[aaronax]

(Have 3yo and 1yo, another one the way, goal is 4)

I have often thought that car seats are one of the major drags of modern parenting. This study apparently (I don't have time to read it, too busy with kids lmao!) confirms my suspicions.

It is unfortunate that every policy change around them is trading some amount of convenience for every smaller risk eliminations. It is essentially impossible to say perfectly rational things like "I think children should be put in this slightly riskier type of car seat for convenience reasons."

Even if laws are relaxed, there is the peer/manufacturer pressure. As a real example, I think it is pretty annoying to have my three year old facing backwards. It would be somewhat more dangerous to have them facing forwards, but a substantial improvement in quality of life for me and for the child. The manufacturers compete based on max weight that they support/allow/claim for rear facing, something like 45 pounds. So a family member such as a spouse allegedly has decided that the child ABSOLUTELY needs to be rear facing until they reach that weight. That may not happen until age five! By this time there may be manufacturers inching up to 60 pounds rear facing.

The only possible relief I can envision is that computers become so proficient at driving our cars that there are essentially no accidents. Then we may be allowed to sit unbuckled holding our children!

[sgerenser]

My child moved to front facing at around 2 or maybe 2.5 at the oldest (had to go back and lock at old pictures to confirm, she’s 12 now). Parents who obsess over things like keeping their kid rear facing until 5 or in a booster seat until 12 are just neurotic, IMHO. They’re probably the same ones who won’t let them ride their bikes around the neighborhood unsupervised or walk/ride the bus to or from school.

[bombcar]

My wife's argument to keep them rear-facing as long as possible is that it's closer to laying down and it helps them sleep.

[namibj]

Ehhhhh, what's your problem with booster seats? Those are just to get the shoulders into the design zone as needed for the typical 3-point seat belt.

It's based on size (shoulder height measured in sitting position) not age.

I think some 5-point seat belts allow a much wider design zone so won't need boosters by the time the children outgrow the front-facing bucket seat.

[manwe150]

Kids want to get out of them into adult seats as soon as they can. Actual comfort not relevant.

[agensaequivocum]

With 6 kids, I have not really had this issue.

[mothballed]

I had a vehicle with no back seats when my child was in a car seat. It was great because I could attend to them while driving. Since there were no back seats they could not cite me as it was an exception to the law.

I'm not convinced it's actually safer to have kids in the back. Sure they're safer in an accident, but when I drove another car with rear seats I found myself constantly looking back to deal with the child thus more likely to cause an accident. Yes maybe you should just neglect your child while driving, but they will exact penance if you do so, by non-stop screaming so loud you can't hear emergency vehicles or other possible road hazards.

[beerandt]

This common sense mindset would invalidate so many 'safety' laws and I'm all for it.

Studies make so many invalid assumptions (and usually don't even state them) to force the data / statistics to fit clean a/b or null testing.

But to put a dent in the status quo, we really need a greenlight to just dump however many kids in the back again, no matter the number of kids or seatbelts.

And before anyone gut reacts to this- ask yourself why doing that with schoolbuses still isn't a problem?

[celeritascelery]

> why doing that with schoolbuses still isn't a problem?

Because school buses are very large and heavy and the passengers are high off the roadway. Buses also need to stop at all railroad tracks.

[rogerrogerr]

Car seats ain’t doing much if you get hit by a train.

[celeritascelery]

Nothing will. Which is why buses are required to stop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_South_Jordan_train-bus_co...

[mothballed]

Probably for the same reason government trucks aren't required to have emissions controls on them, at the end of the day the King will do whatever they like and reason backwards why it applies to the subjects but not the crown.

[agensaequivocum]

Yes please.

[drdec]

> I'm not convinced it's actually safer to have kids in the back.

I thought that a major reason for placing children in back seat was because of the air bags in the front seat representing a danger to them when they deploy.

(But maybe kids don't trigger the weight needed to activate the passenger side air bag anymore?)

[SAI_Peregrinus]

You can also usually just turn off the passenger-side airbag. I know there's been a button on every car I've owned to do so, for when you've got something heavy in the front seat that isn't a passenger.

[kelnos]

I've never had a car where you could disable the passenger-side airbag. We did have a car like that in the 90s, but it didn't come that way from the factory: my mother had a mostly-irrational fear of them (she was on the shorter side, but not so short that it could actually be a danger for her if it deployed), so we somehow got an aftermarket mod that let her disable it when she was riding in that seat.

Of course, she drove that car often enough too; not sure why she felt having the driver-side airbag enabled all the time was safe, but not the passenger-side airbag. (Mom was... often inconsistent with how she reacted to her fears.)

[tohnjitor]

Some newer vehicles will automatically disable the front passenger airbag if there is nothing in the seat or if there is weight in the seat but less weight than a typical adult.

Pickup trucks without a backseat have long had the ability to manually disable the passenger airbag.

[extraduder_ire]

Check the area near the hinge on the front passanger-side door, there should be a labelled thing you can turn to disable it. (using a key or screwdriver, similar to the rear childlocks)

It might be due to me being in Europe, but every car I've ever seen with an airbag for that seat has had it along with a sticker warning about it in the sunvisor area.

[izacus]

It's literally the law to have that feature for decade(s) now, whats going on in this conversation?

[magarnicle]

Built-in 5-point harnesses in the back seats would be safer than car seats and far easier, but there is a whole industry working against that idea.

[hbs18]

Assuming the kids would be facing forward, wouldn't that require a helmet and a HANS device as well?

[aleph_minus_one]

> The only possible relief I can envision is that computers become so proficient at driving our cars that there are essentially no accidents. Then we may be allowed to sit unbuckled holding our children!

Laws are about control[ling citizens]. Politicians are not willing to give up control.