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August 23, 2022
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If the rate of restraint in the 9-12 group was higher that's weird, I honestly didn't even consider that as a possibility and am curious how that could have happened. It also suggests that the mandates are not doing much to get kids into actual seats. Seriously, so weird. Will ponder.

On the 49% vs. 45%, my thinking was this: A seat belt, worn by an adult, properly restrains them and reduces by 45%. A seat belt, worn by a child, is highly unlikely to be worse than nothing. It's going to be protective some of the time and perhaps useless some of the time. Then what does the booster do? It makes it possible to do the thing you do to an adult, strap them in. So when comparing to the seat belts, you should expect to see smaller impacts, because you already got some benefit from seat belts in the comparison group. That's what I was thinking there, still am.

By 'as far as it goes' I meant that the impact on death and incapacitating injury wasn't measured in a way that is robust due to small numbers. And I do think I'm willing to bite the bullet that almost all the actual loss/risk is in those injuries - as a parent, I'm much more interested in the tail risk than modest stuff.

As for rhetoric assuming the conclusion, yeah, I read it that way. You can say it's 'summarizing previous research' and that's fine but it starts out saying its recommendations are 'correct' before justifying them. That's pretty rare in papers, in my experience.

Anyway, I will think more about the distribution of restraints being so odd and what might be a better comparison. Does anyone have 13-16 handy maybe? Times like these I wish I did have that assistant, but attempts at that have all failed.

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Nice work. I read the headline expecting to roll my eyes at the whole thing, but I am convinced that the association is real. Though, I'm not entirely convinced that the survey data can support a causal model, it is suggestive.

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I imagine the pattern would generalize really well beyond car seats i.e. the whole of child related safety regulations caused a significant percentage of the fertility decline since the 1960s.

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Yes. The impact of going back to a 1980s level of permissiveness would be quite large.

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Unfortunately, the genie is out of the bottle here. It would be political malpractice to liberalize these safety rules. The first child who dies or is critically injured after eliminating the post two year old requirements is a political disaster for whoever changed the rules.

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Maybe the initiative process could spread that political heat out over the voters instead, who can't face any consequences for their votes.

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I agree that's political reality for some measures that likely fail a cost-benefit analysis, but I see some distinguishing factors on this one.

First, the political angle depends heavily on an emotional "hook" for coverage of specific tragic events. With a subject such as child safety, that's typically grieving parents. Changing these laws, however, wouldn't prevent parents from deciding to have their children ride in car seats. The change simply wouldn't mandate it under state law.

Second, there are, of course, more than zero deaths and critical injuries among children riding in automobiles even in car seats. So that adds a layer of complexity in attributing specific injuries to lack of car seats.

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Sowell's "seen and unseen."

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If we're going to incentivize parenting, let's replace schools with an actually decent childminding service that works for parents instead of against them.

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I was going to note the upfront nature of the car seat costs, and how they are lumped timewise with most of the other new baby spending, particularly the cost of having the kid in the hospital. All three of ours were c-sections and ran into the 5 digits in terms of cost. Throw in an additional car seat and in the case of the last one a whole new mini-van, and that was a big chunk of money all at once. How many people have more than 30k$ just sitting around so they can cover all that without a loan? It also makes that third kid over twice as expensive as the first two in the short term.

In general, one has to wonder about the logic of e.g. preventing those 1 or 2 pediatric head injuries a year in exchange for tens of thousands of kids never even existing. A doctor at least might be myopic about the costs of that safety, since they only see the kids they treat and don't really keep track of how many are being born over all. For the lawmakers, I think you have it right that they simply don't care about what the effects of their decisions are on other people, only whether or not those decisions benefit themselves and their careers. We make a mistake giving the rule makers the benefit of the doubt when it is obvious they don't bother to find out.

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A small note; but since Obamacare, coverage of most maternity costs was mandated in most plans; here is a write-up; it's not universal, because you might be on some old grandfathered plan or still be entirely uninsured; but access to maternity should have become less of an issue now.

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Update to my note. Having since been caught in one of the exceptions regarding the maternity stuff (and still "paying off" my delivery) - it can still be a significant expenditure, even if out of pocket maxima apply. In particular, my plan (which is actually the employer being self -insured) covered only "physician-provided services" at 100% - so hospital, anesthesia, etc. was with a percentage co-insurance, which again wasn't the full billed amount but turned out to be substantial.

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Thanks for the update, Elle! Congrats on the new baby!

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Perhaps lowering the age for mandating car seat laws would also cause parents to drive even more carefully and have fewer accidents.

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Yes, there is always that discount factor on any new safety feature so it makes sense it would reverse for its absence. And of course, if they want to be safe, they can always continue to use the booster seats.

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Washington State requires car or booster seats until age 12 now: https://wtsc.wa.gov/programs-priorities/seat-belts-child-restraints/

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This is my first time hearing about 13 year olds being relegated to the back seat, and discovered my state of Washington requires that children up to age thirteen be transported in the back seat of the car "when practical."

I have to wonder if this even nets out to no effect on safety, and is actually a net negative. Kids that age can have conversations with their parents, and it's slightly more distracting to engage with someone in the backseat than someone riding shotgun. You also can't separate bickering siblings by having one of them ride up front.

Drivers also can't delegate things like updating the navigation, changing the radio station, climate control, etc. to riders in the backseat. At least not without them unbuckling their seat belts to reach forward between the front seats.

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Been waiting years for someone to write this.

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One additional item in the cost category that I’ve yet to see any good studies on (though I haven’t looked too hard) - with relatively high geographic mobility among the higher socioeconomic cohort where the study finds the most effect, it anecdotally seems many families don’t live near other family anymore... removing a source of “free” babysitting especially in those younger years where the difficulty dragging two or three car seat age kids to the grocery store is sometimes soul crushing. With less connection to neighbors (this well studied) and cultural resistance to leaving kids with neighbors anyway, this seems to greatly increase the cost of this “3 seat tax”.

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That's definitely a huge deal. Another intersecting problem is that the kids are not legally allowed to safely babysit each other (or even if they are, you can't trust that it will be socially/legally allowed), even for such short periods.

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In the great state of Maryland, not only does everyone under 8 (unless 4’9”+) need a car seat, you can’t leave them home or even in the car for a millisecond until the oldest sibling hits 13… even then, if you’ve got multiple kids like we do, I can’t say I’d want to bet custody of my kids that my 14 your old is viewed by a court as “responsible”.

From the state family law site:

“In Maryland, a child under the age of 8 years may not be left unattended at home, at school, or in a car.

If a parent or guardian needs to leave a child who is younger than 8 years old, the parent or guardian must ensure that a reliable person, who is at least 13 years old will stay to protect the child. Failure to provide a reliable person to babysit the child is a misdemeanor, and the parent or guardian is subject to a fine up to $500 and up to 30 days in prison.”

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It's way better for the child to have their parent in prison for 30 days than be in the car for a few mins alone, or for the family to forgo $500 in consumption or savings. (Sarcasm)

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They aren't? I looked after my parents' friends' kids when I was young.

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I have had several times recently when I needed to run a brief errand, 10 mins, but it would be way longer with all the kids and would disrupt naps, and I wished I could ask a neighbor to peek in on them. But it's weird to ask the neighbors that, so the errand didn't happen.

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When my wife and I had our third child, we got a minivan because there was no way to fit three car seats in the back of her car, despite the fact that it nominally held three passengers in the back.

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It can always be worse. Where I live in Europe car seats are required until age 12 (!!). (Technically it's for any child under 150cm in height or 36kg in weight)

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Sounds like an incentive to get yer kids obese asap.

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In the UK car seats are required until age 12 or 135cm, whichever comes first. However, the latter is almost always reached first- practically it's usually reached around 8.

There are countries in Europe that require car seats for adults under a certain height, irrespective of age.

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Are the rules against adults actually enforced? Are there are grown-ass humans forced to carry around car seats who otherwise aren't allowed to order an Uber?

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I think, on checking this up, that I was probably thinking of Ireland, and I wasn't quite right. Irish law requires any child under 150cm or less than 36kg (either) to use a child seat (as in the UK, taxis are exempt). Not only does this effectively mandate child seats up to around 13 or so for most people, it doesn't appear to define "child" anywhere. 150cm is about 5 feet, so there are plenty of adult women shorter than that. I assume it is not enforced.

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Hi, I'm David Solomon, one of the authors of the paper. I just wanted to say thanks heaps for doing such a fantastic writeup, especially in terms of explaining everything very clearly and in going into tons of detail. In particular, the estimates of the all-in dollar cost that prevents or subsidizes a birth is a really neat angle that we hadn't thought about, but something we're definitely going to consider more. I really appreciate it.

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A simple way of looking at studies like this is to simply ask "What predictions does this study make?"

This study predicts that places with more mass transit will have higher fertility rates than places with less mass transit. So New York City should have above average fertility relative to the rest of the US, and the EU should have significantly higher fertility.

We instead observe that NYC has below-average fertility rates for the US and the EU has substantially lower fertility rates than the US.

Failure.

This is a really bad sign for the hypothesis, and was literally the first thing I thought of.

This is the sort of very basic sanity check that should be done whenever doing anything like this.

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Except that places with mass transit tend to be more expensive, so families with children are less likely to live there, and big cities tend to have a lot more people who are politically liberal, have higher levels of education, are immersed in competitive careers, all of which make them less likely to have children. In partricular, most places in the US with enough transit to not require a car at all, are unaffordable for families with 3+ children, which is why families usually move to suburbs when they have their 2nd child and grow out of their apartment.

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Um... have you personally tried to travel with 2+ children using public transport? :-) I have (as an uncle) and trust me - it is NOT a great experience.

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What you write makes sense, but what would persist would be the awful perception that the govt. that changed the law was reckless with a child's life. Stories always win against facts in these sorts of things.

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There is such a risk but this implies we can never get rid of any regulation or requirement that can make a safety claim, however weak and however expensive to implement. If so, There Is No Hope.

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I think this is a special case because it involves children and driving is a universal activity.

For example, regulations that were overly restrictive on welders or hairdressers could be rolled back without the same "story" risk.

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Ummm... I would contend that regulations on welders and hairdressers can be arbitrarily draconian, because those populations are small enough in numbers and specialized enough, that only welders and hairdressers would be affected, the general public would not ever notice, so there would be no pushback. No regulations ever get rolled back, all the public sees is that one day there are no auto shops or fabrication businesss, and the corner barber shop is gone, wonder why?

See the literature on occupational licensing reqirements for example.

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What garbage did I just read?

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Even in nanny state Denmark, kids only need to be 135 cm to be out of a car seat (6-7 yo). And the third child in the middle seat isn't required to use a car seat. So many regulations in USA+Canada are so irrational it boggles my mind.

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