But sure everything would be better if any moron was allowed to decide how to keep their own kids safe.
- travel with many kids (nope, physically can't carry 4 car seats plus luggage)
- using a taxi, e.g. to go see a movie (nope, can't carry a car seat into the theater)
- carpooling with other families (I'll drive them, you pick up? Nope, we'd have to shuffle car seats around.)
- rides with grandparents or other family members (sorry, we'd have to deliver the car seat to them first)
- splitting kids between two vehicles for errands (let's spend 10m wrestling car seats from one car to the other first)
The whole texture of independent childhood is altered by car seat mandates! Everything gets filtered through "is there a car seat available?". If you haven't experienced this, it's hard to describe - and I think it's absolutely a case where tradeoffs like "how will this affect quality of life?" are completely overridden because "well, if it just saves one life..."
> Car seats and booster seats significantly reduce the risk of fatal injury in crashes by 71% for infants and 54% for toddlers (1-4 years old), saving over 11,000 lives in the US since 1975
> Booster seats reduce the risk of serious injury for children aged 4-8 by 45% compared to seatbelts alone.
It's from the AI summary because it was the most quotable but the articles I found say pretty much the same thing. Seems pretty solid to me.
> If you haven't experienced this, it's hard to describe - and I think it's absolutely a case where tradeoffs like "how will this affect quality of life?" are completely overridden because "well, if it just saves one life..."
If you haven't experienced your children dying unnecessarily because it was inconvenient to make them safe it's hard to describe..
What articles did you find, exactly? What primary evidence are they basing their claims on? Many of the numbers you'll find with a google search are unclear about what they're comparing to - I believe both of the fatality numbers above (71% and 54%) are relative to completely unrestrained kids, which is not the relevant comparison.
The 45% number I specifically discuss in the other comment, but every independently reproducible study using publicly available data has found much smaller effects, around 10-25% for minor injuries and no statistically significant difference in severe injuries.
To be clear, I'm not saying "don't use car seats," I'm saying that the evidence doesn't support mandating them through age 8 (or 12!).
Our kids would be much safer if we drove everywhere at 15mph - less convenient, but it would prevent many unnecessary deaths. Unfortunately, it is impossible to do anything in the world without risk. So we're forced to balance convenience against safety every day, whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not.
It notes this, which might be pertinent to your comment regarding how the overall statistics don't show the trends you expect:
> A NHTSA study found that while most parents and caregivers believe they know how to correctly install their car seats, about half (46%) have installed their child’s car seat incorrectly.
Here's a more quotable one that directly addresses your claim that it's compared with unrestrained: https://www.cdc.gov/child-passenger-safety/prevention/index....
> Car seat use reduces the risk for injury in a crash by 71–82% for children, when *compared with seat belt use alone*.
Here's another one specifically concerning booster seats: https://www.childrenshospitals.org/news/childrens-hospitals-...
> Children in booster seats in the back seat are 45% less likely to be injured in a crash than children *using a seat belt alone*.
That's about as much effort as I'm willing to put into this conversation. I'll finish off by saying I'm not American and these rules exist outside the US as well - I have a hard time believing so many countries would separately implement this (or similar) mandate if it was as unfounded as you claim.
Yes, I think that we'd all be better off if every person was allowed to have their own personal values, deciding what's more important to themSELVES, rather than piling on and trying to force every one into a one-size-fits-all solution.
For my part, I'd much rather have people wishing me "have a rich and fulfilling life" rather than "be timid and careful to maximize your time even if it's boring and unrewarding".
Sure, you can disagree with my priorities, but that's the whole point. We should each be able to have our own priorities.
You can endanger yourself all you like, I couldn't care less but you don't get to endanger others even if you made them.
Far more harm comes from that than tail risk elimination mandating car seats between 8 and 12 years.
Would you be willing to make all new parents submit to frequent breathalyzers during pregnancy and after birth? Drinking is a massive factor in infant mortality at birth and SIDS.
Should all parents submit to frequent breathalyzers? Tell me, how many parents, as a fraction of all parents, drink irresponsibly to the point where it significantly endangers their children?
Now compare that number to the fraction of parents who drive their kids around in cars. You're grasping at straws comparing apples and oranges.
Isn't this true for every safety measure?
I don't need a guard on my table saw if I don't stick my thumb in it. Don't need a helmet if I don't fall off of my bike.
Every safety measure faces a question of whether the resources allocated to it are an efficient means of achieving that reduction in risk.
To GP's point, we probably can't prevent people from crashing altogether, but we currently have a road system designed to sacrifice safety on the altar of throughput [0]. How many more or fewer kids (or just people) would die if governments allocated the resources to making roads safer that they currently mandate their citizens use on car seats?
> I don't need a guard on my table saw if I don't stick my thumb in it. Don't need a helmet if I don't fall off of my bike.
Do you think the guard on your table saw makes you safer than training and experience using the saw safely? There are always limited resources and multiple routes to safety, so we shouldn't assume any given safety measure is the best use of those resources (especially in consideration of second-order effects).
[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018-3-1-whats-a-stroad-...
This was not the major factor, but when things were still like that, it was not only NASA that made more forward progress than later times.
