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This reads like a textbook example of "correlation is not causation". You think there'd be ...some? people talking about how they decided not to have a child be

This reads like a textbook example of "correlation is not causation". You think there'd be ...some? people talking about how they decided not to have a child because she/he wouldn't fit in the car if it's going to have a measurable effect on birth rates but at least personally I have never, ever heard this one.

fosap 6y ago
Please RFA. "The reduction they saw was confined to households that did actually have access to a car" "They discovered that tightening these laws had no detectable effects on the rate of first and second children". Also, if i understand it correctly, you have about 50 quasi experiments, one for each state.
- Nacraile 6y ago
  Please RFA more ;) "the third-child deterrent appears stronger among wealthier families" So this has both the most and least effect on families that have little reason to care about needing a bigger car (because they can easily afford it, or they can't afford any car at all, respectively). When you go fishing for a correlation, form a post-hoc hypothesis for its mechanism, and then other data fits that hypothesis poorly, it's a strong sign you've found yourself a red herring. Which is the usual result of failing to properly understand the distinction between correlation and causation.
  - souprock 6y ago
    With increasing wealth, per-child cost goes up. It's self-imposed of course. Getting a larger Porsche or BMW or Mercedes is going to be harder than getting a larger used Hyundai or Kia. At the extreme, you're just out of luck; there is no Ferrari with more than 4 seats.
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      Most well-to-do families that I know drive a very large SUV as their secondary car, often a Q7 or a Land Rover.
munificent 6y ago
I have elementary school age kids, so I know lots of parents. Anecdotally, there is a big jump between having two kids and having more than two. I've had a lot of conversations with friends on their third pregnancy about having to upgrade to a bigger car because with the size of car seats, you can't fit three of them in one row of a typical sedan. And I've likewise had conversations with parents who decided (like my wife and I did) to stop at two, and many of the reasons are fundamentally about logistics and resources. Transportation is a real component of that. If you take a step back, it does make sense. The difference between zero kids and one is a major qualititative lifestyle change. It's the transition from parent to non-parent. It means not easily going out at night, schooling, etc. Everything changes. The transition from one to two kids is a qualitative change for the kid because it means going from no siblings to siblings. That transitively makes it somewhat of a qualitative change for parents. It means the kids always have a playmate and someone their age on vacations. But for parents, it's mostly a change in degree. More work, more cost, more time parenting, but the overall lifestyle is basically unchanged. The transition from two to three is really just quantitative. 33% more space in the house for sleeping, 33% more food costs, 33% more car space for transportation, etc. So the decision about when to stop is mostly just "how much of this experience do you want?" The transportation overhead here in the US where you do a lot of driving is a pretty big piece of that.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  I absolutely buy the step-wise argument, especially for housing, but I do not buy it for cars. Americans buy way more large SUVs and trucks than the rest of the world, even those with fewer than three kids (or no kids). The idea that car size is a meaningful barrier to the number of children one has, especially compared to housing and education costs, simply does not pass the sniff test to me. From a pure financial standpoint, I'd look more to the cost of education, healthcare, and housing. All of which have been growing much more rapidly than the cost of cars or gasoline.
  - thrower123 6y ago
    Even in a full-size SUV, you can't fit three car seats in one row of the back seats. Combine that with requirements to keep kids in various car seats and booster seats until they hit arbitrary age and weight limits, which stretch out longer and longer all the time, and it's still a problem.
ashtonkem 6y ago
Just to reinforce your point: the idea that Americans are deciding not to have children because they can't fit modern child seats in their cars is outright laughable. Americans drive massive cars compared to the rest of the world; if there is any society where car size would not prove to be a hindrance to having children it would be America.
- kube-system 6y ago
  It is not easy to fit three car seats in the back of seat of the average vehicle in the US. I bet this is not a hinderance in the rest of the world because many of those other places have either: 1. a lack of child seat laws 2. effective public transportation. It's not like Europe is full of A-segment cars with 3 car seats in the back.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    The median vehicle in the US is fully capable of seating three child safe seats. Yes, if you get a Honda Civic you're going to struggle. But sales of sedans are absolutely swamped by SUVs and trucks. The best selling car in America by a long shot is the F-series pickup truck, with about 900,000 units sold. You can easily fit three child seats in it[0] Oh, the number two and number three best selling vehicles are the RAM 1500 truck and the Chevy Silverado, at 633k and 575k. The Silverado is a bit smaller, but it too will fit three seats[1] across. You have to get to number eight in the list before you find a sedan at all, the Toyota Camry. You have to get to nine and ten on the list before you start finding sedans that would get uncomfortably tight fitting three seats, specifically the Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla, and even those will fit three if you're careful in your shopping. The top selling car that I'm pretty comfortable you simply could not fit three car seats in is the Nissan Sentra at number 19, with only 184k sales last year. Now, 184K sales isn't nothing. There are clearly cars sold in America that will not fit three car seats. But the sales of those cars are dwarfed by large trucks and SUVs. In 2019 Ford sold more f-series trucks than the top three sedans combined. And that's before we consider the sales of three row SUVs which can easily fit 4-5 child safe seats in them. So, if Americans are willing to buy massive vehicles capable of seating three seats safely by the literal millions, how in the world is that consistent with "the cost of upgrading to a car capable of seating three seats is a major barrier to having more children"? 0 - Here's a list of all the child seats that'll fit three across in a F-150: https://www.thecarcrashdetective.com/3-across-installations-f-150/ https://www.thecarcrashdetective.com/3-across-installations-... 1 - https://www.thecarcrashdetective.com/3-across-installations-silverado/ https://www.thecarcrashdetective.com/3-across-installations-...
rm445 6y ago
I've heard it, and said it, pertaining to not having a fourth child. Semi tongue-in-cheek but having to buy a van would be one extra inconvenience.
milesvp 6y ago
I wasn't going to have more than 2 kids, partly for reasons around travel logistics, and car seats play a surprisingly large role in that. Car seats needs to be rear facing until children are big enough, but most cars expect everyone to be leaning back and so rear facing car seats can be tricky for tall drivers. Part of our planning involved spacing children so we'd only have 1 rear facing car seat at a time. I'm tall enough that I can't have a rear facing car seat behind me in most cars (even SUVs). If I hadn't had twins the second go round my calculus would have stuck. Instead we had to get a minivan. Now I'm not saying this is a strong effect nationally, the effect wasn't particularly strong for me since other costs were a bigger deterrent than a new car payment, but there is an effect and I'm sure I'm not the only one who did that math.
imron 6y ago
> You think there'd be ...some? people talking about how they decided not to have a child because she/he wouldn't fit in the car if it's going to have a measurable effect on birth rates but at least personally I have never, ever heard this one. We have 3 kids. When talking to friends with only 2 kids, this comes up all the time and is a non-trivial concern in having a third child. You need a bigger car, a bigger house and bigger everything, and many things are not geared towards families of 5 - family passes at museums/zoos are often 2 adults + 2 children etc. When we had our third we upgraded our car (from 5 seats to 8 seats) and our house. If we had a fourth we'd need to upgrade the house in a few years again. It's definitely a concern and is definitely talked about by people who are affected by it.
- megablast 6y ago
  This is good news then. We should be thinking hard about having more kids. 2 is more than enough. The damage each extra child does, especially in the west is insane.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    Speak for yourself! After past generations have screwed over the world, my kids are going to have to be the ones to fix it.
watwut 6y ago
> personally I have never, ever heard this one I did and find it completely normal? "What everything we would have to buy" is completely normal consideration. So is "if we dont fit in a car we need to stop doing all these things" is another completely normal consideration.

fosap 6y ago

Please RFA. "The reduction they saw was confined to households that did actually have access to a car" "They discovered that tightening these laws had no detectable effects on the rate of first and second children". Also, if i understand it correctly, you have about 50 quasi experiments, one for each state.

Nacraile 6y ago
Please RFA more ;) "the third-child deterrent appears stronger among wealthier families" So this has both the most and least effect on families that have little reason to care about needing a bigger car (because they can easily afford it, or they can't afford any car at all, respectively). When you go fishing for a correlation, form a post-hoc hypothesis for its mechanism, and then other data fits that hypothesis poorly, it's a strong sign you've found yourself a red herring. Which is the usual result of failing to properly understand the distinction between correlation and causation.
- souprock 6y ago
  With increasing wealth, per-child cost goes up. It's self-imposed of course. Getting a larger Porsche or BMW or Mercedes is going to be harder than getting a larger used Hyundai or Kia. At the extreme, you're just out of luck; there is no Ferrari with more than 4 seats.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Most well-to-do families that I know drive a very large SUV as their secondary car, often a Q7 or a Land Rover.

munificent 6y ago

I have elementary school age kids, so I know lots of parents. Anecdotally, there is a big jump between having two kids and having more than two. I've had a lot of conversations with friends on their third pregnancy about having to upgrade to a bigger car because with the size of car seats, you can't fit three of them in one row of a typical sedan. And I've likewise had conversations with parents who decided (like my wife and I did) to stop at two, and many of the reasons are fundamentally about logistics and resources. Transportation is a real component of that. If you take a step back, it does make sense. The difference between zero kids and one is a major qualititative lifestyle change. It's the transition from parent to non-parent. It means not easily going out at night, schooling, etc. Everything changes. The transition from one to two kids is a qualitative change for the kid because it means going from no siblings to siblings. That transitively makes it somewhat of a qualitative change for parents. It means the kids always have a playmate and someone their age on vacations. But for parents, it's mostly a change in degree. More work, more cost, more time parenting, but the overall lifestyle is basically unchanged. The transition from two to three is really just quantitative. 33% more space in the house for sleeping, 33% more food costs, 33% more car space for transportation, etc. So the decision about when to stop is mostly just "how much of this experience do you want?" The transportation overhead here in the US where you do a lot of driving is a pretty big piece of that.

ashtonkem 6y ago
I absolutely buy the step-wise argument, especially for housing, but I do not buy it for cars. Americans buy way more large SUVs and trucks than the rest of the world, even those with fewer than three kids (or no kids). The idea that car size is a meaningful barrier to the number of children one has, especially compared to housing and education costs, simply does not pass the sniff test to me. From a pure financial standpoint, I'd look more to the cost of education, healthcare, and housing. All of which have been growing much more rapidly than the cost of cars or gasoline.
- thrower123 6y ago
  Even in a full-size SUV, you can't fit three car seats in one row of the back seats. Combine that with requirements to keep kids in various car seats and booster seats until they hit arbitrary age and weight limits, which stretch out longer and longer all the time, and it's still a problem.

ashtonkem 6y ago

Just to reinforce your point: the idea that Americans are deciding not to have children because they can't fit modern child seats in their cars is outright laughable. Americans drive massive cars compared to the rest of the world; if there is any society where car size would not prove to be a hindrance to having children it would be America.

kube-system 6y ago
It is not easy to fit three car seats in the back of seat of the average vehicle in the US. I bet this is not a hinderance in the rest of the world because many of those other places have either: 1. a lack of child seat laws 2. effective public transportation. It's not like Europe is full of A-segment cars with 3 car seats in the back.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  The median vehicle in the US is fully capable of seating three child safe seats. Yes, if you get a Honda Civic you're going to struggle. But sales of sedans are absolutely swamped by SUVs and trucks. The best selling car in America by a long shot is the F-series pickup truck, with about 900,000 units sold. You can easily fit three child seats in it[0] Oh, the number two and number three best selling vehicles are the RAM 1500 truck and the Chevy Silverado, at 633k and 575k. The Silverado is a bit smaller, but it too will fit three seats[1] across. You have to get to number eight in the list before you find a sedan at all, the Toyota Camry. You have to get to nine and ten on the list before you start finding sedans that would get uncomfortably tight fitting three seats, specifically the Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla, and even those will fit three if you're careful in your shopping. The top selling car that I'm pretty comfortable you simply could not fit three car seats in is the Nissan Sentra at number 19, with only 184k sales last year. Now, 184K sales isn't nothing. There are clearly cars sold in America that will not fit three car seats. But the sales of those cars are dwarfed by large trucks and SUVs. In 2019 Ford sold more f-series trucks than the top three sedans combined. And that's before we consider the sales of three row SUVs which can easily fit 4-5 child safe seats in them. So, if Americans are willing to buy massive vehicles capable of seating three seats safely by the literal millions, how in the world is that consistent with "the cost of upgrading to a car capable of seating three seats is a major barrier to having more children"? 0 - Here's a list of all the child seats that'll fit three across in a F-150: https://www.thecarcrashdetective.com/3-across-installations-f-150/ https://www.thecarcrashdetective.com/3-across-installations-... 1 - https://www.thecarcrashdetective.com/3-across-installations-silverado/ https://www.thecarcrashdetective.com/3-across-installations-...

rm445 6y ago

I've heard it, and said it, pertaining to not having a fourth child. Semi tongue-in-cheek but having to buy a van would be one extra inconvenience.

milesvp 6y ago

I wasn't going to have more than 2 kids, partly for reasons around travel logistics, and car seats play a surprisingly large role in that. Car seats needs to be rear facing until children are big enough, but most cars expect everyone to be leaning back and so rear facing car seats can be tricky for tall drivers. Part of our planning involved spacing children so we'd only have 1 rear facing car seat at a time. I'm tall enough that I can't have a rear facing car seat behind me in most cars (even SUVs). If I hadn't had twins the second go round my calculus would have stuck. Instead we had to get a minivan. Now I'm not saying this is a strong effect nationally, the effect wasn't particularly strong for me since other costs were a bigger deterrent than a new car payment, but there is an effect and I'm sure I'm not the only one who did that math.

imron 6y ago

> You think there'd be ...some? people talking about how they decided not to have a child because she/he wouldn't fit in the car if it's going to have a measurable effect on birth rates but at least personally I have never, ever heard this one. We have 3 kids. When talking to friends with only 2 kids, this comes up all the time and is a non-trivial concern in having a third child. You need a bigger car, a bigger house and bigger everything, and many things are not geared towards families of 5 - family passes at museums/zoos are often 2 adults + 2 children etc. When we had our third we upgraded our car (from 5 seats to 8 seats) and our house. If we had a fourth we'd need to upgrade the house in a few years again. It's definitely a concern and is definitely talked about by people who are affected by it.

megablast 6y ago
This is good news then. We should be thinking hard about having more kids. 2 is more than enough. The damage each extra child does, especially in the west is insane.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Speak for yourself! After past generations have screwed over the world, my kids are going to have to be the ones to fix it.

watwut 6y ago

> personally I have never, ever heard this one I did and find it completely normal? "What everything we would have to buy" is completely normal consideration. So is "if we dont fit in a car we need to stop doing all these things" is another completely normal consideration.