The Case of the Car Seats

When something very simple is very profound

In a long piece on urbanism as pro-family policy back in June, I wrote this, about strapping kids in car seats:

Look, I suppose a lot of this comes down to what you’re used to. If you grew up in the suburbs, and if you were corralled into a car every time you went anywhere, and if you’re used to corralling your kids into a car, it’s fine. It works. If you’re used to doing it differently, you’re used to doing it differently. Freighting these choices with political meaning is a big, big mistake.

The other day, on the walking trails in Reston, Virginia, I saw a mother and her two young children open the gate to their backyard fence, step onto the walking trail, and head towards the public pool a few hundred feet away, carrying towels. What a frictionless, almost effortless thing—so much easier than shooing two kids into a car, especially if the two kids are young enough to still need to be buckled into a children’s carseat. In my state of Virginia, that applies to children seven years and younger.

That routine of getting everyone into the car is effort; it’s friction. It wears you down. It raises the cost of having kids, even if, given America’s predominant land use, it also lowers it. When the average 20-something imagines having kids, they don’t imagine walking them out the door and over to school, or the pool, or the store. They imagine the drudgery of buckling them into the minivan, sitting in the drop-off and pick-up line at school, spending 20 minutes to leave the house to drive five minutes to buy a gallon of milk. Walkable communities, or at least walkable developments of the sort now in vogue, can be an absolute godsend for young parents, if they can afford those places.

A few people reacted as if I had put in words exactly how they felt about this. And a few others wondered why I focused so much on car seats, of all things.

Then I got a letter from a reader, which included this bit:

What stood out to me most was your observation, one I rarely see made, that young child-ed couples’ lives could be made unimaginably easier by having the option to forgo the car entirely. My sister-in-law and her husband, who are in their early 30s, just had their first child a year ago, and the ordeal of strapping this baby into the carseat has been a hellish endeavor for all involved, even though their son is remarkably behaved and adaptable.

I’ve actually just noticed this discrepancy as I wrote that now: their family life is, some inevitable sleep interruptions notwithstanding, generally peaceful, except where the car is concerned. I remember her specifically saying, when the baby was probably 4-5 months old, that if they can successfully get “out to Target” as a family without incident, it feels like an unparalleled triumph.

As I think about this more, the only times they seem to have truly struggled with their son—as in sustained bouts of crying and distress—involve getting him into the car. He recently took two flights and was said to be entirely comfortable and calm on the airplane. But that carseat struggle, as you so aptly put it, wears everyone down, the baby included. I’ve never seen urbanism presented as, “Life free from this.”

If they had any amenities that allowed for them to take shopping trips on foot, I know they would use them. I can’t imagine how much more energy they would all have.

I suspect people’s experiences with this differ. Every child throws a tantrum over something different. But the response, and that response in particular, really struck me. The funny thing is, we don’t have kids yet, and I don’t even remember being strapped into a car seat. I wrote that mostly just imagining what it would be like having to deal with it as a parent. Losing the breeziness of jumping into the car and pulling over and getting out whenever you want, at your own pace. Whenever something I write rather casually hits a nerve, I try to go back and think further about it.

And that leads me to a tweet I saw the other day. I can’t find it again, but the gist of it was, “We built suburbia and designed everyday life around the car back when it was legal and normal to pile five kids in the station wagon without seat belts.” In other words, the laws—and a proper understanding of safety—have caught up to our land-use pattern. And in some ways, this combination has stranded young families in an environment that simply does not work smoothly for them. It’s like if you could cross the street in a city at any point you wanted, but you had to pick up a 100-pound weight and carry it across the street as you did so. It’s taking the fundamental selling point of car-oriented development and then takign an ax to it.

The frustration of knowing that things could be different, in some ways, is the whole thing. I’m going to use this line in another piece, but I think it applies here: frustration is the gap between possibility and reality.

But the possibility here is either subjecting your children to much higher likelihood of dying in a car accident, or fundamentally reevaluating our national approach to land use. You know, of course, which possibility I support.

But I think the bit about suburbia not being designed for the later development of child car seats is fascinating. I’m struggling to think of an analogy that gets at this phenomenon. Maybe big, complicated houses built before central air? But construction took into account natural climate control back then. Building the whole house and then realizing that the foundation needs major work? Maybe lawyers struggling to maintain records on physical media, like cassettes or floppies, as the broader commercial support for physical media deteriorates in the face of digital everything?

What do you call it when a genuine improvement leaves an important group of people worse off, with no real way out that isn’t even worse?

And the theoretical question this leaves me with: if we were starting today where we were, land-use wise, in 1910 or 1920, but with all of the modern safety mechanics and understandings we have today, would we ever have embarked on the project of making almost all of America car-dependent? And viewed it as almost obviously a good thing?

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Related Reading:

The Path of Most Desire

Taking Off the Car Blinders, Opening Your World

Rural New Mexico Blues

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