So, there was an article about a Consumer Reports study this week about infant car seats, and how our children are DOOOOOOOOMED!

You can tell I don't put much faith in these studies.

Yes, if you subject a car seat to worse and worse crashes, bad things are going to happen. It's a fact of life that nothing, and I mean NOTHING, is going to protect you 100%.

If the government says my car seat meets their regulations, I'm OK with that. After all, if you look at the real-life consequences of these regulations, you get stories like this one - OPP contradicts Consumer Reports on child seat safety. The Ontario Provincial Police are willing to go on record to state, "We've had no documented cases of any sort of failures that the Consumer Reports are worrying about in the past decade".

Good enough for me. I mean, if this encourages the government to redo or double check their safety tests, fine. If my model of car seat gets recalled, I'll send it back.

But what really raises my hackles is the kind of alarmist bullshit reporting we're seeing this week over tests like this. And it happens every bloody month! There's a new study out every few weeks, breathlessly reported in the media, about how something that makes our life easier as parents will have disastrous consequences for our children. Car seats. Jolly Jumpers. Mobiles. Infant seats. Playpen bassinets. All the government regulation in the world is not going to prevent the kind of accidents that lead to most of the safety warnings. Here's my tip - try a little due care and attention and you're less likely to get in a car crash or have your child launch himself off the table or what have you.

The way these things are reported, every bloody child safety story might as well have the same title: "Don't have children, BECAUSE YOU'LL JUST KILL THEM."