This child is being abused

This week, in What You Don't Know Could Kill Your Child Part CCLXXVIII, infant safety seats were being declared unsafe by the media. Consumer Reports tested a bunch of them and only two passed. (Several stories noted gravely that a dummy was flung across the room during the course of their tests. Awesome! Am I the only one hoping the video makes it to YouTube? There's the Chucky movie in there somewhere. Chucky Gets Chuck-ied?)

Anyway, you should have seen various online parenting boards light up like the sky on the 1st of July. Oh god, little Wesson has been riding in an unsafe car seat. Lord in heaven, have mercy, little McPooply uses the kind that flung Chucky across the room! Let's all buy new carseats, because now there are only two possible car seats to buy in the whole of North America. Oh, and let's book that professional car seat installer in for a week next Tuesday -- you know, the one that has the PhD in mechanical engineering. Or if she's busy, let's take it to a fire station and a police station. And get a priest to bless it. And maybe a shaman.

Welcome to the newest freakin' yuppie parenting fetish: the goddamned car seat.

I am not saying that people should not buy, install and use car seats. They should. It's also the law. But before any more people get sucked into a screaming vortex of overthinking and consumerism, consider this:

1. The Consumer Reports tests were more stringest than US safety tests (Canadian tests are different again). So big fucking surprise that only 2 seats passed. If I tell Acme Seat Co. that the current safety standard is X at 48 km/hour, then do you think they're going to build their seats to withstand X at 56 km/hour? Why would they? But Consumer Reports tested the seats at 56 km/hour, a speed higher than current safety standards, meaning they were essentially rigging the test to fail a proportion of the seats.

I mean, why did CR not test the seats for a head-on collision at 75 km/hour? My kid rides at that speed frequently. Except then all the seats would fail, and people would start to question the validity of the test.

2. Car seats save lives. Sort of. Now, this is going to blow your little yuppie minds, but really, car seats are not magical force fields that have the power to ward off evil and semi-trailers. If you get into a collision with another car, it's possible that nothing will prevent your child being injured or killed -- not even the PoopaTron9000 with SnugShielding that you spent $280 on.

Or if your child is not killed, it may not have been the car seat that saved him. Read this article, detailing a study of how child restraint systems function in the real world.

Or don't, and let me draw your attention to the relevant part:

Compared with seat belts, safety seats were associated with a 28% reduced risk of death (relative risk=0.72; 95% confidence interval=0.54 to 0.97) when both were properly used.

When including cases in which seat belts and safety seats were seriously misused-for example, when two children were buckled with one seat belt or when the safety seat harness was not used-safety seats still reduced mortality risk by 21% compared with seat belts (RR=0.79; 95% CI=0.59 to 1.05).

What does this mean, exactly? This means that if you use a carseat properly and you are unfortunate enough to be in a crash, your child enjoys at 28% reduction in risk of death. However, if you toss your kid into his seat and don't even do up the straps, your child still enjoys a 21% reduction in risk of death. Pretty good, eh? The study doesn't control for "good" vs. "bad" carseats, so we can safely assume that even crappy seats protect kids.

Steven Levitt argues in the popular book Freakonomics that the reason child-death stats have been falling since carseats have become more widely used is purely due to kids being put the back seat and less to do with the seats themselves. (There's a somewhat-related article by Levitt here.)

Why do I care, though, that over-entitled yuppies are getting their Calvins in a bunch about their car seats? Well, some of it is just sheer annoyance that car seats have become another stupid thing middle-class parents can be competitive about. Did you get a bucket or a convertible, did you get the right brand, did you choose the houndstooth pattern or the stripes, did you get it installed professionally, did you get it rechecked at a clinic? Oh, you must never EVER accept a used car seat, even from a friend, it might have been in a fender-bender! You must throw out a 5 year old car seat. It must be actually DESTROYED, not just put out in the trash, because otherwise a poor person could come along and steal it and then their child would die.

And those poor people is why I feel strongly about the shittiness of this whole Consumer Reports report. Imagine that you're poor. You have maybe $100 to spend on baby gear. You keep hearing all this stuff about how there are only two carseats in the whole of North America that will actually keep your child safe. (And you know what that means -- they're not going to be the cheapest ones.) And car seats keep getting recalled. You're supposed to keep track of the serial number at all times in case of a recall. Or they could email you. If you had email. And you've heard they're hard to install. Professional people are paid to install them! You don't have the money for that. The cops would do it for free, but like you're going to go into a police station with those unpaid parking tickets in your car.

No, better not buy a carseat. It's expensive and they won't keep my child safe anyway, so what's the point?

This is why I'm pissed off. Because a five-year-old, bottom-of-the-line, Consumer-report-failing seat is better than no seat at all.

Oh, and out of 22,000 car accidents in Ontario in 2006, how many injuries or deaths were attributed to improperly installed, defective or otherwise problematic car seats?

That would be zero.

If you're that worried about car accidents, here's a thought: don't drive as much.