The Wonder of Car Seats

Car seats have evolved.

For people like me--dinosaurs of the Baby Boom generation--child safety systems were somewhere between exotic and non existent. Yes, there were such things as "car seats" when we were young, but they were the rare exception rather than the rule--let alone the law!

I remember my parents bought a contraption called a Wonder Chair that did multiple duty as a high chair, toddler chair, play table, stroller and, yes, car seat.

Of course, in the 1950's, with the family securely wrapped in several tons of Detroit steel in the form of a 1949 Hudson, the car seat was really just a kind of status symbol--one way in sprawling suburbia to get ahead of the Joneses. Besides, there were no seat belts, so the chair just simply sat on the seat; and there was one measley, narrow plastic belt that could be fastened around the baby's waist with a buckle that wouldn't even pass inspection as a decoration in today's world of litgation-avoidance and safety overkill (maybe those are really the same thing).

By the time I had my first kid, child safety seats were the law--sort of. I mean, we had to put them in something that could be held down with the now required seat belts.

The seats were simple and varied in their design, and it seemed like any means of securing them was fine: it was OK to have them in the front seat, facing forward, in the back seat facing backward, balanced on the engine hump of a '79 Dodge mini truck--OK maybe that one wasn't officially sanctioned, but no one seemed to worry about the particulars.

Fast forward 28 years.

The car seats (sorry, child safety restraint systems) of the--what do we call this decade, anyhow? the "teens"?--anyway, they have morphed into frightening machines of torture equipped with harnesses, chest buckles, crotch buckles, shoulder straps, head and body padding that looks like deployed airbags, canopies, adjustable handles, leveling dampeners, photon torpedoes and, I swear to God, cup holders.

We have to go the Highway Patrol or AAA just to learn how to secure them with a LATCH -- that's not a latch, but a LATCH: An acronym for Lower Anchors and Tethers for CHildren. Yep, that's right. They couldn't come up with an obnoxious enough acronym using only the first letter of each word, so they had to get sleazy and steal the "H" from "Children."

To make things worse, our little twins are on the small side: 5 lbs 7 oz and 6 lbs 1 oz, so putting them into these monstrosities borders on cruel and unusual punishment. Fortunately, there is no end to the accessories available, like rear-rear-view mirrors (to see the faces of the little ones facing away from you in the back seat) to inane music and lighting controlled with a remote--It's like something you would expect to see in a 70's bachelor pad--one click and you've got mood lighting and "Kumbaya" synthesized from the sides of the convex mirror showing you a distorted version of your precious cargo.

O brave new world, that has such Wonder Chairs in it!