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by morepedantic 368 days ago
Historically, the jump from 2 kids to 3 kids requires purchasing a new car. The new car is more expensive to buy, operate, and maintain.

Today there are many narrow car seat options on the market, so 3 across seating is possible in full size sedans, but not compact cars. A European company makes a 3-across and 4-across car seat, but it's illegal in the US by accident.
2 comments
jjav 368 days ago
> Historically, the jump from 2 kids to 3 kids requires purchasing a new car.

The cost of daycare and education is so immensely larger than the cost of a car, that I don't think cost of a car is a factor. The important consideration with having a child, or another, is how could you possibly afford the daycare and later school.

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morepedantic 368 days ago
>Historically

The car seat related drop predates high daycare costs. In some places, high daycare costs aren't the primary concern: it's infant daycare waiting lists longer than 9 months.

Grandparents used to look after young children. Maybe we should incentivize that structure again? I'm open to other ideas.

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BobaFloutist 368 days ago
As someone who doesn't have kids, and probably never will, it's super clear to me that we need to be subsidizing childcare costs with public funds.

Right now, childcare can't be affordable without the workers being paid exploitative low amounts. We should fix that, that's exactly the sort of problem that having a society is for.

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subscribed 368 days ago
Kinder eggs are illegal in the USA.

Lead in the drinking water is okay. Last resort human antibiotics in the farmed animals are OK.

Seems like school shootings are OK.

I wouldn't use "illegal in the US" as something necessarily negative.

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morepedantic 368 days ago
It's only accidentally illegal. Nobody made it illegal on purpose. It just so happened that car seat regulations and car seat testing regulations were highly prescriptive, but also written at a time where nobody had thought to build a full bench, multi-child car seat.

The full bench car seat is significantly safer than single seats. But it cannot be tested on the testing sleds in North America, and the wording of the regulations implicitly forbids multi-child seats anyway in many ways. Unfortunately, fixing the regulations is probably ~10 years and ~20 million dollars in lobbying.

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