Not my mother. A generation and several hemline inches removed, but remember those steering wheels? Sex tries to sell seatbelts, but stats and hefty fines finally do the trick.
Even long after she had no more little ones in the car, far past the time when buckling up became law – and then suddenly the absolute minimum expectation of parental responsibility – my mother had a reflexive connection between her right foot and hand. When her foot lunged from accelerator to brake pedal, her right hand made a karate-worthy swipe to restrain front-seated kiddies who were no longer there. Through the 1950s and most of the 1960s, this was her automotive child-protection toolkit, that and her lip-chewing, white-knucklingly slow driving. I didn’t get the habit of seatbelt use until I was driving myself. Can you imagine?
You’d have no trouble imagining if you were in China. Here, safety consciousness in cars is about at the mid-1960s level (so, by the way, are popular music, workplace equity, and pollution control). It’s becoming part of the conversation, I think, but most people don’t buckle up, and it is routine to see grandparents and well-coiffed young mummies holding babies on their laps in the front seat. There must be trendy, upper-middle-class parents who have infant and child car-seats, but I haven’t noticed one yet.