Free-range parenting, and by implication the opposite (helicopter parenting), seems to be in the news all the time (example from today’s New York Times that talks about the “narrowing of the child’s world has happened across the developed world”).
At the same time I have been poking around to find a new car seat for our son (will be 16 months old when the seat arrives). I’m discovering that the goal of safety advocates is to keep children rear-facing until they are age 4 or 5. All of the articles talk about how this makes children 50 or 75 percent “safer” but there is no mention of the actual statistical risk. Is the risk of injury in an accident being reduced from 10%/year or from 0.0001%/year? None of the articles include this information. Nor do any say “You could cut your child’s risk to zero by leaving him or her at home, buying a house that is walking distance to school (and where no streets need to be crossed), not signing up for Russian Math or Kumon unless those are offered within walking distance from your house, etc. You could also cut the risk in half by getting a minivan instead of a compact sedan. You could cut the risk by at least another fact of two avoiding driving at night, in the rain, or when you’re tired.”
Personally I try to avoid schlepping children around in cars because it seems like a second-rate environment for a child to learn/develop. But to the extent that they must travel in a car with me I try to use the time to point out stuff that we can see out the window. I’d be interested to hear from readers, e.g., in Scandinavian countries where supposedly rear-facing until older ages is common, how in-car conversations about the scenery work when a child can’t see the same things as the adults in the car.
Parents spend so much time these days trying to make sure that every possible moment is spent on some sort of enrichment activity. Could it be that the rear-facing idea reduces the child’s mental enrichment to the point that the reduction in injury risk is not worth it? (“There is no level of acceptable risk” is not a sensible answer because if a parent truly felt that way the child would almost never be in a car at all (see above).)
[Separately, I recently got a letter from the school superintendent here in our (rich) suburb of Boston. This lists a lot of hazards facing children but car accidents are not among them. Here’s an excerpt:
“If you are a parent, at some point it is likely that your child or someone they know will face one or more of these issues…
- Mental Health
- Substance Use/Abuse
- Domestic Violence
- Learning Differences
- Bullying
- Stress
- Suicide Prevention
- Eating Disorders
- Sexual Health
- Autism Spectrum
- Resiliency
… Don’t wait until your child is facing an issue to become educated. Prepare yourself now. Early awareness and intervention are the best methods of prevention.”]
You’re onto something by comparing the cost of sensory deprivation to the benefit of “increased safety”.
If the child is in the front seat, though, it’s important to remember that airbags are explosive.
But in general, I would think that the dramatically improved crashworthiness of recent cars needs to be considered: maybe front-facing in a 2015 car is already 75% safer than rear facing in a 19xx car and the diminishing returns have long since occurred so the kids might as well enjoy the view.
Kourt: I hope that you did read my original posting as suggesting that a child should be in the front seat. The point was to contrast rear-facing versus front-facing for a child, for example, in the middle of the middle row of a minivan. In the front-facing position the child can see both adults in the front seats and can also see out the windshield.
My son rebelled and insisted on a better front-facing view when he was less than 2, I think. A middle 2nd row seat in a Sienna has an awesome view, sometimes I wish to ride in that seat instead.For longer trips, child seat comfort is extremely important. Unfortunately child seats are not nearly as comfortable as adult ones.
I think the free-range parenting debates are fascinating and important. We are, by design, social creatures before we are rational creatures. In that vein, it is generally more important to us that we *signal* how much we are concerned about safety than that we actually make meaningful improvements in safety. I’ve wondered about the exact same statistics you question in your second paragraph.
Likewise, I’ve wondered whether the quasi-criminalization of some free-range parenting activities relative to a baseline of fifty years ago is due to an increase in child abductions or just a cable-news-fueled hysteria that every unattended child in a public space is moments away from tragedy. I think moms in particular crank the ratchet of status parenting that drives both the helicoptering and safety hysterias.
Sounds like you spent some time recently the same way and the same websites that I did (“researching” a new seat for a 1 year old).
You’re right that nobody publishes the numbers, because properly harnessed kids are pretty safe in any seat, not enough data, too many control variables like “did you properly attach the carseat?” And you’re right that being in the car in the first place is dangerous, though unlike your school, I’ve seen plenty of statistics saying car accidents are pretty much far bigger danger to young kids than anything else at all.
On the other young children are much more susceptible to serious or fatal spinal cord injury due to whiplash than adults, and that’s the big reason to rear-face. I suppose that some minivans can overcome by being very compressible in a car-crash, and some seats have “crumple zones” too to deflect forward momentum down, but rear facing’s easier. I doubt that mental development will suffer much because they can’t see forward – you can still talk to them, give them toys, have someone sit with them in the back
Parents spend so much time these days trying to make sure that every possible moment is spent on some sort of enrichment activity
Have you read Lancy’s The Anthropology of Childhood yet? If not, you need to, for reasons I describe in detail here.
It’s really a miracle that any of us survived. I came home from the hospital (I am told) held in my mother’s arms while she sat unbelted in the front seat of a car with a hard metal dashboard.
My kids (who are now 20 and 25) only sat rear facing when they were tiny and as soon as they were able to sit up they faced front (but still sat in a car seat and then in a booster seat up to around 6 or so). In retrospect, we were never (thank God) in any accidents so they could have sat in their mother’s lap (or my lap) in the front seat the whole time and it would not have changed anything.
Wouldn’t EVERYONE (except the driver) benefit from sitting rear facing? Why stop at age 4 or 5?
PS I wonder if you end up going rear facing until age 5 (or 15 or whatever) whether it would be possible to rig up some kind of (plastic/mylar) type mirror on the seat back next to him so that your kid could see what is behind him, so you could see him, etc.?
I live in Norway. I am yet to see a kid above 2 in a rear-facing seat in a car. The concept just strikes me as completely stupid. As soon as my kids graduated from the baby capsule they went straight into forward-facing seats. I fail to understand how one keep a 2 or 3-year old quiet in the car if he/she was always looking at the rear seat.
Compare to children in Oklahoma regularly getting thrashed in rodeo competitions. This New Yorker article contrasts them to the delicate creatures in Brooklyn, where parents insisted decorative rocks placed at a local park be ground smooth lest a child skin their knee on one.
Once we moved into a city center where neither of us needed a car, we got rid of the problem essentially by not driving. My plan is to just avoid putting my child in a car until she is at least six, when no one can say anything if she is bucked in normally. We have had problems with taxi drivers refusing to take us because their taxis were not equipped with car seats.
I’ve actually wondered if cars could and would be better designed with at least the seats in the rear facing sideways.
We have gone totally bonkers with parenting. Personally, I have succumbed to the nonsense as well and have a strange mix of old-school and helicopter parenting going on. I am from South America, my wife is Eastern European. We are both Americans and we live in Europe.
My twins were born about three months before I got a new position in Germany. Anticipating how overwhelming twins would be, my mother-in-law stayed with us those three months, then my wife went with her back to the old country, while I sorted out the move and new job.
At the time I had to buy a car in Germany, and the only requirement my wife gave me was that it had to have an automatic transmission. I had a look at some Opel mini-vans and thought “good god… I will have a mid-life crisis right now”. SUVs are out of the question in Europe (and I don’t like them anyway). Then I remembered my mom managed just fine with me and my little brother in a 1990 Toyota Corolla station wagon. So instead of the mini-van, I bought a 2010 (two year old at the time) BMW 318 diesel touring (or kombi as it is called here). I thought, why come all the way to Germany and drive a Ford on the Autobahn? When my wife arrived with the kids ( I think 6-7 months old by that point), I had installed front facing car seats. So you can imagine my wife wanted to clobber me at that point. We now we have rear-facing car seats… but at least I got to keep the car 🙂
As far a mental enrichment, they now speak both Russian and English and I am doing the crazy experiment of introducing them to Spanish as well. And they still need to learn Deutsch…
Adults are safer in cars if they wear five point harnesses, HANS devices, and crash helmets. It also helps to have a roll cage welded in place.
Children are forced into some of this extra safety because we give them no choice.
Why let adults decide for themselves?
We ran into a Swedish family today here in Naples, Florida. We asked until what age they’d kept their girls in rear-facing seats. The response: “You’re supposed to do it until they’re age 4, but we turned them around much younger because there was no room for their legs, we couldn’t talk to them, and there was nothing for them to look at.”
Some actual numbers are on http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/leadingcauses.html which have lists of documents including in particular http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_death_by_age_group_2012-a.pdf which lists unintentional injury as by far the leading cause of death 1-4yo, and http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_injury_deaths_highlighting_unintentional_injury_2012-a.pdf which breaks down unintentional injury, of which the lions share are drowning and motor vehicle accidents.
Given these high “n” there should certainly be sufficient statistical power to measure whether rear-facing car seats are worth it.
All of the articles talk about how this makes children 50 or 75 percent “safer” but there is no mention of the actual statistical risk. Is the risk of injury in an accident being reduced from 10%/year or from 0.0001%/year?
I decided to take a swing at answering your question. That was probably a mistake on my part because it can be absurdly difficult to translate published numerators and denominators into something more practical we might wish to know. Typically, we only have access to a study’s headline numbers and a few summary tables rather than the granular source data necessary to derive meaningful alternative summaries.
The source of the original ‘75% safer’ statistic with regard to rear-facing car safety seats is most likely Henary et al, Inj. Prev. 2007 (doi: 10.1136/ip.2006.015115). Journal articles can be hard to come by, but I found a random jail-broken copy here:
http://www.infobebe.es/file/ficheros/HenaryIP2007.pdf
The Henary study is a bit of a dead-end though because it evaluates relative risk within a sample population (NASS-CDS data) so there is no measure of the absolute risk you are seeking to quantify.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reports that in 2004 the number of crash-related deaths for children under the age of 4 was approximately 420, which is roughly 26 fatalities per million kids per year.
http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/child-safety/fatalityfacts/child-safety#Age-and-gender
The NHTSA reports that in 2004 “Every day in the United States, an average of 6 children age 14 and younger were killed and 673 were injured in motor vehicle crashes”.
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/809906.pdf
This statistic suggests that crash-related child *injuries* are approximately 110 times as frequent as crash-related child *fatalities*. Assuming that this ratio (for children under 14-years-old) is reasonably approximate for children under 4-years-old and using it to scale up our IIHS number for fatality rates, we obtain 3,000 injuries per million kids (under the age of 4) per year, which is on the order of 0.3% per year.
This number is a little muddled in that (among other failings) it co-mingles children who were restrained in a variety of manners (forward-facing, rear-facing, lap belt, booster, etc.) as well as children who were unrestrained entirely. I would assume that a baseline injury rate focused exclusively on children restrained in a forward-facing car seat would be lower still.