In one of my first posts, I linked to a TED video of Steven Levitt questioning the need for car seats for non-infant children. In the video, Levitt acknowledges he had not examined non-fatal serious injuries, and that his statistics only applied to fatalities.
While cruising the archives at Slate, I found an article by Emily Bazelon from 2006 examining studies on car seats. Bazelon cites
a response by Dennis Durbin and Flaura Winston, doctors at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and leading researchers in this field. Durbin and Winston tartly pointed out that car seats are a lot more effective at preventing injury in nonfatal crashes, of which there are 450,000 a year. According to Winston, for kids under the age of 6, car seats win out over seat belts at injury prevention by 30 percent to 40 percent.
I thought it was important to note that someone had filled in the gap that Levitt himself had identified.
I still believe that we should question received wisdom, but not to the point of knee-jerk rejection, throwing our kids into the car without so much as a seatbelt. There is a balance. As Bazelon sums up in her article:
The problem is deciding when you’ve reached the point of diminishing returns, or absurdity, or whatever you want to call your own limit. It’s safer to stay home, after all, than to drive with your kid, car seat or no car seat. But responsible parenthood can’t mean acting on every piece of safety information—besides being impossible, that would make your kids crazy.
{ 0 comments }
Comments on this entry are closed.