A Real Feminist Issue

Wolf culling is not a feminist issue. [Sorry Gloria!]

Firing of political appointees who endorsed one's opponent is not a feminist issue.

The over zealous car seat lobby is.

Spare me the stay at home dads and the whole "Gaybies" rhetoric, the people who are truly affected by these regulations are moms. The car seat phenomenon has gotten beyond ridiculous. It takes my husband fifteen minutes to run to the store to pick up a gallon of milk [that includes getting lost at the store looking for the dairy case]. It takes me an hour just to get the kids [ages two and three] out the door and loaded into the car. I am looking at an extra five minutes per each loading/unloading of two kids in and out of the car. For one trip to a store, that is TWENTY extra minutes [this, of course does not count chasing children, getting them out of strollers, making sure they have all of their "stuff" and have gone to the bathroom or are changed].

On an average day, let's be conservative and say that a mom makes probably about three trips with kids. Three trips times twenty minutes is one hour. ONE WHOLE HOUR OF A MOM'S DAY IS LOST TO LOADING/UNLOADING KIDS ALONE!!!! That comes out to more than fifteen days per year. That is more than two weeks per year lost just to loading kids in and out of a car.

Now, I gladly do this because my kids are worth more to me than those days and I have bought onto the whole car-seat-as-savior thing. This article makes me think differently. There is no doubt in my mind that my little toddlebops should be strapped securely in car seats, but EIGHT years old? That seems excessive given the actual statistics.

Furthermore, the flexibility of mothers everywhere is compromised. The other day, a neighbor told me that she almost called me to see if I could drive her son because she was having car trouble but then thought about the fact that I have two children in car seats and wouldn't be able to accommodate her own child's car seat. So she drove her unsafe car instead... At least the kid was strapped safely in his expensive car seat.

Our mothers had it a lot easier, they would take turns loading an entire neighborhood worth of kids in cars and save on gas and time and money. The average car can only accommodate two car seats. Carpooling has gone the way of all things. We are getting mad about the environment and focusing on conservation, but we have forced parents into NOT carpooling. How in the world does this make sense?

So, thanks, car seat lobby. Because of you, I will have lost 137 days of my life.