Many millennial parents will be familiar with a slight skepticism from boomer grandparents about the strictness of current rules about car-seat installation and use. These images from 1977 explain why: Because just a generation ago, car seats were basically just fancy plastic buckets.
While combing through J.C. Penney catalog from fall/winter 1977 for another post, I stumbled across this page that stopped me in my tracks:
These car seats, the matching copy promises, “All comply with Motor Vehicle Safety Standards,” and fit most cars, “even” compact cars. At the time, these were the cutting edge of technology—and a vast improvement over what had been available just a decade before.
You can watch the seats evolve over the last century in a brief video from What to Expect. Apparently the first car seats designed for safety didn’t arrive until the 1960s; the federal government didn’t establish safety standards for car seats until 1971. It was apparently mandated crash testing that pushed design forward in the 1980s, when car seats began looking recognizably like their modern descendants, but even so, the LATCH system that has wreaked so much havoc on my fingernails wasn’t required by law until 2002. There weren’t even car seat laws in effect in all fifty states until 1986.
