Hi Emily (big fan)! My question involves infant car safety, specifically the baby car mirrors used to monitor your child in their car seat. I know there is a risk that these mirrors can become projectiles in the event of an accident. I also know there is a risk of infant asphyxiation on long car rides, especially before your baby has head and neck control. Is there data to understand which risk is greater?
—Back Seat Blues
Conceptually, I love this question because it grapples very directly with the idea that no option is completely safe, an insight I’ve written about before. The sales pitch for these mirrors is that they enhance safety by allowing you to check on your child. But wait! They might become a dangerous projectile! It’s easy to go from here down a road of safety obsessiveness. Maybe you get a padded mirror. Or you surround the baby with more padding. But wait! That’s a suffocation risk! Maybe the whole car could be somehow padded?
I’m kidding, but only just. Once we start down the safety road, we can go anywhere, as in this amazing music video. In this particular case, both of the risks are really, really small. With a correct-size car seat and insert, infant asphyxiation in the car is extremely rare. Similarly, the confluence of circumstances in which there is a bad enough accident to dislodge the mirror at a high enough speed to damage you and in which the accident itself isn’t the problem … this is also extremely unlikely.
What I think is notable is that, in this case, the focus on the weighing of these two very small risks actually may lead us to ignore the much larger risk: a car accident. Cars are dangerous, and you have to pay attention. Focusing on paying attention to a baby in a mirror is a risk for distracted driving. And that is a real risk. It’s the possible increased risk of an accident in the first place that is the problem, not the mirror projectile.
In conclusion: do not get a mirror, but not for the reason you said.
Log in