Monday, March 21, 2011

Face It To The Rear

So, perhaps it is two blog posts in one day, but I have to make note: WHAT IS A MOM BLOG?! And is that what I am doing? Or perhaps I just outed myself as a bad parent by admitting I ignore my kids and hit up McDonald’s twice in one week. . .
That said, I’ll continue in that thread with a note I heard from NPR today: Pediatricians and policy makers have agreed that children should stay rear facing in their cars eats until they are two years old. For anyone who reads this and doesn’t quite understand, that means that around age 7 months, if you have an especially rowdy and long baby boy, he will start to cry and whine about wanting things like cookies, crackers, drinks, taking special care to drop any toy or food that you have given him after two seconds, only to repeat this process all the way home from wherever you go. Not only does your baby constantly tell you they hate sitting in the seat, you begin to notice that their legs are increasingly crammed between the seat and the already milk stained upholstery of the Subaru.
Thing Two hasn’t sat rear facing in his car seat since that 7 month marker. That was the same time that his legs pushed against the back of the car seat so tightly that would strain to straighten out his pudgy legs, giving him one more thing to complain about in the back seat. The idea that a two year old would sit rear facing in a five point harness is mostly absurd. Not because safety isn’t a concern, but sanity is also one of my top priorities. Back seat bitching from the babies is enough to drive a person into an accident anyway.
The statistic NPR stated this morning was, “The pediatricians note that auto accidents are the leading cause of death for kids older than 4, causing more than 5,000 deaths in children and young people under the age of 21 each year.” That is an interesting statistic. I wonder how many of those “children” are under the age of two. I wonder how many of those young people are over the age of 16. I’m not trying to argue with a person who wants her kid to sit backward until he’s 21, but I can’t do it. I’m not saying that it isn’t safer, because it makes sense. Perhaps car makers should take this into account and just make all the back seats facing the other direction. Humans would eventually evolve through all their carsickness, and in the meantime Dramamine could become as common a household drug as Tylenol. And, to be clear, I didn’t breast feed my kids either and they are perfectly healthy and intelligent, now I’ll just cross my fingers that they don’t die in their car seats, along with all the million other things that might kill them every day for the rest of their lives.

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