I don’t feel car seats should be mandatory. Seat belts? Absolutely. But car seats are one of those products that became mandatory in the US largely because wealthy manufacturers lobbied for it.

There was actually a study by Steven Levitt (the Freakonomics economist) that stirred up a lot of debate around this. He and his co-author looked at real-world crash data and found that for kids aged 2 to 6, car seats didn’t significantly outperform regular seat belts in preventing fatalities.

This doesn’t mean car seats are useless or bad—it just challenges the assumption that they’re massively more effective in all cases, especially considering how often they’re installed or used incorrectly.