6 ms·

My kids are going to be legally mandated to be in car seats until they’re about 12 years old.

by adamsb6 6mo ago

MeetingsBrowser 6mo ago
Your implied frustration at a relatively easy change backed by experts and mountains of data is another point in favor of > humans are so oblivious to safety
- enoch_r 6mo ago
  We have 4 kids. Before we had our 3rd, we needed to buy a new vehicle solely because we couldn't fit 3 car seats into the back of our old car. And when traveling with kids, carrying 4 gigantic car seats plus your other luggage is not exactly as easy as you might think! It essentially rules out solo parent travel with all 4 kids. Transferring car seats between two cars, or installing car seats in a taxi, is a serious pain. Furthermore, the evidence that car seats actually benefit safety is significantly less robust than you might think. The "mountains of evidence" that do exist for things like 70% reductions in fatalities, bizarrely enough, generally compare the rate of fatalities for car seats vs completely unrestrained kids. When you compare the rate of fatalities in car seats to kids wearing adult seat belts, the bulk of the evidence suggests essentially no difference. Fatalities happen when the forces involved are catastrophic and sadly a car seat doesn't help much for kids over 2. Even a back of the envelope comparison makes this extremely plausible: car crash fatalities for kids 9-12 have declined by 72% from 1978-2017. If car seats and car seat laws save significant numbers of lives, you'd expect that the fatality rate for kids 0-8, who are generally in car seats, to have decreased much more. But it hasn't, it declined by 73% over the same period. Now, car seats and boosters do seem to moderately reduce non-fatal injuries - huge spread of estimates here, most clustering around 10-25%. It's reasonable for most people to use car seats or boosters most of the time based on this alone, IMO, especially for young kids. But do they justify a mandate? IMO: no. Absolutely not. Worth mentioning that mandates probably do succeed in one thing: they reduce the number of children born at all by at least 57x more than they prevent child fatalities. Roughly 8,000 kids per year, 145,000 kids since 1980. That's with the (unlikely, as discussed above) assumption that car seats do in fact save significant numbers of lives. But it's also entirely possible that they've prevented hundreds of thousands of kids from being born, somewhat reduced the nonfatal injury rate, and saved essentially no lives. Citations below: Fatality reduction with car seats or boosters: - https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/seatbelts.pdf https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/seatbelts.pdf (found that seat belts as effective as car seats for children 2-6) - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jae.2449 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jae.2449 (independent replication of above with different data set) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19959729/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19959729/ (no statistically significant difference between booster seats and seat belt alone for fatalities) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16754824/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16754824/ (the main counter-estimate to the above, with the 28% fatality reduction) Non-fatal injury reductions: - https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ecinqu/v48y2010i3p521-536.html https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ecinqu/v48y2010i3p521-536.html (no difference in serious injuries, ~25% reduction in least serious injury category) - https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811338 https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... (14% reduction in likelihood of injury for boosters) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19841126/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19841126/ (45% estimate) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12783914/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12783914/ (59% estimate) Reduction in birth rate from car seat mandates: - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046 (car seat mandates "led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000") Note that both the 45% and 59% estimate for injury reduction and the 28% estimate for fatality reduction all come from one research group using a proprietary data set. Everything that's independently reproducible points towards small or zero effect on fatalities and modest effects on injuries.
  - MeetingsBrowser 6mo ago
    I don’t think your analysis is fair, but pointing out details I disagree with misses the forest for the trees. Look at what lengths you went to in order to justify and defend what is, by your own arguments, the demonstrably less safe option.
    - enoch_r 6mo ago
      Do you think that car seat mandates (up to age 12 in my state) are good policy if the net effect is: - a small reduction in minor injuries, - worse childhoods and parenting experiences (difficult to quantify, but real), - and a few hundred thousand fewer children being born in the first place, - very few, if any, lives saved? If yes, then cool - but I strongly disagree. If no - then I think the evidence and details very much matter, and that's why I was happy to invest my time in them.
      - MeetingsBrowser 6mo ago
        In the hypothetical scenario where car seats have only downsides, then of course I’m against a mandate. There is a difference between cherry picking studies that back up your view point and how medical experts set policy though. Experts review all of the data, and ignore outliers like a paper published in a law journal that suggests car seats are the primary reason families have shrunk from having three to two kids since the 80’s
        kortilla 6mo ago
        You’ve funnily proven the point of how willing people are to put immense burdens on others in the name of safety. There is a non-zero amount of deaths the car seat law would prevent. The burden will discourage larger families and will contribute to population decline far larger than the lives saved. You’re not only arguing for it, you’re doing it in a way as if preventing death is such an obvious single dimension to optimize that you’re calling people irrational because they are against something that reduces fatalities. Your same argument is what leads to prohibition and a long list of other things that suck the color out of life in the interest of “safety”.
sfn42 6mo ago
Oh wow what a tragedy. You think maybe there's reasons for that mandate? Like maybe it saves children's lives? But sure everything would be better if any moron was allowed to decide how to keep their own kids safe.
- fuzzfactor 6mo ago
  >allowed to decide how to keep their own kids safe. 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.
- enoch_r 6mo ago
  The evidence that car seats save lives is significantly weaker that you probably believe, as I detailed in another comment in this thread. But look: even if car seats make sense for a typical 5 year old on a typical drive in their typical car (which is a higher evidentiary burden than you might think), a mandate imposes a huge logistical tax that makes many normal things completely infeasible or impractical: - 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..."
  - sfn42 6mo ago
    Here's what I found doing a basic Google search: > 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..
array_key_first 6mo ago
Considering cars are one of the top causes of death for kids (the top?), this just feels obvious.
- InitialLastName 6mo ago
  Thanks to risk compensation, making things "safer" doesn't necessarily improve safety. What are the odds that people drive their kids around more (increasing their risk) because having kids in car-seats reduces the perceived risk? How many of those people do you think can point at what the reduction in risk due to car seat use is [0], such that they compensate that risk "rationally"? [0] Hint: As our sibling conversation shows, that's a non-trivial question.

My kids are going to be legally mandated to be in car seats until they’re about 12 years old.

by adamsb6 6mo ago

My kids are going to be legally mandated to be in car seats until they’re about 12 years old.

Your implied frustration at a relatively easy change backed by experts and mountains of data is another point in favor of > humans are so oblivious to safety

enoch_r 6mo ago
We have 4 kids. Before we had our 3rd, we needed to buy a new vehicle solely because we couldn't fit 3 car seats into the back of our old car. And when traveling with kids, carrying 4 gigantic car seats plus your other luggage is not exactly as easy as you might think! It essentially rules out solo parent travel with all 4 kids. Transferring car seats between two cars, or installing car seats in a taxi, is a serious pain. Furthermore, the evidence that car seats actually benefit safety is significantly less robust than you might think. The "mountains of evidence" that do exist for things like 70% reductions in fatalities, bizarrely enough, generally compare the rate of fatalities for car seats vs completely unrestrained kids. When you compare the rate of fatalities in car seats to kids wearing adult seat belts, the bulk of the evidence suggests essentially no difference. Fatalities happen when the forces involved are catastrophic and sadly a car seat doesn't help much for kids over 2. Even a back of the envelope comparison makes this extremely plausible: car crash fatalities for kids 9-12 have declined by 72% from 1978-2017. If car seats and car seat laws save significant numbers of lives, you'd expect that the fatality rate for kids 0-8, who are generally in car seats, to have decreased much more. But it hasn't, it declined by 73% over the same period. Now, car seats and boosters do seem to moderately reduce non-fatal injuries - huge spread of estimates here, most clustering around 10-25%. It's reasonable for most people to use car seats or boosters most of the time based on this alone, IMO, especially for young kids. But do they justify a mandate? IMO: no. Absolutely not. Worth mentioning that mandates probably do succeed in one thing: they reduce the number of children born at all by at least 57x more than they prevent child fatalities. Roughly 8,000 kids per year, 145,000 kids since 1980. That's with the (unlikely, as discussed above) assumption that car seats do in fact save significant numbers of lives. But it's also entirely possible that they've prevented hundreds of thousands of kids from being born, somewhat reduced the nonfatal injury rate, and saved essentially no lives. Citations below: Fatality reduction with car seats or boosters: - https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/seatbelts.pdf https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/seatbelts.pdf (found that seat belts as effective as car seats for children 2-6) - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jae.2449 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jae.2449 (independent replication of above with different data set) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19959729/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19959729/ (no statistically significant difference between booster seats and seat belt alone for fatalities) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16754824/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16754824/ (the main counter-estimate to the above, with the 28% fatality reduction) Non-fatal injury reductions: - https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ecinqu/v48y2010i3p521-536.html https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ecinqu/v48y2010i3p521-536.html (no difference in serious injuries, ~25% reduction in least serious injury category) - https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811338 https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... (14% reduction in likelihood of injury for boosters) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19841126/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19841126/ (45% estimate) - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12783914/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12783914/ (59% estimate) Reduction in birth rate from car seat mandates: - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046 (car seat mandates "led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000") Note that both the 45% and 59% estimate for injury reduction and the 28% estimate for fatality reduction all come from one research group using a proprietary data set. Everything that's independently reproducible points towards small or zero effect on fatalities and modest effects on injuries.
- MeetingsBrowser 6mo ago
  I don’t think your analysis is fair, but pointing out details I disagree with misses the forest for the trees. Look at what lengths you went to in order to justify and defend what is, by your own arguments, the demonstrably less safe option.
  - enoch_r 6mo ago
    Do you think that car seat mandates (up to age 12 in my state) are good policy if the net effect is: - a small reduction in minor injuries, - worse childhoods and parenting experiences (difficult to quantify, but real), - and a few hundred thousand fewer children being born in the first place, - very few, if any, lives saved? If yes, then cool - but I strongly disagree. If no - then I think the evidence and details very much matter, and that's why I was happy to invest my time in them.
    - MeetingsBrowser 6mo ago
      In the hypothetical scenario where car seats have only downsides, then of course I’m against a mandate. There is a difference between cherry picking studies that back up your view point and how medical experts set policy though. Experts review all of the data, and ignore outliers like a paper published in a law journal that suggests car seats are the primary reason families have shrunk from having three to two kids since the 80’s
      - kortilla 6mo ago
        You’ve funnily proven the point of how willing people are to put immense burdens on others in the name of safety. There is a non-zero amount of deaths the car seat law would prevent. The burden will discourage larger families and will contribute to population decline far larger than the lives saved. You’re not only arguing for it, you’re doing it in a way as if preventing death is such an obvious single dimension to optimize that you’re calling people irrational because they are against something that reduces fatalities. Your same argument is what leads to prohibition and a long list of other things that suck the color out of life in the interest of “safety”.

sfn42 6mo ago

Oh wow what a tragedy. You think maybe there's reasons for that mandate? Like maybe it saves children's lives? But sure everything would be better if any moron was allowed to decide how to keep their own kids safe.

fuzzfactor 6mo ago
>allowed to decide how to keep their own kids safe. 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.
enoch_r 6mo ago
The evidence that car seats save lives is significantly weaker that you probably believe, as I detailed in another comment in this thread. But look: even if car seats make sense for a typical 5 year old on a typical drive in their typical car (which is a higher evidentiary burden than you might think), a mandate imposes a huge logistical tax that makes many normal things completely infeasible or impractical: - 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..."
- sfn42 6mo ago
  Here's what I found doing a basic Google search: > 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..

array_key_first 6mo ago

Considering cars are one of the top causes of death for kids (the top?), this just feels obvious.

InitialLastName 6mo ago
Thanks to risk compensation, making things "safer" doesn't necessarily improve safety. What are the odds that people drive their kids around more (increasing their risk) because having kids in car-seats reduces the perceived risk? How many of those people do you think can point at what the reduction in risk due to car seat use is [0], such that they compensate that risk "rationally"? [0] Hint: As our sibling conversation shows, that's a non-trivial question.