Hundreds of children are alive today because of laws mandating car seats for young children. But also thanks to those laws, hundreds of thousands of children were never born.
Requiring car seats, it turns out, is a contraceptive.
Researchers Jordan Nickerson of MIT and David Solomon of Boston College studied the effect of car seat mandates on family size. They found evidence that these mandates lead a significant number of families to stop at two children.
If you’ve dealt with child car seats and children in car seats, it’s not hard to see how they heighten aggravation and curb the hankering for a larger family.
Try to do a multistop grocery shop with little children, and it’s impossible. If you have a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old in tow, you’re buckling and unbuckling and buckling and unbuckling and buckling and unbuckling two buckles on each child’s five-point harness.
When it’s time for the toddler to enter or exit, she can barely squeeze past her car seat, which nearly rubs up against the back of the driver’s seat.
You have to keep your little ones facing backward for years, which makes it impossible for you to hand them a pacifier or just make eye contact in the rear-view mirror.
What if you have to car pool, or want to drop off your baby with your sister while you take the 5-year-old cousins to the playground? You’re repeatedly installing and uninstalling these seats, which you’re promised will kill your children if they’re not buckled down with the strength of a bodybuilder and perfectly parallel to the ground.
Forget about flying somewhere and then renting cars.
Nickerson and Solomon estimated that “these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017.” Again, those 57 alive children per year are valuable beyond any accounting. But there is a corresponding cost to those laws:
“Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in [2017] and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000.”
The researchers found that seat belt laws had their biggest contraceptive effect among mothers of two. (You can’t fit a third car seat in a sedan.) In states and family situations in which the oldest child doesn’t have to be in a car seat, a third baby was more likely.
So when you wonder why families are smaller today, check out the back seat of a family car.
