Parents not having car seats for their children

[bicyclefish]

The other day I came out of the supermarket and saw a couple getting into their car with the lady in the back seat strapped in with a CHILD on her lap (less than a 2 year old) and a slightly older child (maybe 4 or 5 ) strapped in but with no child seat or even a booster. I went across to them and told them in what was probably an overly abrupt manner that they should under no circumstances do what they were doing and that i was taking his number down and reporting him. He told me to F off and that he was 'only going up the road anyway'. Oh right thats ok then, accidents never happen on the short trip back from the supermarket... ahem..a little wound up by his lack of care for the people in his care i then told him that if he got back into his car and tried to drive away i would physically stand in front of it and sue him for assault if he drove into me... I know, i know..
upshot is, he got the family back out and went home and got the car seats that they did actually own but didn't see fit to put into the car..FFS
AIBU or should i have minded my own business?

OP don't come to where I live it's like a return to the 1970's . You would have a heart -attack.No-one puts their child in a seat belt never mind a booster seat. You regularly see toddlers in the front passenger seat, babies driving on their parent's laps.

I teach in the local school the other week a child's 14 year old brother drove up to pick her up. I didn't let her go. I live in an isolated spot with no real police presence.Amazing what people will do when they know they will get away with it.

Wow, bicyclefish, can you please come and ride in the alleged-Quiet Zone trains with me? We need somebody besides me for a change kicking ass with the mobile users and the ssstssst headphone people.

Where I live the same. Been here 10 years and never encountered any road deaths because everyone drives decent safe cars but that is another story

friday16 - your facile points don't actually make any any difference to the circumstances of the original incident - the parents 'calculated risk' was due to negligence and ignorance. I understand that you have a gripe against my methods but i really don't understand why you seem to continually want to justify the parents lack of due care for their kids in THIS INSTANCE...

friday16 - ref "If a man went around carparks, or the road outside your local primary school at finishing time, yelling at women, particular mothers with small children, who he thought weren't safe to drive, he would most almost certainly be arrested for threatening behaviour."

erm...did i miss something? Spcifically the bit where any of that happened?

It seems to me there are far too many people here not used to someone questioning their collective narrowmindedness wisdom.
I'm glad I came..

the parents 'calculated risk' was due to negligence and ignorance

So you're a mind-reader now too? How the hell did you know their motives? You've already said that you put practicality and convenience ahead of the safety of your children, so why shouldn't they as well?

continually want to justify the parents lack of due care

The risk was minute. A few miles in a car without restraint is around a one in a million additional risk of death. Before you can benefit from a car seat you need to involved in a car accident with sufficient energy to injure you in the first place. Road deaths are massively dominated by young men (under 25) in cars with other young men, driving late at night. Potentially injurious accidents involving families with young children in urban settings are fantastically rare.

They took a risk of a similar magnitude to allowing a child to use the stairs, rather than living in a bungalow. Life is almost literally too short to worry about such risks as one-offs (as Larry Niven said, if we could live to be a thousand, we'd be a lot more careful about crossing the road).

Oh bicycle we've been waiting for someone like you to come along an enlighten our wretched minds

It seems to me there are far too many people here not used to someone questioning their collective narrowmindedness wisdom.

And there's at least one person who doesn't seem to think "mind your own business" is a complete sentence.

BeCool - I do what i can.
You're Welcome.

Potentially injurious accidents involving families with young children in urban settings are fantastically rare.

Source, by the way: here

For example, in my police authority (large urban, population >1m), there are less than 100 vehicle-related deaths per year. At least 75% of those are male, which is itself interesting, and although I haven't checked all of them, an extensive random survey taking at least two minutes says every child death was a pedestrian or cyclist struck by a car, and the modal in-car death is a man aged 20 to 40 at night. I can't find a child dying inside a car, in one of the largest cities in the country, over the course of a ten year period. Googling around for children dying in car accidents, it's all (as you'd expect) high energy accidents involving A Roads.

Given the number of people aged under 16 dying in car accidents in this city is less than five a year, and every one of them appears to be either a cyclist or a pedestrian, the additional risk of making a five mile journey in daylight without proper restraint is essentially zero. Even if there's one death a year, it's probably less risky than eating fruit without washing it.

friday16 - ok so because it is so rare we might as well not bother worry about it? Wow...
my life just got a whole lot simpler

Friday16 - heres an interesting fact for you.
In the 1970's there was a study started on women smokers and non smokers in the UK and, among other things, it was looking at the health effects of people smoking and in the twenty years that followed, of the people in the study, 43% of the non-smokers died and only 38% of the smokers died. By your rational, did smoking therefore SAVE some of those people from dying?
There may be clear trends in individual pools of data that will dissipate and become moot when grouped within a greater amount of data.

OP, you were wrong.

You are not the police or a government agent (thank God) and you behaved aggressively.

Had a person behaved to me like you did, it would have been ME calling the police.

But I don't think you really did this, it is a Walter Mitty fantasy I think?

Parmarella - why are you joining in a conversation and giving an opinion about something that you don't even believe happened??
If my 'fantasy' world is so much more interesting and requiring of your attention than your real world then for you, like the others in the same deluded boat, i am sad.
sad face there, just so you know i'm not making it up...

Oh look. The person who can't spell rationale or use apostrophes suddenly comes up with "There may be clear trends in individual pools of data that will dissipate and become moot when grouped within a greater amount of data". The cut and paste is strong with this one.

Where do you get this bollocks from, anyway? The study you're citing is on thyroid and heart conditions. There was an attempt made to reanalyse it to look at smoking, but the problem was that the smokers were not homogenous with the non-smokers. The smokers were younger. A lot younger. The study wasn't into smoking, so the original researchers didn't bother to equalise the numbers of smokers within each age range.

When correcting for that, the "effect" you're so proud of finding disappears. You can read a layman's summary of Simpson's paradox here.

So no, I wouldn't say smoking "saved" lives because the effect never existed in the first place.

It just sounds so weirdly millitant.

A bit like storming into mcD and yelling at people feeding their chubby kids nuggets and saying you'll call SS on them.

Oh, and I love other people's fantasy worlds, In my time off I read fiction or MN, sometimes hard to tell which is which.

What I love about MN, Is that things could be true.

friday16 - feel free to 'cut and paste' into google or alta vista or whatever outdated search engine you use to back up and find your outdated data, i'm fairly sure you won't find that , but i'm also sure you will have had a go, just to prove a point that you are a superior data miner, so top marks to you. The point is, the parents were remiss in their care, any amount of statistics to back up your point that the children would 'probably not come to any harm' any frankly irrelevant, no?

Parmarella - sometimes life IS stranger than fiction.
Despite some peoples belief this is all very new to me here but it really does seem as though some of the posters here have been given a free reign on the judgement and execution of people for far too long without anyone giving rise to an iota of disagreement.
Yes friday16, i used ANOTHER sentence with posh words in...get me eh?

The point is, the parents were remiss in their care

So says the woman who's too lazy to catch a bus, and therefore endangers her own children because driving's easier. Why are they remiss in making their risk calculation, while you aren't when you make yours?

If you want to keep children safe from dying in cars, don't put them in cars. Everything else is in the noise floor.

friday, the OP is pissing me off as well, but isn't a likely explanation for your data that the children aren't dying in car accidents because they are in carseats? I don't see how you can extrapolate from "no children in car seats were killed" to "therefore it can't be much more dangerous not to use a car seat".

Yes friday16, i used ANOTHER sentence with posh words in...get me eh?

Although this time, you return to form by not being able to spell the words you're using. The phrase you were looking for was "free rein".

Maryz, 101 was piloted in 2006. It wasn't rolled out across the whole of England and Wales until 2012 and not in Scotland until earlier this year.

(Don't read this as my supporting the OP, BTW. I stand merely for Truth, Justice, and Really Cool Toys)