This resonates with me. It’s beyond tedious to get the kids in and out of the car seats all the time, and needing to buy a larger car to fit more than two kids gave me significant pause. We eventually decided to have more kids, and the positives far outweigh the negatives for us, but to this day the hassle of loading and unloading the car to go places is the single biggest negative experience of raising children. It adds an extra 5-10 minutes on each end of every trip compared to adults just being able to get in and out on their own.
With one single child I barely notice, but thinking about it it does probably take 2-3 minutes so your 5-10 minutes estimates is probably spot on for multiple kids. Living in a midwestern city and relying on street parking I do dread the loading/unloading in the winter, has there been any attempt at improving this product category on the speed of use dimension?
Mine were able to buckle themselves by at 2.5 or so. It’s not that hard. So even having 4 kids under 6, I rarely had to deal with buckling more than one at a time.
Plus IMO 30 seconds is a better estimate than 2-3 minutes unless they are fighting you or somewhere hard to reach. It’s one check buck and two leg buckles.
I will say that installing car seats is an absolute pain of a task.
My wife and I have a Doona (https://www.doona.com/car-seat-stroller/discover-doona), and we refer to it as a the Ferarri of push chairs. Loading and unloading the stroller (when using their base), is super easy, takes seconds, and we can keep our baby asleep while transporting to/from the car.
pretty much any infant seat is easy to deal with but you can only use those for a year at most. its all the bigger car seats for the next 5-12 years of their lives that are annoying
Speaking to some other kid-having cargo bike owners, one reason they like the cargo bike with the children is that it's significantly easier to get the kids in and out of it.
Not sure why the "don't drive" sibling comment got flagged out of existence, but bikes, transit, and walking don't have the same hassle as driving with children. They entail different hassles, to be sure, but the "get everyone to sit down and buckle them in" tedium isn't one of them.
> It adds an extra 5-10 minutes on each end of every trip
Still better than a dead or handicapped for life kid, that would take much more than a few minutes per day
Having kids always has been a logistical nightmare, and increasingly so thanks to modern lifestyles, the real nightmare is having to depend on cars for everything, that's the root of all evil, the rest is just a natural consequence.
> It’s beyond tedious to get the kids in and out of the car seats all the time
Car seats are a minor annoyance. With certain children, managing the headstrong children is time consuming around getting into and out of cars, but car seats themselves are easy.
Unless you are putting them in and and taking them out after every trip, but why would you do that?
I don't know how old your kids are, but mine are 3 & 5 and they can seat and buckle on their own, so that extra time doesn't last for too long at least (seats are mostly annoying when I need to transfer the seats to another car and then back to mine)
... and then it's an even bigger impediment to sharing responsibility for children, as you try to move seats around or make sure grandparents have duplicate equipment. Hard to spontaneously have another parent bring a kid home from school. We had to get special car seats to carpool with my sister, just so we could fit it all in.
These psychological safety burdens - and accompanying negotiations between caretakers - make it so hard to provide mutual aid. We're lucky to have found other parents with similar understandings, but the moralizing on safety makes it hard to even discuss.
reply