Still watching TED, now while trying to put bindings on quilts.

This talk, by Steven Levitt, is on how seat belts for children over two statistically are just as effective as car seats. Once in a school class, we had to look at new law being enacted and debate whether it was efficacious. I chose the law about children only in the back, protecting them from air bags, largely because the assumption was non-compliance with car seat usage.

When I went to the data posted by the National Highway Safety Board, they gauged the compliance by posting observers at intersections and counting those children who were in car seats. The compliance rate was actually very high. But the piece of data that I found most riveting was the numbers of elderly who were harmed by air bags, but no law anywhere was on the books that they should sit in the back.

I felt like the law in California was written/proposed by some jr. congressman/woman who wanted to brag to her district that she'd gotten the law on the books. I was never, given the data that I saw (posted on this lawmaker's website) entirely convinced that this new law didn't fall somewhere between good intentions and politics.

I'm only one person and my review of the all the data wasn't comprehensive, I'm sure. Shortly thereafter Barbara drove down to visit us, bringing young Keagan. Previously she had ridden facing backwards, in the front, as there were no air bags in Barbara's car on the passenger side. Now Keagan was in the back, and she screamed bloody murder for nearly two hours on the way home, while Barbara tried to drive with her arm over the seat holding in the pacifier. It seemed to me that if Keagan could have seen her mother, been touched by her mother, it would have been a safer drive.

I have thought many times of my grandchildren strapped down in their car seats on long drives, their muscles just aching to move around a bit. (I'm happy they have videos.) If Levitt's data (and analysis) holds true, maybe we should all be writing to our Congressmen/women asking them to slide out from under the grip of the carseat lobby and really take a look.

Again, as Levitt said, there's more data to analyzed. The amount of sorrow and guilt that a parent in this generation faces if they don't "do the right thing" is enormous, so we must always err on the side of extraordinary caution. But perhaps, just perhaps, it's okay to look at the data another way and to consider other options (as he does in the end of his talk).