Notes from the Nanny State

Sibley Memorial Hospital is generally acknowledged as the best place to have a baby in Washington, D.C. Located in the ritzy Palisades neighborhood, Sibley is just a few blocks from the Potomac, surrounded on three sides by trees. The delivery suites, outfitted with dark-wood cabinets and soothing earth tones, are more three-star hotel rooms than institutional spaces. And while the cafeteria is pleasantly passable, there are a bevy of takeout gourmet eateries within a five-minute drive, making life even more enjoyable for new moms and dads. But if you're lucky enough to deliver your bundle of joy at Sibley, the hospital has a rigorous discharge policy: They won't let your baby out the door until you demonstrate that you have a federally certified infant car seat. Though they will make an exception on the off chance you can prove you are walking home.

After you've been discharged, hospital policy gives way to D.C. law, which stipulates that children less than a year old and under 22 pounds must ride in a rear-facing, infant car seat, installed in the back of your car. Children between one and four years old may ride in a forward-facing child safety seat, installed in the back of your car. And from ages five to eight, children must use a federally approved child booster seat, also in the rear of the car. These are primary offense laws, mind you, meaning that if a police officer spots you illegally transporting children--if, for instance, you buckle your seven-year-old into the front seat for a trip to the corner store--they can pull you over and issue a citation giving you a choice of attending a $25 safety class or paying a $75 fine.

The tyranny of the car seat isn't confined to the mollycoddlers in Washington. Every state in the union has laws on the books mandating the use of car seats for infants and toddlers. Thirty-eight states now have laws also mandating the use of booster seats. If anything, the laws in the District of Columbia are on the lax side. In Massachusetts, once eight-year-olds graduate from their booster seats, they must remain in the backseat of the car, using normal seatbelts, until age twelve. In Maine, children over 40 pounds must be in a booster seat until they reach eight years of age or 80 pounds--whichever comes last. The penalty for violating these laws varies from state to state, ranging from $10 to $500 per infraction. (The District of Columbia also tacks two points onto your license for good measure.) In Nevada, you can be sentenced to up to 50 hours of community service.

Enforcement can be quite zealous. A few years back, the District of Columbia took to setting up roadblocks and pulling aside vehicles with car-seat-age children in order to perform random checks. The officers handed out mock summonses, instructing bad parents to attend car-seat safety classes. In 2000, Arkansas judge Doug Schrantz made news when he made an example out of Robyn Skillian, who had foolishly secured her three-year-old with a normal seatbelt in the back of her car. Schrantz fined Skillian $125 and ordered her to write an obituary for her daughter. You know, to teach her a lesson.

Oddly, parents are compelled to buy car seats but are discouraged from installing them on their own. Instead they are urged--by doctors, public safety advocates, even the car-seat manufacturers themselves--to have the devices professionally installed at a car-seat inspection center--usually a local firehouse or police station. Although the installation is free, it can aggravate other problems. For instance, car seats now have expiration dates. If you used a car seat for one child and want to re-use it for another, you may be out of luck. And if the car-seat installation inspector determines that your seat is past its "use by" date, they will likely refuse to install it. On parenting message boards, some people claim to have had their out-of-date car seats confiscated by the officials who were supposed to install them.

Thirty years ago, the child safety seat was a novelty device. Generations of American children had been transported sitting in a parent's lap. In the front seat, no less! But in the blink of an eye--much faster, even, than the seat belt--the child safety seat became a staple of parenting and an object of legislative fetish, an embodiment of nanny-statedom. The story of how the car seat became a fixture in our lives is a weird synecdoche for how bureaucrats, private do-gooders, and corporate America cooperate to invisibly shape and change both culture and the law.