Best of Blog: Do we really care about children?
Tuesday, December 13, 2011 | Charles Marohn So many causes use children as the foil for their arguments or the centerpiece of their fundraising campaign, to the point where it often diminishes the effectiveness (here we go again.....just doing it "for the children"). As a father of two girls, I am both susceptible to and turned off by this approach, depending on the day and how excessive/sincere the pitch seems.
Yesterday we ran our series on the Infrastructure Cult and our unquestioned, societal belief that spending on highways is simply an investment in prosperity; the more we do, the more prosperous we become. Our Best of Blog piece today is one where we questioned another dogmatic belief Americans nearly universally seem to hold: that car seats keep children safe.
I had a city council member last week say that people did not want walkable neighborhoods because they were afraid of child abductions, that people prefer the "safety" of their cars. Sad to say, but I think he is right, despite being completely ignorant of the facts. In a single year, the U.S. has around 7,000 children die in auto accidents (many, many more injured severely) but only around 100 children kidnapped.
We love our cars but, like all one-way relationships, our obsession has made us completely irrational.
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As a society, we are zealous when it comes to the safety of children. And rightfully so. Still, for some reason we find it perfectly acceptable to routinely include them in the most dangerous activity of American life: riding in a car. Even with car seats, auto accidents are the leading cause of death amongst children over two years old. It is time that child advocates start promoting mixed-use, walkable communities as an alternative to better armor and thicker padding.
I was out for a walk with my family this past weekend. My wife and I were discussing one of her friends who was expecting. This would be the second child for this friend who also has a six year old. In the conversation my wife -- who by the way I would describe as brilliant, well-informed and very frugal (I would add other adjectives, of course, but those are the ones pertinent to this post) -- she lamented the added cost of having kids so far apart. There was a need, according to her, to essentially get all new kid gear, from car seats to cribs.
This was puzzling to me. I'd like to think I'm a pretty modern dad, up to date on all the latest and greatest recommendations for raising happy and healthy kids, but I was not aware of a law or even a recommendation that a plastic car seat be replaced just because sixty months had elapsed since it was purchased. Looking at my six and four year old and knowing that we have not completely abandoned the idea of a third child, I started to run through the cost of outfitting an entirely new nursery. Ouch.
I'll pause here and point out that my wife is right (to which our readers say: was there any doubt?). Manufacturers of car seats are now putting expiration dates on their products - typically five to eight years - following a theory that the seat could become obsolete if a change in car design or industry norm occurred. That the practice also happens to benefit the car seat manufacturers is where I wrong-headedly took the conversation.
Actually, I went even further than that. I went all the way to the Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner argument in SuperFreakonomics that having your kid in a car seat doesn't matter. Now, hold your anger at my apostasy (I heard it from my wife already) and let me explain. In the book, Levitt and Dubner statistically demonstrate that the major advancement in auto safety for non-infants was not the child seat but simply moving the kids to the back seat and putting them in a seat belt. A passenger - be they a child or an adult - is far more likely to survive a car crash if they are sitting, buckled in the back seat rather than in the front. Anyone who grew up, as I did, riding in the cab of a truck with the only restraint being the back of the driver's arm knows what I'm talking about. (See ABC News from October 2009.)
This was quite the wrong argument to have with my wife, who went for the kill with this statement:
I wouldn't compromise with our kids' safety. Would you?
Gulp.
I wouldn't intentionally compromise on my kids' safety -- of course not -- but as I ruminated on my spousal lesson of the week it occurred to me just how often we do compromise their safety.
After perinatal conditions, which are problems that occur near or in the immediate months after childbirth, the leading cause of death amongst children ages 0 to 19 is auto accidents. For accidental causes of mortality, there is no close second. Even drowning, which we are militant about here in terms of baths, pools and time at the lake, is just a fraction of auto accidents. Imagine two 9/11 attacks each year that killed just kids and you still would not have the number of child fatalities America has each year from auto accidents.
I take my oldest to school every day. Three days a week she is picked up, the other two she rides the bus after school. My youngest goes on many of these trips. On weekends, we drive into town for swimming lessons, grocery store runs, visits to families, trips to the park, church, movies, etc... I would estimate that my girls take between twelve and twenty trips a week. Average round trip: probably ten miles. Sure, I put my kids in car seats, make sure they are buckled according to manufacturer's specifications, drive according to posted limits, always signal my turns, etc... but what I am doing putting them in a car so often?
The answer is that I am an American, so I drive everywhere. In my town I really don't have an alternative. Even the people who live in the traditional neighborhoods have to drive out to the edge of town to get groceries (don't worry, the city has spent millions making that trip fast and easy). But is this really acceptable?
If we are serious about wanting what is best for kids, shouldn't we be doing everything we can to reduce the number of auto trips people are required to take each day? And when people do take trips, shouldn't our top priority be reducing the travel speeds on local streets? Once outside of the local street network, shouldn't our top priority be the removal of the greatest source of accidents - intersections - so traffic can flow smoothly?
The best thing we can do for the safety of our children is to get them out of the car by building mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods.
So who in the child-advocacy realm is talking about this? Nobody that I can see. Safe Kids USA has all kinds of information on using your child seat, but nothing on the value of reducing trips. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has information on child seats, but that's it. Same with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Transportation Safety Board.
Child seats. Should they really inoculate our collective conscience?
Shortly after my oldest was born, I got in a bad accident. An oncoming car came across the lane, we glanced each other head on, I went off the road and came to a stop when Mr. Tree refused to yield. I was belted and air-bagged yet banged my head pretty hard. I could not remember my phone number, address or doctor's name and it took me a couple of months before I had my full mental cognition back. For a fast-driving, road-loving, engineer type with a new baby, this had a major impact on me.
I'm sorry if this piece has caused anyone pain. It seems we all know someone who has lost a loved one, too many of them kids, in a car accident. I don't blame any parent for doing what I do each day: buckle up the kids, give them a kiss and drive as safely as I can. Still, we need to ask ourselves, what are we really willing to risk in order to maintain the American development pattern?
Is it really worth it?
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Reader Comments (5)
Thanks for re-running this, Charles. With cars such a huge part of our modern existence, we tend to assess everything in a way that somehow doesn't see them. They become a given and our decisions only consider other variables.
True story. Directly in front of my house is a state highway (one lane in each direction) that processes 11 or 12 thousand cars a day. It's posted 35 but people routinely go 40 or 45. Just across it is a CSX freight rail line that sees about 8 or 10 trains while the sun's shining.
When our daughter was young, we'd routinely have friends visit from the suburbs. We'd sit out on the porch and they'd look out across my front yard. Wanna guess what they'd say, over and over again? "Now that you have a little one, are you concerned about having the train right over there?"
Mind you, my daughter would have to cross a continuous flow of cars traveling around 40 mph to get to the tracks. Folks just looked straight through it, as though it weren't even there. That's how much we've accepted the automobile as a permanent piece of the landscape.
Thanks Scott. Wow - that is a great story. Hard to believe we are so myopic.
We love your work. Keep in touch.
-Chuck
I appreciate this subject and have something to add to it. I too have two daughters who now are adults. They drive everywhere they need to go, as there are no other choices. When they go to college, fifty to sixty miles from home, there is only one way to get there, by car. Some of their friends, young women and men, drive from other states, hundreds of miles. When my oldest left home to begin school, she had been driving for only one year. My wife and I watched nervously as she drove off to school alone, on the journey that will become a typical day in the life of any american. I wished for a train service, or even a reasonable bus service to transport my children from one major city to another. I live in Georgia where it is the mantra of conservatives to hate any idea of mass or public transit. Everyone's children grow up from riding in cars, to being the driver of cars, riding on the interstate highway system or state roads at speeds in excess of sixty and seventy miles per hour in vehicles that they have little experience operating and no experience handling emergency situations. I learned so much as a youth about how to handle a vehicle in a spin, sliding on ice, wet roads on bad tires etc. I look back at it all in amazement, that I lived to tell about it. That was great until I became a father of young drivers. Now I see it all from a different perspective. The result of the constant avoidance of other forms of transportation in the U.S. is our children navigating these roads as their only option for travel. From a conservative point of view, as long as it someone else's children, then it's ok. John
this strib article has the perfect illustration for your point here: http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/135502763.html
One of the major issues with car seats isn't their design or the car's, it is the complacency of parents. The car seat itself creates a false sense of security. So much so that parents are known to simply put their kids in the seat without even buckling it in. I actually became certified as a car seat installer through a program that was hosted by a local EMS and police department about 10 years ago. I also spent 9 years a volunteer fireman/EMT and have responded to a large number of vehicle accidents, including my share of fatalities.
Your "wake-up" was similar as mine Chuck, except it wasn't me in the wreck. I have responded to so many, I actually chose not to get into the profession full-time. It is simply heartbreaking sometimes. The truth is, vehicle impact are such an unnatural occurrence they ought to always be reason for contemplation. Back to car seats...
My wife can tell you, I don't play around with car seats. Having been properly trained and having lived in a family with lots of kids running around, I am quite positive most parents don't properly install car seats. When you come up on a car wreck with a child and you see the car seat a fully 18" away from the seat it was supposed to be fastened, you know the seat was not installed correctly. And for a brief moment, that child was a flying object in the vehicle.
We actually don't own a car anymore. I don't want to sound preachy either. The reality is, driving is pretty much a requirement these days. I am very glad we get to eliminate one of the major contributing risks and thanks to cities like Seattle, we can live without a car quite comfortably.
The good news is that by all indications, fatalities are down in all major categories. Cyclists and pedestrians fatalities included. I hope this is a continued trend and I hope that all families that use a car seat will go take a short class on how to properly install their car seats.