Every family I see with at least 2 kids has a minivan, so maybe we can discuss if minivans are causal.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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?)
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.
5 kids in a car, held, seated, seatbelted, any-which-way. Like on a train.
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.
(Father of 4, 39 y.o., non-religious.)
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.
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...).
mullingitover•2h ago
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.
Aurornis•1h ago
> 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.
cucumber3732842•1h ago
throwway120385•1h ago
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.
mothballed•1h ago
mullingitover•1h ago
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.
Earw0rm•1h ago
orthoxerox•49m ago
Earw0rm•1h ago
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.