Am I the only one here stunned and apalled at his turn of phrase?? " Off the top of my head". Oh god. Okay, we all get the picture there. I bet it was unconscious…
So, he STILL gets to be obnoxious and defensive, in the face of NUMEROUS first hand stories, because he has only done it a few times. I Google’d for like 25 minutes, to find the death statistics for the last available year on babies who have died because of being lap-held. I couldn’t find it and for that I’m really sorry.
Then again, I doubt it would make the slightest difference to him. It’s all about him, not about his baby’s safety.
Acting like an asshole and ending every post with an stupid smilie doesnt make you more charming, it make you more abrasive.
I cant beleive in this day and age, on a message board dedicated to FIGHTING IGNORANCE that anyone would trot out the old “well its only once in a while and we dont go far” arguement.
(note: I am not perfect, not even close, but my kids dont even THINK of not wearing a belt, its as alien to them as riding on the hood of the car, otoh, I dont always wear mine, I am lazy, and its a hassle. After reading the accounts in this thread, I will make sure I do in the future, every time, always.)
The problem with letting the kids ride without a seatbelt or carseat sometimes is that then they get the idea that they can ride without it just by crying hard enough.
“Gee, if I pitch a fit, Mom will let me get out of the carseat!”
If you NEVER let them ride without the carseat, they’ll never know anything else and won’t bug you about having to be in it.
My kids never knew any different. If they were in the car, they were in their carseat.
My son is five, and he still uses the booster seat, although technically he doesn’t have to. He uses the regular seatbelt, but being in the booster is actually better than sitting in the car’s seat, since he can see out the window, and the seatbelt fits him correctly. The shoulder strap falls where it should (and he doesn’t put it behind him…that’s a big no-no!), and he doesn’t have to sit on his knees to see out.
I hope you are laughing at those attacking you as much as I am. Quite amusing. You are not irresponsible if your wife on occasion holds your baby outside the carseat. That is not to say children jumping around is not irresponsible. But a mother putting her baby to sleep in the backseat? Perfectly fine.
On long trips my wife did that occasionally (While on freeway, 0%-2% of trip time). It is a matter of weighting the risk of an accident vs. comfort of the baby. There are stretches of road where an accident is less likely. The baby (now toddler) will not sleep in a stopped car. We will not keep him in a car seat for 10 hours straight. He will come out on occasion for his own comfort which is important to us.
I don’t own a large SUV and that fact is ten times more risky for my baby’s life than the fact that he is out of the seat on rare occasion. A baby driven in a Lincoln Navigator in a baby seat 99% of the time is at less risk than a baby in a Geo Metro in baby seat 100% of the time.
“Hi, I’m John Beard with Fox 11 News at Ten. A vortex! formed in the Valley shortly after 9pm this evening! Trees bent and objects were sucked into the air pocket formed when a woman gasped in horror at a post she read online. The website she was visiting, www.straightdope.com, dedicates itself to fighting ignorance! A tough battle, if the message she read is any indication.”
The child has to be brought up from the beginning to know that doing what is RIGHT comes BEFORE doing what is comfortable.
My parents had me sitting in the car seat screaming for hour long trips, sure one of them could have held me in their lap, but then again, I am quite thankful that I am here today ThankYouSoVeryMuch.
Yah nice one there, playing the odds with your kids life when you have NOTHING to gain from it other then some MINOR and TEMPORARY physical comforts? Hell not even really physical comforts, more like a mental comfort (quiet kid and all)
Potential long term gains: Nil.
Potential long term losses: Enormous.
Uh, so? Put child in car seat, start car, go. I do not see how that statement of yours has any relationship to anything else.
Heck, you should not be in a car for 10 hours straight.
Get up, eat, hell, CHANGE THE KIDS DIAPERS, yeesh. Go to the bathroom while you are at it, stretch, and so forth. Your tax dollars paid for those rest stops, use them.
So he is not strapped in? Or he just gets out? My baby nephew was VERY quickly taught that the latch on his car seat was NEVER EVER EVER to be touched by him.
Uh, no.
Let me put it simply.
Baby small, require little force to move, a Geo Metro hitting an SUV will still provide sufficient force to cause a BABY TO GO FLYING.
A number of years ago, when my children were 8 months and 4 years old, respectively, there was a cold winter’s day when I realized I was very, very late paying my gas bill. I’d gotten a final notice and I had to pay the bill that day or risk having the gas shut off the next day. So I piled my little ones into the car (yes, in their carseats) and drove over to a grocery store where the gas company maintained a payment office. When I got there, the baby was fast asleep and the toddler was playing quietly with her stuffed animal. I thought about it for a few seconds, then impulsively decided to just run my payment into the store without going to the trouble of taking the children in.
It took me quite literally two minutes to drop off the payment. When I came back to the car, however, a woman was standing there looking at my kids alone in the backseat. She berated me for leaving them there, and I protested (rather weakly) that I’d just been gone a minute, that the day was overcast and the temperature in the car was fine, that…and then I admitted that, no, I shouldn’t have left them alone. She’d worked up enough of a head of self-righteous steam, though, that she kept on reaming me anyway. Finally, I told her she should call a cop if she was that concerned and I got in my car and left.
Now, I was indignant about this. How dare she, a stranger, tell me that I was endangering my kids? What business did she have talking to me like that? I even told the story to a few friends, sometimes obscuring the fact that I wasn’t able to see the car the whole time I was gone, so that I could get reassurance that I really didn’t do such a bad thing, that the woman was overzealous and didn’t know what she was talking about. I eventually managed to even convince myself that I hadn’t done anything wrong. I certainly wouldn’t admit that I had.
We have four children, the youngest is two and she already knows more than rjung and sail combined.
You see, she knows that when we get into the van we put on our seatbelts. The seatbelt doesn’t come off until we’re parked.
It’s so simple even a two year old can understand it.
I work with profoundly handicapped individuals who also know what rjung and sail just don’t get, **when you get in a vehicle you wear a seatbelt. **
I shudder to imagine that any harm will ever come to my children be it through a vehicular accident or from something around our home. I would not be able to live with myself if my negligence was the cause for their deaths. My boys don’t ride their bikes without helmets, even if they are simply riding around the front of our house. My van doesn’t roll until everyone is buckled in.
I would like to take you two (and anyone else who won’t buckle themselves or their kids up) to work with me sometime. I also work with a number of individuals who decided against wearing their seatbelts or thought they didn’t need to wear a helmet when they went out for a ride. They will be spending the rest of their lives under the care of people like myself as those abilities were lost when they suffered major head and spinal traumas. Some are even fortunate enough to have retained some use of their upper extremeties but still, they weighed the risks, gambled and lost.
Some people think the worst case scenario is death, many of the folks I work with would disagree and tell you there are worse fates. Like having no feeling below the neck, spending your life in a wheelchair, and being totally dependant on people like myself for everything.
So lets just not dwell on children becoming tiny human projectiles in the event of an accident because some of them might survive and not end up as bloody paste. Some might live through the accident and spend the rest of their lives as brain damaged quadrapalegics.
So guys… do you still feel like gambling with your children’s lives?
So, um, sail, why you think SUV’s are safer than cars?
I mean, cars are held to much stricter safety standards than SUV’s or light trucks. Many SUV’s have a back seat right against the back windows, making those sitting in the far back far more vulnerable to death or injury than in a car that typically has a trunk area to absorb some impact. SUV’s, being heavier, take much longer to stop than a car, which can make braking in time difficult. SUV’s are far more likely to overturn in an accident, or even just in a turn. In fact, I’ve seen folks driving a freeway turnoff completely oblivious to the fact they are on three wheels, not four. Even belted in, a rollover accident can easily result in severe injury or death because the weight of the vehicle tends to crush the roof down onto the occupants. Cars roll over, too, but there is less weight, less force of impact, and many cars have roofs strong enough to protect the occupants in such an event.
My mum was in a car accident when she was a teenager which resulted in the death of her boyfriend at the time. Apparently the only thing which saved her was the fact that she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt (the car had fallen into a lake, and she could get out quickly).
But she still always wears her seatbelt now, and always made sure we had ours on too.
[hijack]
Anyone else find it ironic that this thread was created by Running with Scissors?
[/hijack]
**Have you even read the thread?!? YES, YOU ARE IRRESPONSIBLE FOR TAKING A CHILD OUT OF THE CARSEAT. Even more so for holding a baby on your lap while driving on the highway.
Yep, perfectly fine as long as the baby is IN HIS CARSEAT.
**“Let’s see, honey, comfort of the baby vs. him possibly dying; what should we do? Such a hard decision.”
**And of course those stretches of road where an accident is more likely are clearly marked so you know when to put him back in his carseat. :rolleyes:
**You know, part of having a child is altering your life to take care of him. Want to take a 10-hour road trip with no stops? Ain’t gonna happen with a small child. Obviously you can’t keep a toddler strapped in a carseat for 10 hours. You have to stop and let them get out of the carseat, of course. Plan some rest stops. Some of them have play areas with play ground equipment. Stop at a McD’s with a Play Place. Leave at 4:00 in the morning when you know he’ll sleep for several hours. Leave at night when he’ll sleep for several hours. Make it a 2-day trip. Who said you had to drive 10 hours in one day?
Most likely. Before the accident, it didn’t occur to them that my little brother should ride with a bike helmet almost directly in front of their home on a very quiet side residiential road. He did wear a helmet when we went mountain biking or on busier roads.
Had someone taken 5 minutes to maybe set a lightbulb off in their head and remind them that eventho it isn’t as likely that a confused old lady would panic and hit him just the right way to cause severe head injury on a side street as it would be on a busy highway, it could still happen.
I know my parents. They have sadly already admitted that it just never crossed their minds.
So yeah, in all honesty, I think this thread would have helped.
I am very glad to see that at least one person in this thread now realizes the importance of helmets.
As for jrung and sail, they reinforce my belief that some dumbfucks just shouldn’t breed.
I’m going to wrap all of my kids in cotton and never ever let them leave their beds.
They can hurt themselves in the bathroom! In the kitchen! I have KNIVES IN THERE! There are needles…NEEDLES, I TELL YOU! in my sewing kit, and I don’t want the slightest chance that they might accidentally PLUNGE ONE THROUGH THEIR EYEBALLS AND LOBOTOMIZE THEMSELVES!
My back yard? There’s hard plastic lawn furniture out there! And BUGS! And some of those mosquitos might carry WEST NILE VIRUS which can be DEADLY!!!
I won’t put any of them in school because those floors are HARD AND SLIPPERY! They could fall and BREAK THEIR NECKS! It’s HAPPENED BEFORE! I saw it on an episode of ER!! And they use SCISSORS! With BLADES!!! ACTUAL SHARP BLADES in the hands of my BABIES! And the other kids have them too…WHO KNOWS WHAT SOME OTHER IRRESPONSIBLE KID MIGHT DO TO MY KIDS WITH THOSE SHARP BLADES???
My kids are buckled up every time we get in the car. Occasionally, though, I’ll let my 7-year-old ride in the front seat from his school to my house (about a block and a half) or to our friends’ house (about four blocks).
I AM A HORRIBLE PARENT!!! THE AIR-BAG MIGHT DEPLOY AND KILL HIM!!! AND IT WILL BE ALL MY FAULT FOR PUTTING HIM IN THE FRONT SEAT!!!
I’m not saying that it’s right to leave one’s kids unbelted. I’m not saying car safety isn’t incredibly important. However, I don’t think I’ve seen this many self-righteous fucks mouth off in one non-religious, non-political thread in my life.
You people have actually been saying you hope peoples’ kids DIE or become MAIMED to 'teach the parents a lesson.'
Shame on ALL of you. I fucking hate Newt Gingritch and almost everything he stands for, but I’m not going to wish harm to his KIDS to teach him a lesson.
To be fair, Hama, I don’t recall seeing that sentiment expressed anywhere in this thread. Quite the reverse in fact - the only sentiment I’ve seen is that people are sorry that kids might die due to a lack of safety.
There has been, for right or wrong, a lot of sanctimoniousness in this thread. (If that’s a word). I’m fairly ambivalent on that issue - after all some times some people need a good shot of lecturing to make them see sense. But there hasn’t been anything like you are suggesting here.
Er, I don’t remember seeing anybody say that they wanted to see dead or maimed children. And nobody is suggesting that someone who lets her 7-year-old ride buckled up in the front seat is a bad parent. I think we’ve specifically been talking about infants and toddlers being properly restrained in carseats.
It is dangerous and irresponsible to transport your child in a car if he or she is not properly belted in. Making hysterical claims about other situations that may or may not be safe does not change that fact.
of course there are risks involved in every aspect of life. And, even buckling your child in their seat, they still can be killed in an accident.
But it ain’t sanctimonious to point out that:
Buckling a kid in a car seat is a quick, easy way to drastically reduce a potential risk.
Refusing to do so because of some level of inconvenience to the parent involved is a piss poor excuse.
So, while yes, there are knives in your kitchen Hama, I’d be willing to bet that you didn’t hand over your sharp chef’s knife to your 6 month old to teeth on, right?
