If you have more than two kids, you probably have – have to have – a three-row crossover or SUV, because there aren’t any cars that seat three kids in the back.
Well, that’s not technically true.
There are still cars that have enough room in the back for three kids. However, they do not have attachment points for more than two “safety” seats – which kids are required to be strapped into for most of their childhood. Parents who let their kids ride in the back (or in their lap) are open to having their kids taken away from them by the enforcement division of the Safety Cult. It is not easy to “get away” with allowing kids to have a normal childhood – like every American generation of kids had until the 1990s, when this business of training kids to be afraid of cars became a legal requirement.
This of course has little (if anything) to do with “safety.”
It has to do with exploiting engineered neurosis.
If you are over 40 today, you remember a time when most Americans weren’t neurotic – chiefly because they hadn’t been trained up to be neurotic. I remember this America. I remember sitting up front when I was really little and then in back, when I was old enough to climb back there myself. Yes, climb. Like little chimps, which was fun. We kids of the Before Time transferred ourselves from up front to in the back (and then from in the back to up front again) by climbing over the center section armrest – most cars back then had bench seats – to get to the front or the rear. We also climbed into the cargo area in back, if the car was a wagon. No seats back there at all, sometimes. We just rolled around on the floor.
This was a normal part of childhood back when America was normal.
Almost no one even wore seat belts back then, either.
No one strapped their kids into what (in those days) would have been seen by most normal people as a kind of retard helmet for the entire body. Back in normal America, only retards wore helmets off the football or hockey field; there were no helmet laws, at any rate. You could ride a motorcycle in any state without having to wear one. In abnormal America – rendered neurotic by the Safety Cult’s programming – kids cannot ride a Big Wheel without a helmet. If they are allowed to, the kid’s parents risk a Hut! Hut! Hutting! by what is styled Child Protection Services, which is an adjunct of the Safety Cult.
Many states require adults to wear a helmet when they ride a bicycle.
It probably won’t be long before they are required to wear them whenever they’re out walking. After all, they might fall and crack their head open on the sidewalk. This is, after all, fundamentally the same argument used to justify forcing adults to wear a helmet while riding a bicycle. The difference is not one of principle but of degree. It is acceptance of the principle that led to the ever-increasing degree – which will increase even more, if the underlying principle that our “safety” is the government’s business isn’t outright rejected.
Because it was accepted, the normal became pathological as well as normalized.
Today, it is considered by most Americans to be reckless for a parent to not strap a kid into a body retard helmet. This instills fear in kids. After all, it is implicit isn’t it? We over-40s grew up differently, which is why we (most of us) love cars and despise the Safety Cult for what it has done to cars and to driving, too.
Anyhow, this is why you effectively have to buy a three-row crossover or SUV if you have more than two kids – because only vehicles with a third row can accommodate three (or more) “safety” seats. Add into the mix that bench seats are not available in most cars anymore and there are no longer any big cars that can seat seat three-across in both rows. The last of them was the Ford Crown Victoria, which was the last full-size American sedan. It was forced off the road (effectively) by federal mileage mandates that punished any vehicle manufacturer that made big cars with V8 engines and room for six in two rows by heaping “gas guzzler” fines on any manufacturer that did make them. These costs were naturally passed along to buyers, who could choose not pay them by not buying the “gas guzzling” big cars. Instead, they moved into big crossovers and SUVs – which also guzzle gas, but never mind that.
They do accommodate more “safety” seats.
. . .
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One of my favorite memories is riding across most of the southwest in a lawn chair in the very back of a ‘79 Blazer. They’d shoot someone now for coming up with that idea – but in the early 80’s? $4.99 for a low slung lawn chair at Thrifty Drug got you a third row!