changes to one that includes more and larger families.
5 kids in a car, held, seated, seatbelted, any-which-way. Like on a train.
145K is roughly the population of Syracuse, NY or Midland, TX. That is far more than the absolute number of US military deaths in World War I (116,516 per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...).
He already said he told people who were hand wringing to pound sand. What's the point of more hand wringing?
Also, trucks from the 90s typically even have passenger airbags.
> I put my kid up front in my truck that had zero back seats, only a couple people said anything and I told them to pound sand, it certainly wasn't illegal.
Yeah because at that point you're basically advertising that you don't give a shit what they think and so you're a lost cause to the kind of people who'd try and guilt you.
I bet if you showed up wearing both a front and rear kid carrier while riding a motorcycle they would have not said a word and avoided I contact with you entirely.
Maybe people just avoid 3 kids, because it’s hard enough raising one or two kids.
Their causal explanation relies on two additional observations that seem pretty hard to explain by other theories: the effect disappears for single-parent and carless households.