Wouldn't the real cause of the depressed birthrates be the requirement to own a car in order to have children? If you aren't a slave to your vehicle there's no problem with the available space for car seats.

Germany first introduced mandatory child car seat laws on April 1, 1993. [1]

That year, fertility was at 1.28 kids per woman. Since then, it has increased to 1.62.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindersitz

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/deu/ger...

Then there is the time cost of wrangling kids in an out of them. My toddler can easily make it 15 minutes to buckle her in just on her own. A third would mean easily 5 minutes of to get everyone buckled in and only if they are cooperative.

Without going into the specifics of car seats, I do think we overemphasize safety. The article mentions saving 57 children. How much are 57 lives worth? The answer is not infinite - a life has a numeric value, ask any insurance company.

Every safety regulation ought to pass a cold-blooded cost/benefit analysis. Few of them do.

With kids, unbelievably, needing some form of car seat until the age of 8~12.. you are limited in who can help with pickup/dropoff/after school programs to someone who borrows your car or is doing so often enough to buy the correct sized car seats for each of your kids. The upper limit being 12 is pretty wild considering we then let them drive at 16.

Oddly of course in the US, if your kid is taking the school bus they are entirely unbelted and without a safety seat from the age of.. 5.

As an uncle to multiple kids under 10, I end up only spending time with them in their own home or when they are brought over.

Contrast that with my upbringing spending time with cousins/aunts/neighbors being driven around by whoever I was staying with for the afternoon.

And none of this have contributed to us not wanting more than 2 children. That wasn't going to happen regardless of any car seats. People not wanting to have more than a 1 or 2 kids has so many other, more important reasons, I very much doubt that car seat size has much to do with it.

I have often thought that car seats are one of the major drags of modern parenting. This study apparently (I don't have time to read it, too busy with kids lmao!) confirms my suspicions.

It is unfortunate that every policy change around them is trading some amount of convenience for every smaller risk eliminations. It is essentially impossible to say perfectly rational things like "I think children should be put in this slightly riskier type of car seat for convenience reasons."

Even if laws are relaxed, there is the peer/manufacturer pressure. As a real example, I think it is pretty annoying to have my three year old facing backwards. It would be somewhat more dangerous to have them facing forwards, but a substantial improvement in quality of life for me and for the child. The manufacturers compete based on max weight that they support/allow/claim for rear facing, something like 45 pounds. So a family member such as a spouse allegedly has decided that the child ABSOLUTELY needs to be rear facing until they reach that weight. That may not happen until age five! By this time there may be manufacturers inching up to 60 pounds rear facing.

The only possible relief I can envision is that computers become so proficient at driving our cars that there are essentially no accidents. Then we may be allowed to sit unbuckled holding our children!

These two options are not equivalent. I will take 8,000 3rd children not being born over 57 kids dying in car crashes every time.

Me and my SO were considering a third for a brief moment, but it was the amount of living space and our age (35+ for the mother) that ultimately made us decide against it.

I was totally in for getting a new vehicle BTW.

Interestingly I have two siblings and we had a serious and expected downgrade as a family in living space just when I started attending grade school - a smaller apartment than mine currently.

As for the car seats the regulations came in when my younger sister was in 3rd grade or so, so he just decided to wing it without the seats.

Families of 5+ have very few options in terms of cars, among them the Peugeot 5008 - reviled both by reviewers and owners alike.

I have 3 babies (ages 0, 2, 4 when we started) in a 2016 Subaru Outback for 1.5 years now and it's been mostly fine. I have 2 "slim" seats from Clek, one is a booster, and it's really not a big deal. I cannot imagine deciding to give up a child because of a minor inconvenience like this.

Buying slim car seats is just not that expensive compared to buying a new car, so we did that. It's hard to believe that people who really want 3 children cannot make it work.

It’s really a perfect allrounder - looks nice, is luxurious, more than enough space for us, even drives like a sports car (or at least as close to a CUV can hope to).

Then said cousin had a baby. People around him scolded him for not selling the car for something much bigger - like a Kia Telluride or a Honda Pilot. But he is doing just fine.

When I was growing up in the 90s with 2 siblings we had a small hatch. When I had my second child we had to upgrade from a small hatch to an SUV because we simply couldn't fit a car seat behind the driver. Even now, I'm not sure if a third would fit.

Sure, the SUV itself and the extra padding on the car seats might make my children safe in collisions with other big cars, but if we were all still driving hatches then maybe none of that would be necessary.

We are in the stupidest arms race.

Such a car would make for a great product to sell to parents of teenagers, so you can lend them the car but at least make it difficult to fornicate without consent of the king.

It's almost Darwinistic: Offspring has an increased potential of survival and faces less threats, so reproduction is organically adjusted to prevent overpopulation.

Yet, those who opt in do have a different opinion. We got two a decade ago, and then a couple years ago through of FOMO that when we are 45 we'd look back and regret missing the window of having another couple of kids. So we did. I'm 39, have four kids, had to get a bigger car, pay the airline tickets through the nose, spend a lot of time on kids' stuff, and love it. My family is the center of the universe and I'm the happiest and wisest dad alive. Everyone else is childish ;-P

5 kids in a car, held, seated, seatbelted, any-which-way. Like on a train.

145K is roughly the population of Syracuse, NY or Midland, TX. That is far more than the absolute number of US military deaths in World War I (116,516 per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...).

Maybe people just avoid 3 kids, because it’s hard enough raising one or two kids.