> We show that laws mandating use of child car safety seats significantly reduce birth rates, as many cars cannot fit three child seats in the back seat.
Wouldn't the real cause of the depressed birthrates be the requirement to own a car in order to have children? If you aren't a slave to your vehicle there's no problem with the available space for car seats.
Double-buggies on public transport and more than two kids on a typical cargo cycle aren't fun either. Granted the age-span that's necessary is a little shorter than car seats.
That said, have 3 kids aged within 5 years of one another and we never had to get a double buggy. The older ones would be OK to walk (3 year olds will walk a pretty long way if you're patient) by the time the youngest got too big to be sling-carried.
It comes down to, dealing with three under-5's single-handed while out and about is pretty hectic full stop. Most places with high birth rates "solve" this by not allowing mums the expectation to be away from the house much, and/or they're multigenerational households where grandma or an aunt can be home with some of the kids.
So to your point, I think it's less the requirement to own a car, more the expectation of a kind of lifestyle which often, though not always, in turn requires one. Childcare for 2 year olds here is often upwards of $2500/month, now that's a contraceptive.
If you aren't a slave to your car, you likely live in a walkable area where the cost of a 4-bedroom apartment or house is going to be pretty high. I'm not saying you can't raise kids in a 2 or 3 bedroom apartment, and when I lived in apartments many families had kids in a 1-bedroom apartment, but it's very tight and many people would consider it a significant hardship for both the kids and the parents.
I would also add as a car slave that the kinds of cars large enough to fit the kinds of car seats marketed in the US are tens of thousands more than a compact or mid-size sedan, and that in a mid-size sedan having a car seat in the rear-facing configuration significantly constrains how far back you can put the passenger or driver seat. This is true even for the narrower seats that are designed for three-across seating. And worse, you might not have the latch system or an appropriate kind of seat belt on that third seat.
> If you aren't a slave to your car, you likely live in a walkable area where the cost of a 4-bedroom apartment or house is going to be pretty high.
Or you're one of the millions of people who live in developing countries which have low cost of living and low housing costs. Coincidentally this group has very high birth rates.
Only on very modern times would you feel the need to have that many bedrooms for 3 kids. Of course that’s because you can’t banish the kids from the house until sunset anymore
If you make kids share a bedroom it drastically decreases the margin for tension between children because they don't have anywhere else. That can work, of course, but it might not and too fucking late for the kids if it doesn't. That can mean physical abuse, but it can mean things like one kid loves loud music and the other wants to read quietly alone, or their sleep schedules naturally don't align well - if you were an adult house share you'd say well, we're just incompatible, it's nobody's fault, I'll move out, but kids can't do that, they are stuck with the situation their parents created and it's all they know.
My mother - I found out years after I'd left home - was worried that I resented the fact I had a small bedroom while my younger sister got a larger one - but in reality I didn't care at all, she's an artist, she makes stuff which actually exists, of course she needs space; I write software, which conveniently takes up no space, whereas if I'd had to share with her that would be extremely problematic and wouldn't have gone well. I could be in my tiny room and that was enough.
Raising one child is fine, raise two or three means sharing rooms not having a guest room (e.g. relatives can't stay easily) or an at-home office space.
It's not that you can't, it's just that it's not the standard of living most western people expect.
This is IF you can find a 3 or 4 bedroom apartment in an American city. The job centers mostly build studios, 1 and 2 bedrooms if they build anything at all.
Or you are poor enough you get paid to pop out more kids and it's cheaper to uber twice a month to the grocery store because you have no job for which you'd need a car nor the cash to buy it.
"Wouldn't the real cause of the depressed birthrates be the requirement to own a car in order to have children?"
Yes. The one-time setup costs for "properly" raising kids are probably around $30k. All the kids stuff is extra expensive (in the west) and for the kids seats you need a large car (in the west) and there's social stigma against kids sharing a room (in the west), so you also need a larger apartment.
As a parent of 2 a big reason we won’t have a third is the massive step up in transportation costs. Having to get a third car seat would require us to go from our Kia to a minivan. And then there is the cost of the car seat alone.
Then there is the time cost of wrangling kids in an out of them. My toddler can easily make it 15 minutes to buckle her in just on her own. A third would mean easily 5 minutes of to get everyone buckled in and only if they are cooperative.
It’s this everywhere: the constant fear of not raising children perfectly in every aspect puts downward pressure on a family’s desire (and perceived ability) to have more children.
Without going into the specifics of car seats, I do think we overemphasize safety. The article mentions saving 57 children. How much are 57 lives worth? The answer is not infinite - a life has a numeric value, ask any insurance company.
Every safety regulation ought to pass a cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis. Few of them do.
I had a Mazda 3 hatchback, fun little car with stick shift, when our second child arrived. It was not possible to fit in a second rear-facing car seat behind driver AND have the driver seat be in any acceptable position for me or my wife, there was just no space left in front. We researched the seats and ultimately it was easier to get a bigger car than mess with it, so we got a Volvo XC70 that had plenty of space. Once the kids could face forward, the typical Graco style seats were too wide and the middle rear passenger seat was not usable, so we invested into 2 narrow-profile seats that left the middle seat more useful. I can't remember the brand anymore, but it took a lot of research to find the narrow ones and they weren't cheap.
And none of this have contributed to us not wanting more than 2 children. That wasn't going to happen regardless of any car seats. People not wanting to have more than a 1 or 2 kids has so many other, more important reasons, I very much doubt that car seat size has much to do with it.
It's just not cool to have kids. There are many more ways to have fun and status in society, so having kids is either coming as a social burden ("i am expected to by my spouse/relatives"), or a religious thing. Rationally, it's such a pain in the ass to have kids, while you can have some much more fun without them: travel the world, meet people, learn and explore! Clearly, having kids is net cost and suffering.
Yet, those who opt in do have a different opinion. We got two a decade ago, and then a couple years ago through of FOMO that when we are 45 we'd look back and regret missing the window of having another couple of kids. So we did. I'm 39, have four kids, had to get a bigger car, pay the airline tickets through the nose, spend a lot of time on kids' stuff, and love it. My family is the center of the universe and I'm the happiest and wisest dad alive. Everyone else is childish ;-P
I've mentioned this in another thread when the topic came up, but this has other effects like availability of backup childcare.
With kids, unbelievably, needing some form of car seat until the age of 8~12.. you are limited in who can help with pickup/dropoff/after school programs to someone who borrows your car or is doing so often enough to buy the correct sized car seats for each of your kids. The upper limit being 12 is pretty wild considering we then let them drive at 16.
Oddly of course in the US, if your kid is taking the school bus they are entirely unbelted and without a safety seat from the age of.. 5.
As an uncle to multiple kids under 10, I end up only spending time with them in their own home or when they are brought over.
Contrast that with my upbringing spending time with cousins/aunts/neighbors being driven around by whoever I was staying with for the afternoon.
I thought this was going to be about a car being uncomfortable to have sex in.
Such a car would make for a great product to sell to parents of teenagers, so you can lend them the car but at least make it difficult to fornicate without consent of the king.
I remember the day I measured my youngest, find they didn't need a seat anymore and drove it straight to the rubbish tip. It was pure elation. I could fold the seats down in 10 seconds to carry stuff. I could fold them back up and put a kid straight in. Awesome
Car seats have also deterred me from a few trips, short and long. They're a hassle to get an uber and store at destination (say a sporting event), and they are a nightmare to lug around airports and add to the effective travel time by if you end up checking them in as luggage (and then waiting for them at the carousel).
(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!
It's definitely possible to put 3 car seats across in the back seat of pretty much any car available in the American market. The appropriate narrow seats just aren't very popular or well known...
> We estimate that these laws prevented fatalities of 57 children in car crashes in 2017 but reduced total births by 8,000 that year and have decreased the total by 145,000 since 1980.
My wife and I are DINKs. We drive a smallish CUV. Her cousin drove it, fell in love, and bought the same car.
It’s really a perfect allrounder - looks nice, is luxurious, more than enough space for us, even drives like a sports car (or at least as close to a CUV can hope to).
Then said cousin had a baby. People around him scolded him for not selling the car for something much bigger - like a Kia Telluride or a Honda Pilot. But he is doing just fine.
I believe it's a factor, but not the dominant one.
Me and my SO were considering a third for a brief moment, but it was the amount of living space and our age (35+ for the mother) that ultimately made us decide against it.
I was totally in for getting a new vehicle BTW.
Interestingly I have two siblings and we had a serious and expected downgrade as a family in living space just when I started attending grade school - a smaller apartment than mine currently.
As for the car seats the regulations came in when my younger sister was in 3rd grade or so, so he just decided to wing it without the seats.
Families of 5+ have very few options in terms of cars, among them the Peugeot 5008 - reviled both by reviewers and owners alike.
Is this really true in 2026? Even 10 year old cars are simply big now, and not that expensive. I could believe it in 1990 maybe.
I have 3 babies (ages 0, 2, 4 when we started) in a 2016 Subaru Outback for 1.5 years now and it's been mostly fine. I have 2 "slim" seats from Clek, one is a booster, and it's really not a big deal. I cannot imagine deciding to give up a child because of a minor inconvenience like this.
Buying slim car seats is just not that expensive compared to buying a new car, so we did that. It's hard to believe that people who really want 3 children cannot make it work.
I also think that modern car seats are one of the main factors driving the adoption of unnecessarily large cars, which have far worse safety outcomes in crashes for everybody except the people inside them.
When I was growing up in the 90s with 2 siblings we had a small hatch. When I had my second child we had to upgrade from a small hatch to an SUV because we simply couldn't fit a car seat behind the driver. Even now, I'm not sure if a third would fit.
Sure, the SUV itself and the extra padding on the car seats might make my children safe in collisions with other big cars, but if we were all still driving hatches then maybe none of that would be necessary.
180 comments
> We show that laws mandating use of child car safety seats significantly reduce birth rates, as many cars cannot fit three child seats in the back seat.
Wouldn't the real cause of the depressed birthrates be the requirement to own a car in order to have children? If you aren't a slave to your vehicle there's no problem with the available space for car seats.
That said, have 3 kids aged within 5 years of one another and we never had to get a double buggy. The older ones would be OK to walk (3 year olds will walk a pretty long way if you're patient) by the time the youngest got too big to be sling-carried.
It comes down to, dealing with three under-5's single-handed while out and about is pretty hectic full stop. Most places with high birth rates "solve" this by not allowing mums the expectation to be away from the house much, and/or they're multigenerational households where grandma or an aunt can be home with some of the kids.
So to your point, I think it's less the requirement to own a car, more the expectation of a kind of lifestyle which often, though not always, in turn requires one. Childcare for 2 year olds here is often upwards of $2500/month, now that's a contraceptive.
I would also add as a car slave that the kinds of cars large enough to fit the kinds of car seats marketed in the US are tens of thousands more than a compact or mid-size sedan, and that in a mid-size sedan having a car seat in the rear-facing configuration significantly constrains how far back you can put the passenger or driver seat. This is true even for the narrower seats that are designed for three-across seating. And worse, you might not have the latch system or an appropriate kind of seat belt on that third seat.
> If you aren't a slave to your car, you likely live in a walkable area where the cost of a 4-bedroom apartment or house is going to be pretty high.
Or you're one of the millions of people who live in developing countries which have low cost of living and low housing costs. Coincidentally this group has very high birth rates.
My mother - I found out years after I'd left home - was worried that I resented the fact I had a small bedroom while my younger sister got a larger one - but in reality I didn't care at all, she's an artist, she makes stuff which actually exists, of course she needs space; I write software, which conveniently takes up no space, whereas if I'd had to share with her that would be extremely problematic and wouldn't have gone well. I could be in my tiny room and that was enough.
It's not that you can't, it's just that it's not the standard of living most western people expect.
> If you aren't a slave to your vehicle there's no problem with the available space for car seats.
The abstract says the effect is limited to households with a car.
Yes. The one-time setup costs for "properly" raising kids are probably around $30k. All the kids stuff is extra expensive (in the west) and for the kids seats you need a large car (in the west) and there's social stigma against kids sharing a room (in the west), so you also need a larger apartment.
Then there is the time cost of wrangling kids in an out of them. My toddler can easily make it 15 minutes to buckle her in just on her own. A third would mean easily 5 minutes of to get everyone buckled in and only if they are cooperative.
Germany first introduced mandatory child car seat laws on April 1, 1993. [1]
That year, fertility was at 1.28 kids per woman. Since then, it has increased to 1.62.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindersitz
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/deu/ger...
Without going into the specifics of car seats, I do think we overemphasize safety. The article mentions saving 57 children. How much are 57 lives worth? The answer is not infinite - a life has a numeric value, ask any insurance company.
Every safety regulation ought to pass a cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis. Few of them do.
And none of this have contributed to us not wanting more than 2 children. That wasn't going to happen regardless of any car seats. People not wanting to have more than a 1 or 2 kids has so many other, more important reasons, I very much doubt that car seat size has much to do with it.
Yet, those who opt in do have a different opinion. We got two a decade ago, and then a couple years ago through of FOMO that when we are 45 we'd look back and regret missing the window of having another couple of kids. So we did. I'm 39, have four kids, had to get a bigger car, pay the airline tickets through the nose, spend a lot of time on kids' stuff, and love it. My family is the center of the universe and I'm the happiest and wisest dad alive. Everyone else is childish ;-P
With kids, unbelievably, needing some form of car seat until the age of 8~12.. you are limited in who can help with pickup/dropoff/after school programs to someone who borrows your car or is doing so often enough to buy the correct sized car seats for each of your kids. The upper limit being 12 is pretty wild considering we then let them drive at 16.
Oddly of course in the US, if your kid is taking the school bus they are entirely unbelted and without a safety seat from the age of.. 5.
As an uncle to multiple kids under 10, I end up only spending time with them in their own home or when they are brought over.
Contrast that with my upbringing spending time with cousins/aunts/neighbors being driven around by whoever I was staying with for the afternoon.
Such a car would make for a great product to sell to parents of teenagers, so you can lend them the car but at least make it difficult to fornicate without consent of the king.
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!
> We estimate that these laws prevented fatalities of 57 children in car crashes in 2017 but reduced total births by 8,000 that year and have decreased the total by 145,000 since 1980.
145K is roughly the population of Syracuse, NY or Midland, TX. That is far more than the absolute number of US military deaths in World War I (116,516 per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...).
It’s really a perfect allrounder - looks nice, is luxurious, more than enough space for us, even drives like a sports car (or at least as close to a CUV can hope to).
Then said cousin had a baby. People around him scolded him for not selling the car for something much bigger - like a Kia Telluride or a Honda Pilot. But he is doing just fine.
> We estimate that these laws prevented fatalities of 57 children in car crashes in 2017 but reduced total births by 8,000 that year
These two options are not equivalent. I will take 8,000 3rd children not being born over 57 kids dying in car crashes every time.
Me and my SO were considering a third for a brief moment, but it was the amount of living space and our age (35+ for the mother) that ultimately made us decide against it.
I was totally in for getting a new vehicle BTW.
Interestingly I have two siblings and we had a serious and expected downgrade as a family in living space just when I started attending grade school - a smaller apartment than mine currently.
As for the car seats the regulations came in when my younger sister was in 3rd grade or so, so he just decided to wing it without the seats.
Families of 5+ have very few options in terms of cars, among them the Peugeot 5008 - reviled both by reviewers and owners alike.
I have 3 babies (ages 0, 2, 4 when we started) in a 2016 Subaru Outback for 1.5 years now and it's been mostly fine. I have 2 "slim" seats from Clek, one is a booster, and it's really not a big deal. I cannot imagine deciding to give up a child because of a minor inconvenience like this.
Buying slim car seats is just not that expensive compared to buying a new car, so we did that. It's hard to believe that people who really want 3 children cannot make it work.
When I was growing up in the 90s with 2 siblings we had a small hatch. When I had my second child we had to upgrade from a small hatch to an SUV because we simply couldn't fit a car seat behind the driver. Even now, I'm not sure if a third would fit.
Sure, the SUV itself and the extra padding on the car seats might make my children safe in collisions with other big cars, but if we were all still driving hatches then maybe none of that would be necessary.
We are in the stupidest arms race.