Triumph Bradrick on taking pigs to the slaughterhouse

[slickcat79]

So why hasn't "the CDC, National Safety Council, the American Academy of Pediatrics, every hospital in the country and a bazillion other child welfare organizations" EVER once put together a campaign to push this agenda? Why? Even as much as your confirmation bias is screaming at you to deny it, you know this is a good question. Why do we live in a nation that forces people to put the most important people in their lives in harms way for hours on end, every single day?

I would imagine that they don't push that agenda because it's pointless. As I said in my last sentence, it's not as if parents just decide that they want to drive their kids all over the damn place for no reason. They can either take their kids to their doctors' appointments, or not. They can take their kids to the store, or to school, or daycare, or they can leave them at home by themselves. I don't think any parent who's ever forced their cranky, whining, screaming kid into a car seat needs a campaign to tell them to keep the kid out of the car as much as possible.

Seriously, who is "forcing" you to put your child in harms way for hours every day? Either take them where you need to go, or don't. Hey, maybe it would be better if mom and dad didn't even have a car. Then they could take the kids on a bus where they have no restraints at all. People do what they have to do, and good parents make things as safe for their kids as they can under the circumstances.

[clibbyjo]

I would imagine that they don't push that agenda because it's pointless. As I said in my last sentence, it's not as if parents just decide that they want to drive their kids all over the damn place for no reason. They can either take their kids to their doctors' appointments, or not. They can take their kids to the store, or to school, or daycare, or they can leave them at home by themselves. I don't think any parent who's ever forced their cranky, whining, screaming kid into a car seat needs a campaign to tell them to keep the kid out of the car as much as possible.

Seriously, who is "forcing" you to put your child in harms way for hours every day? Either take them where you need to go, or don't. Hey, maybe it would be better if mom and dad didn't even have a car. Then they could take the kids on a bus where they have no restraints at all. People do what they have to do, and good parents make things as safe for their kids as they can under the circumstances.

Ok. I better tell my friend who has been an EMT for 16 years and does car seat safety checks every week for free she is wrong. I will be sure to tell her the babies and children she has seen firsthand on the accident scene who were saved because of their carseats is really a mirage.She has told us many stories of how anything loose in a car becomes a projectile, INCLUDING humans not buckled in. Do you want to be the adult who goes flying through your car on impact and crush your child? Of course, she has only seen it first hand for 16 years where you seem to know much more with all your experience(the internet?). Um yeah, I would take my chances with a carseat. BTW, I live in a rural area and if I don't drive,we don't go. I guess I should keep my homeschooled children away from all the evil learning and stay home right?

[treemom]

Actually seat belt injuries are pretty high on the list. Yes, statistics may not bear it out, but part of that is you can't put an infant in a seat belt and a 1 year old in a seat belt is effectively unrestrained. Cars are dangerous, but you can mitigate the danger. And you don't understand physics if you think that a small child or infant in a seat belt is effectively restrained.

[debrand]

I would LOVE if more cities in America were friendly to pedestrians. The closest city for me seems to have been built with drivers in mind. The streets are broad and there aren't enough sidewalks. Many of the streets don't have walk/don't walk signs because they assume people are driving not walking. Getting across a busy street would be dangerous. Like I said, I would LOVE, LOVE, LOVE if it was safer to walk more places but I don't see that happening. Until it does, most of us are forced to drive. We have to make the car drive as safe as possible for our children.

[StandingWide]

"Get kids out of the car" only works when there is a viable alternative to cars. Most American cities aren't set up where you can walk to place to place (where I live the weather makes it physically unsafe for young children to do that 4 or 5 months out of the year anyway,) and we have fuck all for a good bus or rail transit system.

Yes! That is my point. and the point of the podcast I linked to upstream. The way we've built America up has made us wholly dependent on cars. And cars kill children. The billions of dollars spent on car seats and airbags and crumple zones would go a lot further if we were investing in making our communities less car dependent. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. The debts we are saddling the next generation with (through our love affair with suburbia and cars) will be nearly insurmountable. Listen to the podcast.

I've never ever heard anything like this. I can't imagine someone honestly thinking that car seats are a racket. It's one thing to say that they feel the guidelines are too strict or something, but that they're basically useless altogether? :think:

The statistics show no lowering of the rate of fatalities over seatbelts. From the article I linked to:

They (car seats) certainly have the hallmarks of an effective piece of safety equipment: big and bulky, federally regulated, hard to install and expensive. (You can easily spend $200 on a car seat.) And NHTSA data seem to show that car seats are indeed a remarkable lifesaver. Although motor-vehicle crashes are still the top killer among children from 2 to 14, fatality rates have fallen steadily in recent decades -- a drop that coincides with the rise of car-seat use. Perhaps the single most compelling statistic about car seats in the NHTSA manual was this one: ''They are 54 percent effective in reducing deaths for children ages 1 to 4 in passenger cars.''

But 54 percent effective compared with what? The answer, it turns out, is this: Compared with a child's riding completely unrestrained. There is another mode of restraint, meanwhile, that doesn't cost $200 or require a four-day course to master: seat belts.

For children younger than roughly 24 months, seat belts plainly won't do. For them, a car seat represents the best practical way to ride securely, and it is certainly an improvement over the days of riding shotgun on mom's lap. But what about older children? Is it possible that seat belts might afford them the same protection as car seats?

The answer can be found in a trove of government data called the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), which compiles police reports on all fatal crashes in the U.S. since 1975. These data include every imaginable variable in a crash, including whether the occupants were restrained and how.

Even a quick look at the FARS data reveals a striking result: among children 2 and older, the death rate is no lower for those traveling in any kind of car seat than for those wearing seat belts. There are many reasons, of course, that this raw data might be misleading. Perhaps kids in car seats are, on average, in worse wrecks. Or maybe their parents drive smaller cars, which might provide less protection.

But no matter what you control for in the FARS data, the results don't change. In recent crashes and old ones, in big vehicles and small, in one-car crashes and multiple-vehicle crashes, there is no evidence that car seats do a better job than seat belts in saving the lives of children older than 2. (In certain kinds of crashes -- rear-enders, for instance -- car seats actually perform worse.) The real answer to why child auto fatalities have been falling seems to be that more and more children are restrained in some way. Many of them happen to be restrained in car seats, since that is what the government mandates, but if the government instead mandated proper seat-belt use for children, they would likely do just as well / without the layers of expense, regulation and anxiety associated with car seats.

Actually seat belt injuries are pretty high on the list. Yes, statistics may not bear it out, but part of that is you can't put an infant in a seat belt and a 1 year old in a seat belt is effectively unrestrained. Cars are dangerous, but you can mitigate the danger. And you don't understand physics if you think that a small child or infant in a seat belt is effectively restrained.

Treemom, I put that part in red to show that I understand that infants belong in car seats. I didn't make it clear earlier, but I am not arguing that infants should be in seatbelts. They should not. Mea Culpa.

I would LOVE if more cities in America were friendly to pedestrians. The closest city for me seems to have been built with drivers in mind. The streets are broad and there aren't enough sidewalks. Many of the streets don't have walk/don't walk signs because they assume people are driving not walking. Getting across a busy street would be dangerous. Like I said, I would LOVE, LOVE, LOVE if it was safer to walk more places but I don't see that happening. Until it does, most of us are forced to drive. We have to make the car drive as safe as possible for our children.

YES!

This is what I am trying to say. And if you go back to my first post on the topic, I said

If this is a topic you care about I highly reccomend spending a half hour listening to this:

http://www.strongtowns.org/strong-towns ... ation.html

And then go out and do something to change the amount of time little ones spend in the car.

The topic of the podcast is why do consumer safety and orgs like the CDC fail to recommend less time in the car. I am not talking about trips to the pediatrician. I am talking about the way entire lives are being spent in the car. I know people that commute 40 miles one way to work and the take the kiddo with them to the daycare at the office. But the CDC doesn't say peep about what a bad idea that is.

[treemom]

CDC? Or CPSC?

[slickcat79]

I am talking about the way entire lives are being spent in the car. I know people that commute 40 miles one way to work and the take the kiddo with them to the daycare at the office. But the CDC doesn't say peep about what a bad idea that is.

How do you think, practically, this would work? Say you've got a father who works as a truck driver and spends 4-5 days every week out of town. You've got a mother who's a paralegal and takes her child in to the office daycare everyday, and has to drive 40 miles. They live 40 miles outside of town because that's the only way they can afford a house to raise their kids in. So, in order to avoid spending $200 on a car seat, they're supposed to...what, exactly? Sell their house (in a depressed real estate market) and buy one that's more expensive? Get a new job, when unemployment is hovering around the double digits? We're moving more and more towards a global society, and long-distance transportation is easier than it's ever been. Some people manage to have very walkable lives, but for most, unless you commit to spending 5-10 years living like a hermit with your kids, you have to use motor vehicles to take them places. Even the FARS data that Dubner and Levitt are so fond of shows that motor vehicle fatalities for kids under 5 have decreased by more than half in the last 15 years, even as population and the number of vehicles on the road have increased dramatically. That's because of improvements in safety standards to vehicles and their restraint systems.

I'm a little confused as to why I should take the article all that seriously anyway. It's a NYT Magazine article written by a couple of economists in 2005. They keep referencing FARS data but don't link anything or even provide a table or any specific numbers. Even after finding the FARS page and clicking through some of their reports, I still can't find the data that Dubner and Levitt are referencing. They apparently performed an experiment themselves, but admitted that the results they got don't prove anything. They also never suggest that putting kids in the car less often is a solution, because it's completely not practical in the US and Canada. Their suggestions include:

So if car seats and booster seats aren't the safety miracle that parents have been taught to believe, what should they do? The most important thing, certainly, is to make sure that children always ride with some kind of restraint -- and, depending on your state, a car seat or booster seat may be the only legal option. On a broader level, though, it might be worth asking this question: Considering that Americans spend a few hundred million dollars annually on complicated contraptions that may not add much lifesaving value, how much better off might we be if that money was spent to make existing seat belts fit children? Some automakers do in fact make integrated child seats (in which, for example, the car's seat back flips down for the child to sit on); other solutions might include lap-and-shoulder belts that vertically adjust to fit children, or even a built-in five-point harness.

It may be that the ultimate benefit of car seats and booster seats is that they force children to sit still in the back seat. If so, perhaps there is a different contraption that could help accomplish the same goal for roughly the same price: a back-seat DVD player.

It's not a bad idea to make seatbelts more adjustable or more suited to children, but those don't exist in all vehicles right now. You can, as they say, get vehicles with built-in child seats, but no one is going to go buy an entire new car so that they can avoid spending a couple hundred (or less) on a car seat. And I know they're being tongue-in-cheek with the last suggestion, but if you think you're wasting money buying your kid a car seat, you sure as hell shouldn't be buying them a dvd player :roll: All the research agrees that children who are restrained are safer than children in no restraints at all; in the real world as it exists right now, the only way to be sure you have restraints that fit a small child is to put them in a car seat or booster.

[Glass Cowcatcher]

Yes! That is my point. and the point of the podcast I linked to upstream. The way we've built America up has made us wholly dependent on cars. And cars kill children. The billions of dollars spent on car seats and airbags and crumple zones would go a lot further if we were investing in making our communities less car dependent. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. The debts we are saddling the next generation with (through our love affair with suburbia and cars) will be nearly insurmountable. Listen to the podcast...

(snip)

...The topic of the podcast is why do consumer safety and orgs like the CDC fail to recommend less time in the car. I am not talking about trips to the pediatrician. I am talking about the way entire lives are being spent in the car. I know people that commute 40 miles one way to work and the take the kiddo with them to the daycare at the office. But the CDC doesn't say peep about what a bad idea that is.

Until the American people and government get over their "We can't fund trains and buses because Eurpose has them and they're socialist!" paranoia, your statement is patently ridiculous.

No one is debating that, yes, children do die in car crashes, but as others have pointed out, you can't tell people to just drive less when there is no other alternative. The podcast and article strike me as thinly veiled libertarian extremism.

By the way, [link=http://www.euro.who.int/en/what-we-do/health-topics/Life-stages/child-and-adolescent-health/publications/2008/european-report-on-child-injury-prevention]this article,[/link] and [link=http://www.webmd.boots.com/children/news/20100512/uk-has-highest-child-death-rate-in-western-europe]this one,[/link] and also [link=http://www.rospa.com/homesafety/adviceandinformation/childsafety/accidents-to-children.aspx]this one[/link], report that in Europe and the UK, after birth defects and congenital anomalies, accidents are still the leading cause of childhood death, even though these countries use cars much less.