The Sarcastic yet Earnest Messenger

This is something I’ve wanted to write for three years now. But I’ve successfully restrained myself because I know it’s going to really piss off or, worse, hurt some people I care about. I’ve spent a bizarrely large number of hours thinking about it, though, and things have finally reached the point where I can no longer keep quiet.

How’s that for an intro?

A shockingly large number of my neighbors are criminals. I know this, because I’ve seen them break the law over and over again, making them repeat offenders. The odd thing is, they’re not only really wonderful people, they’re morally upright ones, committed to being the best parents they can be. And yet they go on, time and again, breaking the law and endangering their children in the process.

See why I’ve been hesitant to write this? Inflammatory stuff, to be sure, but I’m not kidding and I’m not exaggerating. A freakishly high percentage of my neighbors drive around our neighborhood without buckling their children into their carseats, instead allowing them to sit unbuckled, or on the floor, or in the front seat or even in the driver’s lap.

I couldn’t believe it the first time I saw it—it was so utterly outside the realm of my previous experience that I didn’t know how to respond. I was simply shocked and my brain froze. It was as though one of them had picked up a cat walking by and taken a bite out of it. I couldn’t have been more surprised.

Because these are intelligent, loving, caring, well-educated parents, regular church-goers dedicated to bringing up their children right. So the idea that they’re not just breaking the law repeatedly, but WHICH law they’re breaking…even now, I have trouble wrapping my head around it.

There are several different reasons why this situation blows my mind. One is the safety issue. We’ve all heard again and again that the majority of car accidents take place within two miles of home. Hell, I remember first hearing that when I was in third grade, so it’s not exactly breaking news.

There are several reasons for this statistic. First of all, you travel those few miles the most—even if you’re going on a three thousand mile drive, you drive that two miles closest to your house both ways. And the majority of car trips are things like errands, where you might only be going to a grocery story a mile and a half away, or to drop your kid off at a friend’s house.

But another reason is because those are some deceptively treacherous roads. You are far more likely to have to slam on the brakes suddenly in a residential neighborhood, as kids dart out in front of you, on a bike or a scooter or chasing a ball. There are pets running around and toddlers just learning to walk who haven’t the slightest clue where the driveway ends and the street begins. It’s like an obstacle course every single day.

Another cause for the higher rate of accidents is simply that people let their guards down as they travel the roads nearest home. A false sense of security takes over and they become less cautious. They become complacent, erroneously believing that so close to home on roads known oh so well nothing untoward could happen, when in reality it’s exactly the opposite.

Of course, there’s also the legal reason not to drive your children without buckling them in their carseats. It’s against the law. Boom. Pretty simple, really. Or at least you’d think so. Some folks seem to be under the impression that because we live in a development, the normal traffic laws don’t apply here. According to Lieutenant Gary Pleasants of the Charlottesville Police Department, however, those folks are mistaken.

That’s right. For this day and this day only I shed my normal skin, that of a combative, argumentative, one-sided, opinionated ranter who needs no steenkin’ evidence to back up his clear and unambiguous claims of being right. Instead, I temporarily pretended to be something like an actual reporter by calling an authoritative source who can say definitively what is or is not the law.

Actually, I’d already known it. Across the street lives a UVa cop who’s also horrified by the willful disregard for their children’s safety exhibited by so many of the parents around here. Since I’m always on a quest to be as much like Robert Novak as is humanly possible, however, I made sure to verify it with a second source. Alas, my source was willing to talk on record, so my quest must continue.

So, what’s the law? It’s really quite simple. If the state maintains the roads—as indeed is the case with half of our development’s roads currently, and soon to be all of them—then the normal laws apply. Which means, again, for those in the back row, that driving with your children unbuckled is considered reckless driving and is against the law.

Any ambiguity there? I didn’t think so either.

Now we get to what may actually be the most perplexing part: the ethical question. What kind of message is it sending your kid when you don’t buckle her each and every time? I don’t know what you think it’s teaching her, but I’ll tell you what it IS teaching her: that laws are negotiable. That you don’t have to obey the law when you don’t feel like it. That when a law is inconvenient, you can just ignore it.

Think about that. Some multi-millionaire doesn’t feel like paying his taxes? Well, going by your example, he doesn’t need to. Someone sees some CDs you’ve left on your front seat? Well, hey, why shouldn’t he feel free to liberate them? After all, it’s only against the law—and that’s not really set in stone, now is it? And we haven’t even gotten into them pesky laws that concern the taking of another’s life.

I could go on and on about this particular aspect of the problem, and in fact I have, dozens of times. But I hope the basic fallacy in the thinking is now obvious. And really, my head already hurts from trying to look at this from another angle, when there just isn’t another angle.

Finally, there’s the practical issue: if you let your kid drive around the neighborhood unbuckled a few times (or more often) when she’s two, you’ve just taught her that not only is obeying the law optional, but you’ve made your future job much tougher, as she now knows that she doesn’t always have to be buckled; you’ve just opened a door that can never, ever be shut again.

But what’s even scarier is this: you’ve just taught her that wearing a seatbelt is unpleasant. That it’s odious, a task to be avoided whenever possible. What kind of attitude do you think that’s setting up down the road? I’ll tell you this: it’s likely to come back to bite you in the ass when she starts driving. Make sure you remember that when she’s had her license for a few months and she’s now fifteen minutes late getting home. Aren’t you glad you set that fine example regarding seatbelts?

Different people have different standards of safety. When Max was two years old and getting chemo, we demoed the safety standards of the hospital playroom in which she spent twelve hours a day because, unlike all the other parents, if our kid wanted to stand on a chair, we let her stand on a chair. We did this because we were hippy-dippy parents at the time who were as permissive as possible, but we also did it because Max had been accustomed to spending five hours a day at the playground, six days a week, and now her life had changed to the point where she went to the playground twice in eighteen months. So any little bit of physical exercise she could get—and could handle—was groovy with us.

But when a two-year-old stands on a chair a lot, that two-year-old is probably going to fall sometimes. Which she did. Never with any seriously negative results—certainly no broken bones and not even any blood although, hey, if you gotta fall, what better place than a top-notch hospital, right?—but still, she fell. And each and every fall, no matter how minor, had to be officially reported. So when this particular playroom—one of about five in the hospital—saw a tremendous spike in the number of accidents it was experiencing, it got the attention of higher-ups.

Now, undoubtedly, some of the other parents there thought we didn’t care enough about our daughter’s safety. Fortunately, her oncologists and the playroom specialists disagreed and, much as it sometimes made them a bit nervous and/or bummed them out about their declining safety rating, backed us up. But still, this gives some indication of how I understand that different people set the bar in different places when it comes to safety.

But not this one. It’s one thing for a kid to fall off a chair—a chair which, it should be noted, was a kiddie chair, with its seat about twelve inches off the floor and, yes, they sucked to sit in for twelve hours a day; fortunately, I was at work in an ergonomically-correct chair for ten of those hours, leaving the lion’s share of the discomfort to Top Management, which is how our lives have always worked and, God willing, always will.

It’s quite another thing for a kid to be in a car that’s going a reasonable (and, for this neighborhood, unusual) twenty miles an hour when it slams on the brakes to avoid hitting a cat or a little kid. As we all remember from physics class, an unbuckled child in a car that stops suddenly will continue moving at the speed the car had been moving. So if you’re going twenty miles an hour and you slam on the brakes, your child will continue forward at twenty miles an hour until she slams into something which will stop her forward momentum. The dashboard, say, or the windshield are likely candidates. And a child slamming into something hard at twenty miles an hour is pretty much the same as that child getting hit by a car that’s going twenty miles per hour. What, exactly, is worth that? Saving the ten seconds it takes to buckle her? Is it? Really? Because that doesn’t sound like a decent trade-off to me.

Look, I don’t like the hassle of buckling kids into car seats either. I don’t. I’ve driven from the east coast to Colorado and back with children three times now, as well as all up and down, from Boston to southern Georgia, so believe me when I say I feel your pain. Twelve hours spent driving through Kansas with three small and bored children is no one’s idea of a good time, and we all remember how much easier car trips were when you could just move around the car anytime you got bored. For that matter, we realize that it must absolutely suck to be stuck in a carseat, and when I remember lying down on the backseat of the station wagon at night, looking up at the lights of the highway as they buzzed by, I’m sorry that my kids will never know that sensation.

But they won’t. Them days are over. We don’t love our children any more than our parents loved us, but we certainly know better now than they did. Those things were pleasant and made their lives easier, but they were also dangerous. So they’re a thing of the past. And that’s just how it is. Or how it ought to be.

What’s that you say? You don’t think kids should have to be buckled up just for a short trip around the block, despite all the evidence that says they should be? Actually, I haven’t really heard anyone say that—most people rationalize it instead, explaining that it’s either not really against the law (even though it is) or just figure (even if they don’t actually say it out loud) that they’re such excellent drivers (yeah…excellent driver…I’m an excellent driver…ten minutes to Wapner…) that nothing could possibly happen when they’re driving.

To which I say two things: 1) you have no control over OTHER drivers and if that driver coming towards you is also doing twenty miles per hour and suddenly sneezes and veers right into you (and our roads are mighty narrow indeed), or has a blowout with the same result, or is a kid who just gets nervous and jerks the wheel, well, going back to that physics class again, your twenty miles per hour plus his twenty miles per hour equals forty miles per hour for your child. That’s how fast your kid’s face is going to be going when she suddenly slams into the windshield.

And 2) that complete and total confidence in one’s own ability is one of the main factors that causes teenagers to have such a disproportionate number of accidents. They’re oh so sure of their own abilities, with frequently disastrous effects.

Still disagree? Don’t think it’s really reckless driving? That’s fine. In fact, I salute you—and I’m not kidding. An active questioning of the validity of laws is one sign of a healthy society. But the correct response isn’t civil disobedience, especially when it’s the lives of your children you’re using to make the point. No, if you don’t think it should be illegal to drive around your own neighborhood with your children unbuckled, then work to change the law. Write to your representative, your newspaper, the local police department. People can get laws changed if they want to—happens all the time, and it can be a wonderful thing to see democracy in action. Simply disregarding the law, though, is the farthest thing from a healthy response.

One of my favoritest people in the whole world used to be a pediatric intensive care nurse and she said that in the majority of cases, kids brought in with injuries from car accidents had been injured close to home. An accident on a highway is much more likely to be catastrophic, but an accident close to home is far, far more likely. And your kid probably—probably—won’t die from having her face smashed through a windshield at twenty miles an hour. She’ll probably just be disfigured. So, you know, there’s that bright side.

Or maybe she won’t go through the windshield. Maybe she’ll just shatter it with her face. Or, hey! Maybe the airbag will keep her from doing that. Of course, the reason kids aren’t allowed to sit up front anymore is because of airbags. Turns out if you’re not all full-grown-like, the airbag, instead of keeping you safe, can actually cause spinal injuries. Wouldn’t that be a peach? A forty-second ride home, a dog runs into the road and badda-bing, your little princess is in a wheelchair for life. But, you know, buckling that carseat can be a right bitch.

On the other hand, most of the newer cars have sensors so they can tell if the person in the seat is big enough for the airbag to activate safely or not. So maybe she won’t be hurt or killed by the airbag. Maybe the windshield or dashboard’ll break her fall. Good thing those are always there!

The Center for Disease Control says that about one-third of the children ages 12 years and younger who were killed in 2000 were riding in the front seat and that the force of a deployed airbag can injure or kill a young child even in a slow-speed crash. Then again, what do they know? They’re only the most reputable health organization in the world. And nowhere on their site that I could find did they discuss what a hassle bucking a toddler into a carseat can be. So take it with a grain of salt.

In our little development our developer chose a style known as "completely half-assed." The "landscaping"—if you can so abuse the term—is ludicrous, with grading that appears to have been performed by a semi-trained lemur. Our street is just barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other and, even so, one of them usually has to come to a complete stop so the other can squeak by. But it’s a steep road, and the yards slope down away from the street precipitously; in some cases, within ten horizontal feet the yard has sloped down twenty feet vertically. If a minivan goes off that road for whatever reason—snow, ice, the four-year-old who’s driving suddenly losing control—it could rapidly find itself rolling over and over and over and over again. And as we all know, a roll-over is far and away the most dangerous kind of accident. Imagine how a thirty-pound three-year-old is going to get tossed around inside that minivan as it rolls again and again. That’s if she doesn’t get tossed out the window. And then maybe rolled over.

What are the odds of that happening? Thank God, mighty low. Then again, the odds of getting in an accident while you’re travelling 65 miles per hour on the interstate are even lower. Would you consider letting your kid walk around the minivan then? For that matter, a fairly low percentage of smokers ever develops lung cancer (although the overwhelming majority of those who develop lung cancer are smokers)—does that mean you’d happily buy cigarettes for your kid?

You know, it’s funny—when I first sat down to write this, I thought I’d mainly be talking about the morality of the situation, the disconnect inherent in all these good and honest people breaking the law again and again without, seemingly, a second thought. Yet that part of it took up only a tiny bit of the piece. I guess it’s because there’s so much to say about the other factors, but what is there to say about teaching kids that it’s okay to casually disregard the law if observing the law is inconvenient? Very little, really. Frankly, it boggles my mind that it has to be said at all. And yet it seems it does.

In the end (thank God! he heard them cry), I guess it comes down to this: there are lots and lots of reason to buckle your kids for every single trip—legal reasons, ethical reasons, safety reasons and practical reasons. The only reason NOT to buckle your children in for short car trips close to home is because it’s a tiny bit irritating for you. And that’s just not really a good enough reason to risk your kid. Is it?

To anyone who's reading this who's angry or hurt, I'm sorry. I really, really am. I did it because I care.

Comments

[sarah]

Bravo! Well done! Submit to the WR newsletter, please. Next, could you address those who cut the grass with a baby carrier/backpack with a child in it?!!!

[Steve]

This is why I don't go to the pool anymore----I've lost count of the number of toddlers I've fished out of the main pool who fell in while their parents were having a drink and blabbing to the neighbors. At least four.

[Scott]

could you address those who cut the grass with a baby carrier/backpack with a child in it?!!!

Oh, no question--they absolutely MUST move the baby carrier/backpack out of the grass before they cut it. :)