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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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