In North Carolina, children up to 8 years of age and weighing up 80 pounds are now required to be in car seats or booster seats.
For those of you without children who are wondering how big an 80-pound kid is, my 12-year-old daughter, a seventh grader who is a little short but not unusually thin for her age, weighs 81 pounds. This girl, almost ready to be thinking about boys and dating, is supposed to be just getting out of a booster seat?
Social implications aside, there must be some good science behind this law, right? Think again. I had read a while back (can’t remember where) that children are the least likely individuals to be injured or die in car crashes, by far. But maybe this is just because their mothers are more careful drivers. Maybe the car/booster seat offers the 78-pound 7-year-old extra protection for the few times mommy might end up crashing the minivan.
The Freakonomics gang has the evidence: not on your life. Kids in car crashes who had been restrained by seatbelts were no more likely to die than kids restrained by car seats. They took a step further and actually commissioned a test comparing car seats and seatbelts using crash-test-dummies. In their small sample, three and six-year-old dummies are equally likely to survive a 30-mile-per-hour crash in a car seat and in a seat belt.
Car seats are burdensome contraptions. They make carpooling more difficult, and they are a pain to install. Often, they’re not installed properly at all. They can cost hundreds of dollars. And, apparently, for children three years and above, they don’t work any better than seatbelts.
Legislatures love to pass these laws because it makes it look like they care about children. They should do kids a favor, save their parents a couple hundred bucks that could be going into the college fund, and abolish car seat laws from three years and up.