I mean, being in one or not? I was idling away the time looking at cars from my birth year that I might like to own, and as usual the list came down to the Chevy Corvair (a neighbor had one), a Porsche 356 (cool), and the Ford Falcon (my mom had one). My most vivid memory of the Falcon is being in an accident - I was watching the wipers go back and forth when the world went wonky and tilted up, leaving me viewing the underside of the dash. We’d slid off the road and hit a telephone pole, rather gently. My pre-school self was on the front seat and slid off.
I’ve always written off my lack of a car seat to it being the early 60s, before even seat belts were mandatory, but I thought to look it up today and see they’d been around since the 1930s! Does anyone have early memories of their parents using them? I’m wondering if they were common before they were required.
No car seats, in fact the two young ones, myself and my brother would be in the very back of the huge station wagons of the times. This is with the rolled down window. We would be playing and might bounce around a little if any sharp stops happened.
A good thing that window was rolled down as my father smoked and my mother would be spraying Aquanet hair spray in the car. Crazy shit. Car did have seat belts in the front, but no shoulder belts. I don’t think the seatbelts were used. I’m not sure.
I have no memories of being in one (born early 70s). My younger brother was born in 1981, and “child restraints” were required until he was 3 or 4 where we lived. My parents had this cloth harness that clipped around him - sort of like this,but not quite.
Long before child seats were required for safety, they were used for “child management” i.e. keep the kid from climbing on the driver or whatnot. They clipped over the seat back so, yeah, deathtraps but they had their uses. They also had a toy steering wheel and horn and some things like that to hopefully keep the tyke out of everyone’s hair.
I can barely remember sitting in on such seat or maybe remember remembering it or remember my little brother in one in the early sixties in mom’s '49 Buick. Corvairs, 356s and Falcons were all being manufactured in my year of birth.
I remember the booster seat I sat in, but not the car seat, even though I know it exists. I remember my dad’s truck did not have seat belts, and so he had to come up with an alternative way to secure a car seat, which involved some tight straps he put around the seat.
Seat belts were only mandatory for children 5 and under, so I remember sitting without a car seat and holding up my fingers saying I was 5, though I was still only 4 (and a half). But I think this was in a different vehicle where the seat belt just didn’t work.
When I was little I stood on the bench seat of our Plymouth and helped my dad shift gears.
Different times.
Our neighbor had a station wagon with the rear-facing back seat. We thought it was great because we could make faces at the drivers of the cars behind us.
Born in 1963 and no child car seats. No one in the family wore a seatbelt either until we got a 1973 Pinto that had an annoying flashing light on the dash. That’s the car I totaled at 85mph when I was 17. I was wearing a seatbelt.
Wasn’t the Chevy Corvair the vehicle that launched Ralph Nader’s career?
Born 1960, no car seats, restraint mechanism was Mom reaching across and throwing her arm in front of me when I was in the front seat (my wife still does this to me when I’m in the passenger seat). Back seat? Every man for himself.
We used to sleep in the back seat foot wells (the drive shaft ran down the center) on long trips.
I don’t remember seeing or even hearing of car seats in the 1950’s; don’t remember when I did first run into them – I have the vague impression that it was the 1970’s, but it might have been some time in the '60’s.
Certainly I never used one. My mother did, however, insist that I sit in the back seat, and sit down instead of standing up; I remember being annoyed by that, but what she was thinking was that I’d be less injured by hitting the back of the front seat than by hitting the dash or windshield (I did hit the back of the front seat once, when my father came around a curve to find an idiot doing a u-turn and blocking the road entirely; IIRC I got a bruise or maybe a split lip, but wasn’t significantly hurt, just freaked out.)
My father would, once in a while, take me for a ride in his already-old MG with the running boards, which was a treat. That was a twoseater so of course then I got to ride in the front. – I remember once, when I was quite small, my parents had to go somewhere, and for some reason had to use the MG and had to take me; they put me in a small space between the roof and the top of the back seats, which I had to lie down to fit in (and couldn’t have fit if I’d been much older.) People, both children and adults, also rode routinely in the open back of pickup trucks, or jammed into cars with fewer seats than people, by piling onto each other’s laps if necessary. I remember doing both of those things well into the 70’s.
– I think whatever seats were available before somewhere around the late 70’s were not, to put it mildly, crash tested; and probably provided little or no protection, except possibly by making sure the kid wasn’t standing up on the front seat when the crash happened. Some of them may have provided hazards in themselves, due to projections or to poorly designed restraints.
I remember having one of those in early 60s. Steering wheel and all. (Including horn --beep beep) But most of the time, we were rolling around in the back seat or the “way back” of the family wagon.
I had an uncle with a VW microbus and as a six-year-old, I rode in the back, standing on a chair (or maybe one of the car’s seats) with my head sticking out of the sunroof.
I can’t remember myself or my siblings ever being in child car seats. But we did consistently buckle our seat belts. Mom got out of a traffic ticket once because the cop saw all the kids were seat-belted in the back seats (this would’ve been in the 1970s).
Same here. I was an 80s kid. I can remember sitting in a booster seat as a child, but not a car seat.
I have vague memories of riding in my mom’s old Vega, but weirdly I can’t remember sitting in booster seat or car seat in that car. My memories of sitting in a booster seat are of the minivan my parents had after that.
I was born in 1979 and I think what I remember is a booster seat. The arms were metal and they got HOT in the sun and I hated it. I was lucky that we had a garage at home, so the metal only got hot when we were out somewhere.
Born in 1951, and I never rode in a car seat, and we didn’t even have seatbelts until I was a teenager. And the first ones were lap belts only.
Amazing we survived.
