As a parent, I see the structural issues everyday that prevent people from having more kids. Today, I want to talk about one of those issues: car-centric infrastructure.
Day-to-Day Overview
This is a bit of a different piece than my usual articles because this is honestly just going to be a traditional blog. Specifically, while the title is eye-catching, I really just wanted to reflect a bit on being a parent. Hopefully that connection becomes clear in a second.
To start, let me take you on a quick overview of what my day-to-day looks like. Currently, I have a family of four: my wife, two daughters, and me. The oldest kid is on the back half of two, and the baby is literally two months. In fact, we just went in to do her first round of shots a few days ago.
Right now, my wife and I split our schedules so that she works in the morning and I work in the afternoons. That way, one of us is always home, and we don’t have to pay for daycare. That said, it’s a taxing way of life. I’m very much surviving day-to-day or even really hour-to-hour. Honestly, the joke I make is that going to work is the easy part.
Of course, not every day is created equal. I’m home basically all day Mondays, but I work remotely in the afternoons. Then, each day after that kind of has a unique start time. On Tuesdays, I leave the house around noon. On Wednesdays, it’s 11 AM. Then, on Thursdays and Fridays it’s 1 PM.
Ultimately, I realize being able to stay home with your kids is the privileged position, but it’s really hard. I’m technically working a full-time job, but I’m compressing it into 20-30 hours a week, so I’m often stuck catching up late into the night while both kids are asleep. As efficient as I try to be with my time, those last few hours of each day are certainly low productivity.
A Day in the Life of a Parent
Honestly, I suspect that the average person is very busy and doesn’t have an appreciation of what a day looks like for a parent, so let me just walk you through the day we took the baby to get her shots.
That day, I had some of my best sleep in months because I went to bed at 9:47 PM the previous night and woke up later than usual at ~8:30 AM. My smart watch clocked me at 10 hours and 33 minutes of sleep—in contrast to this morning where I got a casual 6 hours and 8 minutes of sleep.
Having gotten up nice and refreshed, courtesy of a baby that is already starting to sleep most of the night and of my wife who got up before me with the kids, I was ready to take on a long day. In the morning, we did our usual breakfast for the toddler and some morning playtime. Before long, we were all getting showered and dressed for the doctor’s appointment.
Luckily, since moving, we found a pediatrician that’s literally five minutes from our house, so we rolled out of the driveway at 10:05 AM to make a 10:15 AM appointment. Normally, this would have required us all to pile into one car, but the appointment was dangerously close to my usual departure time. As a result, we drove separately; the baby in her car and the toddler in mine.
The appointment went about as expected, and on our way out we stopped at the grocery store to get some infant Tylenol to help the baby deal with the pain of vaccines. Because we drove separately and it’s a pain to take two kids to the store, I came along to sit in the car while my wife got the Tylenol. Again, this type of stuff probably seems minor, but you constantly have to include kids in any calculation you make when planning out your day.
While you might think I simply left for work after that, it wasn’t quite that simple. My toddler was extremely upset that I wasn’t coming home with them because this was different from the usual routine of me giving her a hug and kiss before leaving. Naturally, we had to do a bit of bribery with Wendy’s to get her to calm down, so I could run off to work.
On my end, aside from it being my longest day, it was easy. The toughest bit was getting through my two Japanese classes at noon, but everything else was easy after that. Meanwhile, at home, my wife was struggling to get our toddler to sleep. She’d been fighting naps for a couple of months now, but we’ve had no luck with any strategies yet. Unfortunately, dropping the nap is out of the question because she’s unmanageable after 5 o’clock (and she doesn’t go to sleep until 8).
Anyway, the last hurdle for me was rush hour traffic. Currently, I live about 20 miles from work, which during regular hours is like a 25 minute drive max. During rush hour, I typically leave campus between 5:10 PM and 5:15 PM, and I don’t make it home until 6 PM most days. Yeah, I have friends with much worse commutes, but this is way too long to be sitting in a car regardless. Not to mention that the drivers here are among the worst. Though, I would be lying if I didn’t find it somewhat relaxing given the day-to-day grind. Regardless, I don’t remember that particular drive.
Once I got home, it was a rapid sequence of eating dinner, bathing the toddler, and putting the toddler to bed. My wife is on bath duty while I’m on sleep duty. The baby is essentially background noise in the form of screaming throughout. You can’t really do any of this without someone holding her.
To get the toddler to bed, I have a fun routine where I brush her teeth and give her 3 minutes to do whatever she wants. Sometimes it’s running around. Other times, it’s reading a book. There’s a lot of variety in the 3 minutes. When the timer goes off, I start the bedtime routine which involves a ritual of tucking her in. For whatever reason, she likes to be tucked in and “crushed” three times. Before leaving, I usually turn on her sound machine and give her a hug too. Regardless of the actual routine, she screams anyway when I leave. Sometimes the screaming lasts 30 seconds. Other times, she might fight bed time for two hours. I don’t remember how that particular Wednesday went, but I suspect she fell asleep quickly without the nap.
After that, I spent a few hours gaming, responding to emails, and not studying Japanese. I explicitly take Wednesdays off from studying to keep myself sane. Anyway, that particular night, the baby was really struggling with the shots—just screaming all day and night. I ended up holding her from around 11 PM until 1 AM, so my wife could get some sleep. Then, I passed out in bed.
How Cars Restrict Family Size
So, you’re probably imagining what all this has to do with cars. Aside from my daily commute and the chaos that was taking two cars to the pediatrician, this probably just seemed like a parent ranting about their life. On one hand, yeah the title was bait, so I could record this portion of my life as a memory for later. On the other hand, I had a weird epiphany in the chaos of that day around birth rates.
If that seems like an absurd thing to be thinking about, hear me out for a second! I spend some time each May in Japan with engineering students. We spend a lot of time there talking about problems facing Japan, and one of those problems is birth rates. Now, this is not a unique problem to Japan. It’s happening basically everywhere, including the US.
There is a lot of talk around the causes of declining birth rates, and a ton of solutions have been discussed. My thought at this point is that there is no one central cause nor is there a silver bullet. In fact, I don’t even know if the problem is worth solving directly because the consequence only seems to be economic: not enough young people to fund retirement or to fill key jobs.
Anyway, I’m not really here to discuss birth rates, only because it brings out the weirdest characters from anti-natalists who don’t think anyone should have children to pronatalists like Elon who push the “Great Replacement” theory. Instead, I find it more interesting to talk about possible reasons why people aren’t having kids (or aren’t having more kids) that they would otherwise want.
One reason that came to mind to me recently is a little subtle and probably not on the minds of many people, but how the hell are people having more than two kids if the only way to get around is by car? Cars, famously, have very limited capacity. Both of the vehicles I own have 4, maybe 5, seats. Currently, the entire back row of both vehicles is filled with some form of car seat, either the dock for a baby car seat or an entire booster seat for a toddler. I would be amazed if we could fit another car seat in either car, and I don’t even know how you would use it.
Now imagine you’re thinking about having a third kid. You literally can’t unless you go out and buy a larger vehicle. I don’t know that minivans are a thing right now, but cars with a third row aren’t cheap. The “budget” models from 2025 all run at least $30,000, which is frankly absurd. Perhaps the used market is more friendly, but I’m not trying to go more in debt than a kid causes on their own.
I thought I was somewhat crazy for this take, but I did some searching and there’s a paper from 2024 literally titled, “Car Seats as Contraception,” where the abstract reads:
We show that laws mandating use of child car safety seats significantly reduce birth rates, as many cars cannot fit three child seats in the back seat. Women with two children younger than their state’s age mandate have a lower annual birth probability of .73 percentage points. This effect is limited to births of third children, households with access to a car, and households with a male present, where both front seats are likely to be occupied. We estimate that these laws prevented fatalities of 57 children in car crashes in 2017 but reduced total births by 8,000 that year and have decreased the total by 145,000 since 1980.
Personally, I think it’s a little absurd to argue that 57 children dying is worth 8,000 theoretical children. I also don’t think car seats are the direct cause and rather the necessity to have a car to get around is the real issue, but it was interesting to find an article with this take. Leave it to someone publishing in the Journal of Law and Economics to have a take completely devoid of humanity.
Regardless, there is definitely some form of counterargument to be made here because Japan has a wonderful transit system, and no one is having kids over there. That’s why I would argue the effect is probably negligible, despite what this paper suggests.
Anyway, that’s about all the time I want to spend on this. Hopefully, this was interesting for you, even if it was different from my usual work. If you want to hear more about parenting, I don’t write about it a lot, but there are few pieces:
As usual, you’re also welcome to help the site grow. If not, no worries. I’ll see you next time.
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