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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.
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?
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
If you’re referring to me, I was never in a position where I felt obligated to break the law because I only have two kids and wasn’t interested in more. I still broke it by moving them out of their car seats much earlier than legally permissible, I had a certain deniability as my kids, like me, are absolute units and look older than they are.
In fairness to those who comply with that law out of fear, some laws are easier to break than others. Driving with your kids out of car seats is almost as severely punished as driving with a suspended license, with the additional issue of repeat offense possibly bringing CPS to your doorstep. Lovely.
All for some bullshit that doesn’t make any sense. But that’s par for the course in current year.
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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.
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Classic Balkanic coming of age experience
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