[tropo]

Some places require kids to be in car seats until age 8. This is 2nd, 3rd, or 4th grade. These are not babies.

The manufacturers have lobbied for this "think of the children" law. Sales go up because parents are forced to buy the product. The manufacturers would be happy to raise the age even more.

1% of those kids are over 92 pounds. One can outweigh the mom, and can be asked to install his own car seat.

[yongjik]

Maybe I'm missing something super-recent, but for second graders, a "cat seat" is basically a piece of plastic for them to sit on so that the seat belt passes on their chest, instead of neck, which would be disastrous in case of accident.

Unlike toddler car seat, these seats don't look huge by any means, compared to the kids sitting on them. (Well I guess it's still problematic to sit three of them in a row in most cars, but that's a separate discussion...)

[rudedogg]

The author of "Freakonomics" has a TED talk about this. It's a little old though (2005): https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_surprising_stats_abo...