Car Seats and the Illusion of Control

Overthinking keeps us safe. Right?

Content warning: frank discussions of vehicle-related injury and death, as well as postpartum depression and anxiety.

I used to think I could cure my anxiety by overpreparing. If I planned ahead for every possible negative outcome, I’d never have to truly worry, right? I’ve been anxious since I was old enough to think in complete sentences, but somehow the complete inefficacy of this overpreparing practice did not sink in until the fall of 2023.

When I became pregnant with my first son, I immediately joined several safety-conscious Facebook groups dedicated to evidence-based infant care. I learned about safe sleep guidelines, baby-led weaning, and how to navigate the intricacies of the modern infant car seat. As a baby in the 90s, I had been strapped into a simple bucket seat with head cushions and, I think, a single buckle. (This was a step up from how my parents came home from the hospital–handheld, in the front seat of a station wagon. Perhaps in a blanket-lined basket on the floor of the car? Unclear.) But the modern convertible car seat is much more complex, and much more terrifying, than its predecessors. As I read about five-point harnesses, CPSTs, and the dangers of unsecured objects in the back of a car, the pit of dread in my stomach grew along with the unborn baby.

There are so many dangers to fear when you become a parent, but car accidents are one of the most likely. The chances of death in a motor vehicle accident hovered around 1 in 95 according to the National Safety Council in 2023. In this car-dependent society in which I live–city outskirts, landlocked state in the USA–the risk is nearly unavoidable. Every time I buckled my new baby into my vehicle, I said a silent prayer, knowing he was statistically more likely to get hurt in this moving pile of metal than to be bitten by an animal or accidentally poisoned. I worried about those possibilities, too, but the car seat represented a concrete example of how my ignorance or incompetence could irreparably harm my child.

I cannot control the actions of others, I have chanted to both myself and my now-preschooler ad infinitum. I can only control my own. I can’t ensure that everyone we encounter on the road is driving carefully–and I know, very frequently, they are not!–but I at least can always use my turn signal and ensure the chest clip is set precisely at armpit level.

So I watched videos, read the manual, and checked and double-checked my husband’s work when he ultimately did the seat installations. I did the finger check for strap tightness. I followed all the guidelines for seat accessories and kept coats off in the car, opting instead for handmade blankets tucked around secured buckles. I checked the Facebook forums religiously and read horrifying stories of ejection through a windshield and internal decapitation. With every safe journey out and uneventful return home, I counted my blessings– and also wondered if I was counting down to an inevitable tragedy. Surely we couldn’t be lucky every time.

My husband was a little concerned about my intense need to fixate on the worst possible outcome. He didn’t think it was healthy, and suggested I leave the Facebook groups. Some of the stories of preventable accidents were too brutal, too likely to surface in my recurring nightmares and 2 a.m. hallucinations. So much of motherhood is brutal information you wish you were never told and yet you’re terrified to not know. I couldn’t let go of the power of knowing, even if the knowledge was chipping away at my psyche.

By the time our second child was born, our first was two and a half. He’d stayed safe that whole time, and irrational as it may seem, I felt a twinge of pride that my worrying had kept him intact. Because surely that was it, right? I’d fretted and stressed and sprouted a few premature gray hairs over whether the extra visibility of a mirror in the back seat was worth the extra risk of a potential projectile in a crash (it wasn’t, ultimately) and look at that–the overthinking worked.

Then, when my second son, Ben, was about five months old, I loaded him into his car seat on a sunny October day and drove to the thrift store.

My older son, Andy, was at preschool, so it was just the two of us. I put Ben in his bucket seat, forgot something or other and went running back into the house to get it, got the car started and drove off to the store. About ten minutes later, we arrived and I went around to the back to retrieve the baby, and I’m sure you guessed where this was going: I forgot to actually buckle him in.

He was perfectly and completely fine, but I was not. For the rest of the day, I replayed that stomach-dropping moment when I realized he was waving his tiny bare toes in complete freedom from his usual restraints. Just hanging out in the comfy embrace of the bucket seat, unencumbered by anything keeping him from flying out the window if we’d been hit. Cooing at the clouds sailing past his window, not a care in the world.

I vowed to myself I would never let this happen again. I wrote reminders on painter’s tape and stuck them to my steering wheel after that day: CHECK STRAPS. I was hawklike and vigilant, even more careful than before, for a few days. But then? My manic grip on Being the Most Careful Mother actually began to loosen its fingers.

I had failed my baby on that unseasonably warm autumn morning, but he had been okay. His survival of that treacherous ride to the secondhand shop was not linked in any way to my care–or lack thereof. Despite my smug attention to detail for the last three years, I’d slipped up. And I couldn’t go back and change that.

Perhaps I wasn’t as much in control as I thought I was.

It was around this time that I began taking medication for postpartum depression and anxiety, and I don’t think it was a coincidence that the car seat incident happened then. The mild brain fog that accompanies a new SSRI regimen is one explanation for my mental blank that day (the chronic sleep deprivation that accompanies being the mother of an infant is another). The way the meds began to fully integrate in my system, roughly a month from when I started taking them, lines up with the days when my panic about motor vehicle safety began to recede. As my brain recalibrated, the reality of my own relative helplessness in the great cosmic scheme of safety and accidents moved into sharper focus.

I am still very cautious about my children’s safety in the car. I tighten, secure, and CHECK STRAPS. I follow the laws and observe the guidelines and keep the car seat manuals in a handy place for reference. I flipped out on my four-year-old when he recently decided to unbuckle his chest clip while the car was moving, and I don’t think he’ll do that again in a hurry (or maybe he will! Who knows with four-year-olds and their maniacal minds). But I’m holding my mental responsibility–and self-flagellation–for this situation with looser, gentler hands now.

And I left the Facebook groups. I’m grateful for the things they taught me–some of which I wouldn’t even have known to look for–but ultimately, they were doing me more harm than good, and the good they offered can still be found at the pediatrician’s office.

I cannot control the actions of others. I can only control my own– and sometimes, as evidenced by my sleep-deprived buckle-forgetting, not even those. Perhaps the car seat is emblematic of the illusory control of motherhood, the idea that if we do all the Right Things we will be rewarded with well-being–rather than the reality of inexplicable tragedies juxtaposed against sheer dumb luck. “It couldn’t happen to me,” I used to think to myself when I’d hear terrible stories of children who got hurt through the negligence of their parents. “I am informed. I am careful. I am set apart and special.”

But I’m not. I am just a mom who wants to do her best, and sometimes she screws up. That will have to be enough. That and following the state car seat laws, of course.

I cannot protect my children from every eventuality, much as I would love to. I can’t shield them from every physical pain and every emotional hurt and every hypothetical chance of danger. Once I’ve done my best, lying awake at night worrying about whether a handheld board book could become lethal in a rear-ending situation solves nothing. It just makes me more sleep-deprived, which is perhaps how I got into that mess in the first place.

So, with the help of blessed sertraline, I am checking straps, logging off, and sleeping through the night–at least until someone wakes up with a nightmare or a vomit, two more things to add to the List of Uncontrollable Entities. Head relaxed, hands loose and open– to catch the vomit, you know.

I will not be sharing in any Facebook forum exactly when my older child began front-facing, though. I’m not foolhardy enough for that.