у нас спёрли сиденье детское из машины! с паркинга нашего. мы в грустях. скорее, больше всего в грустях о том, что надо бы двигаться - на Луну, к примеру. потому что достаёт бесконечныж хаос этого города дивного, любимого.

Ёлка спешит ходить и иногда забывает о том, что она не птица, выглядит подчас как пингвин ;) очень забавная девица, заводная, как говорит моя маменька, "вся в маму". мне кажется, что дочь гораздо уверенней в себе. и вообще намного радостнее, хоть и серьёзная часто.

вот, "радость ходячая":
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вот, отличная статья из Таймс, о сиденьях, кстати, детских-же. что и требовалось доказать...


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On a recent Monday morning, nearly 20 police officers gathered
in Clarkstown, N.Y., for a four-day seminar. They had assembled
to fight one of modernity's great scourges: child deaths in
motor-vehicle crashes. Each officer was given a 345-page
training manual issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration (NHTSA). At seminar's end, each would be
certified as a ''child passenger safety technician,'' which
primarily means that they would be experts in the installation
and use of child car seats.

Why does it take four days to learn about car seats? Because any
given seat is a tangle of straps, tethers and harnesses built by
one of dozens of manufacturers whose products must be secured by
the diverse seat-belt configurations of any passenger vehicle
sold in the United States. According to the NHTSA manual, more
than 80 percent of car seats are improperly installed.

So over the course of those four days, there were many questions
to be answered. But one question about car seats is rarely even
asked: How well do they actually work?

They certainly have the hallmarks of an effective piece of
safety equipment: big and bulky, federally regulated, hard to
install and expensive. (You can easily spend $200 on a car
seat.) And NHTSA data seem to show that car seats are indeed a
remarkable lifesaver. Although motor-vehicle crashes are still
the top killer among children from 2 to 14, fatality rates have
fallen steadily in recent decades -- a drop that coincides with
the rise of car-seat use. Perhaps the single most compelling
statistic about car seats in the NHTSA manual was this one:
''They are 54 percent effective in reducing deaths for children
ages 1 to 4 in passenger cars.''

But 54 percent effective compared with what? The answer, it
turns out, is this: Compared with a child's riding completely
unrestrained. There is another mode of restraint, meanwhile,
that doesn't cost $200 or require a four-day course to master:
seat belts.

For children younger than roughly 24 months, seat belts plainly
won't do. For them, a car seat represents the best practical way
to ride securely, and it is certainly an improvement over the
days of riding shotgun on mom's lap. But what about older
children? Is it possible that seat belts might afford them the
same protection as car seats?

The answer can be found in a trove of government data called the
Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), which compiles police
reports on all fatal crashes in the U.S. since 1975. These data
include every imaginable variable in a crash, including whether
the occupants were restrained and how.

Even a quick look at the FARS data reveals a striking result:
among children 2 and older, the death rate is no lower for those
traveling in any kind of car seat than for those wearing seat
belts. There are many reasons, of course, that this raw data
might be misleading. Perhaps kids in car seats are, on average,
in worse wrecks. Or maybe their parents drive smaller cars,
which might provide less protection.

But no matter what you control for in the FARS data, the results
don't change. In recent crashes and old ones, in big vehicles
and small, in one-car crashes and multiple-vehicle crashes,
there is no evidence that car seats do a better job than seat
belts in saving the lives of children older than 2. (In certain
kinds of crashes -- rear-enders, for instance -- car seats
actually perform worse.) The real answer to why child auto
fatalities have been falling seems to be that more and more
children are restrained in some way. Many of them happen to be
restrained in car seats, since that is what the government
mandates, but if the government instead mandated proper
seat-belt use for children, they would likely do just as well /
without the layers of expense, regulation and anxiety associated
with car seats.

NHTSA, however, has been pushing the car-seat movement ever
further. The agency now advocates that all older children
(usually starting at about age 4) ride in booster seats, which
boost a child to a height where the adult lap-and-shoulder belts
fit properly. Could this be a step in the wrong direction? In
2001, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety sent NHTSA a
memo warning that its booster-seat recommendations were
''getting ahead of science and regulations'' and that certain
booster seats ''did not improve belt fit, and some actually
worsened the fit.''

If car seats and booster seats are shown in the FARS data to be
no more effective than seat belts, might it be because so many
of them are improperly installed? To find out, we contacted an
independent lab that conducts crash tests. The idea was simple:
compare properly installed car seats with properly used standard
seat belts. We commissioned two crash tests: a 3-year-old-sized
dummy in a car seat versus a 3-year-old dummy in
lap-and-shoulder belt; and a 6-year-old-sized dummy in a booster
seat versus a 6-year-old dummy in lap-and-shoulder belt.

The conditions of the test ensured that the seats would perform
optimally: they were strapped to old-fashioned bench-style seats
(which give a flush fit) by an experienced engineer (who is
presumably more competent than the average parent). The dummies
in the seat belts were also positioned optimally, sitting
upright and flush.

The chore was gruesome, from start to finish. Each dummy,
dressed in shorts, T-shirt and sneakers, had a skein of wires
snaking out of his body to measure head and chest damage. The
pneumatic sled was fired backward with a frightening bang,
simulating a 30 m.p.h. frontal crash; on impact, the dummy's
head, legs and arms jerked forward, fingers flailing in the air,
and then the head recoiled.

Within minutes, we had some data. Though the lap-and-shoulder
belts rode too high on the 3-year-old dummy, the head- and
chest-impact data were only nominally higher than that for the
3-year-old in the car seat; according to federal standards, most
likely neither child would have been injured. In the second
test, the 6-year-old in the booster and the 6-year-old in the
seat belt produced virtually identical numbers. Again, most
likely neither one would have been injured.

These tests don't actually prove much. The sample was too small,
the circumstances were too controlled and the sensors didn't
measure neck or abdominal injuries, which child-safety advocates
say are worse with seat belts. What matter are the crash data
from the real world, where one 4-year-old in a lap-and-shoulder
belt may find the shoulder belt so irritating that he puts it
behind his back and another 4-year-old may be in a poorly
installed car seat. And when it comes to real-world situations,
the FARS data are extremely compelling.

So if car seats and booster seats aren't the safety miracle that
parents have been taught to believe, what should they do? The
most important thing, certainly, is to make sure that children
always ride with some kind of restraint -- and, depending on
your state, a car seat or booster seat may be the only legal
option. On a broader level, though, it might be worth asking
this question: Considering that Americans spend a few hundred
million dollars annually on complicated contraptions that may
not add much lifesaving value, how much better off might we be
if that money was spent to make existing seat belts fit
children? Some automakers do in fact make integrated child seats
(in which, for example, the car's seat back flips down for the
child to sit on); other solutions might include lap-and-shoulder
belts that vertically adjust to fit children, or even a built-in
five-point harness.

It may be that the ultimate benefit of car seats and booster
seats is that they force children to sit still in the back seat.
If so, perhaps there is a different contraption that could help
accomplish the same goal for roughly the same price: a back-seat
DVD player.


Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the authors of
''Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of
Everything.''