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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28506 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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And you don't want to have a kid because of a car seat?!

Correction: people with two kids don't want a third, because car seat laws force you to buy a bigger car, which is still a substantial expense for most people.

See, car seats are usually so wide that you can't fit three in the back of a typical sedan or SUV, plus several states require kids to be in car seats or booster seats to a surprisingly high age - my home state of Pennsylvania doesn't allow kids to go without one until the age of 8!

And, y'know, we also have cheap and reliable contraceptives now, alongside all that cheap food.

Do you have to use an actual car seat? Older kids can sit on booster seats that are much smaller and lower cost than a car seat. Example

A quick googling says Pennsylvania law requires a booster seat between ages 4 and 8.

We do indeed own a couple of booster seats since our kids are in that age range, but you might want to take a second look at the specs on the one you just linked - it's 17.5 inches wide, which means if you want to fit three across then your car's back seat needs to be at least 52.5 inches wide, but actually more because you have to be able to reach in between the booster seats to buckle/unbuckle the kids. I haven't taken a tape measure to my own car seats, but we bought average sized ones and our cars aren't tiny and there still really isn't room for a third seat there.

I have a carseat and a booster in the back of a midsized sedan. It looks to me like I could fit 3 boosters back there. But I understand reaching your hands between the click the belts would not be easy.

The Nissan Altima is a mid-size sedan with 54.5 inches of rear hip room

With the Accord, you get 55 inches of rear hip room

The Camry has 54.6 inches of rear hip room

I have 3 kids, 1 was in a booster while 2 were still in their car seat. I made it work for a short time with 3 in the backseat of my crossover, but I had to buy a seatbelt extender just to be able to buckle in the booster seat.

See, car seats are usually so wide that you can't fit three in the back of a typical sedan or SUV

Usually. Slim-size carseats are more expensive but I can testify that they do fit three across a backseat.

This is one of those things that absolutely infuriates me as a numerate parent.

There’s strong evidence that child seats are much safer for very young children, but my understanding is there’s virtually no statistically significant increase in safety after children reach a certain size, like around 3 years old.

Quite literally at least a generation of third children were never born because of this spurious legislation and regulatory nonsense.

While my wife and I only have two children, we would have likely wanted a third even if we met and married just a year before we did. And getting a larger car would have been prohibitively expensive, even a used one.

I think the link between status and fertility as often is discussed here is a valid one, and the concept of ‘cultural inflation’ has vast explanatory power to mend the massive gap between our greatly increased wealth and our cratering fertility; you’re simply expected to buy a lot more shit and do a lot more expensive things to not be considered “low status”, and I think avoiding low status is much more paramount and painful than achieving high status for the vast majority of people.

The sort of benign neglect that many high functioning millennials / gen x / boomers got from their parents is simply no longer acceptable to society.

A married couple with noble hearts and the love and affection of their kin and community with still be considered a piece of garbage if they roll up in a beater station wagon with four kids with hand me down clothes and bologna sandwiches in brown bags.

I feel like there used to be a place for people who were humble but respected and respectable, I don’t think it’s false nostalgia to perceive that we no longer really have that option, ironically it’s been swept away partially by the huge growth in wealth.

My wife and I are extremely disagreeable & nonconformist types but even we are affected by this kind of intense material snobbery that our unbelievably wealthy society has produced. Collectively we have gone all in on K-Strategy and basically gutted the vast middle ground of family lifestyle that the majority of the world has occupied up until literally maybe a generation ago.

A married couple with noble hearts and the love and affection of their kin and community with still be considered a piece of garbage if they roll up in a beater station wagon with four kids with hand me down clothes and bologna sandwiches in brown bags.

If they have the love and affection of kin and community, who are these people considering them garbage for not having the latest material things, and why do they care?

My wife and I are extremely disagreeable & nonconformist types but even we are affected by this kind of intense material snobbery that our unbelievably wealthy society has produced.

Did you consider that you could just ignore the law?

I routinely ignore stupid laws as a matter of principle, however it must be said the penalty and fine for breaking that particular law can be pretty steep.

As to your other point, in our atomized age social status and the benefits they infer aren’t necessarily given by your immediate neighbors, family and friends. You’ll be happy to have their love and respect on your deathbed but increasingly in order to actually achieve any sort of real success you have to be plugged into a larger scene which is chock full of the fake and gay bullshit that I routinely complain about. That stuff has a monetary cost, not merely a psychological one.

Me personally, I’ve been somewhat lucky to find a niche which allows me to not worry too much about nebulous social status. It helps that I’m not personally very ambitious, but merely concerned with living an excellent life as an example for my children and hopefully their children.

Did you consider that you could just ignore the law?

I have literally never heard of somebody keeping their kid in a car seat up until legally required.

And yet you were willing to get slim carseats to fulfill those requirements. In general people have become far more conformist. Part of this is the vast increase in state capacity (and increase in punishments). Part is a somewhat-overblown fear of same (parents worry CPS will take away their children if they get a car-seat ticket).

Due to the belief that standard seat belts will not fit on a child under four feet tall, yes.

Like I said, more conformist. And safetyist. When I was an elementary-school-aged kid, there were only lap belts in the back seats anyway. Too many kids for the car? Stick some in the cargo area, it'll be fine.

Or as we used to call it in the station wagon, the way way back.

Well yes, concern for the safety of the children themselves when it just looks like seatbelts don't fit right trumps not letting the government tell you what to do. In some ways increased safety consciousness is bad, but my mother was breastfed in the front seat of the car; I don't think we should go back to that.

In some ways increased safety consciousness is bad, but my mother was breastfed in the front seat of the car; I don't think we should go back to that.

Eh, as long as her mother wasn't driving at the time.

But you see, in two generations we've gone from normies being OK with "toss 'em in the cargo area" to "disagreeable nonconformist types" refusing to so much as ignore an ill-fitting seat belt. That's an enormous amount of additional safetyism, and it may well have directly resulted in preventing more births than deaths.

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The new cars don’t come with the option of lap belt only, and the one time I picked the four year old up having forgotten the car seat, she complained about how uncomfortable it was the whole way home.

Stick some in the cargo area, it'll be fine.

Classic Balkanic coming of age experience

my home state of Pennsylvania doesn't allow kids to go without one until the age of 8!

Meanwhile, in the land of 'you got a loicence for that?' kids are required to have a car seat until they're 12! (Although I just learned that there is an exception for families with three children which seems sensible)

Plus we have the lowest nursery teacher to child ratio in Europe so childcare is crazy expensive. It's like they don't want us to have children! (I say that flippantly, the real culprit is safetyism).

Meanwhile, in the land of 'you got a loicence for that?' kids are required to have a car seat until they're 12!

Is this true? That's insanity. By the time I was 12 I was quickly gaining on my own mother in height.

Looks like it's age 12 or 135cm (4' 5"), whichever comes first. The internet tells me that on average this is at age ten for boys and age nine for girls. Still crazy, of course.

The law is actually 12 years or 4’5, whichever comes first.

In addition there appear to be some major caveats:

Unexpected journeys If the correct child car seat isn’t available, a child aged 3 or older can use an adult seat belt if the journey is all of the following:

  • unexpected
  • necessary
  • over a short distance

You can’t take children under 3 on an unexpected journey in a vehicle without the correct child car seat, unless both of the following apply:

  • it’s a licensed taxi or minicab
  • the child travels on a rear seat without a seat belt

No room for a third child car seat: Children under 3 must be in a child car seat. If there’s no room for a third child car seat in the back of the vehicle, the child must travel in the front seat with the correct child car seat.

Children aged 3 or older can sit in the back using an adult belt.

So large families (provided at least one child is older than 3) seem to be pretty much fully exempted.

Sadly, the idea that anyone might consider trade-offs is so ridiculous that it’s played for laughs by comedians.

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