Ian looks at Kid’s technology and how thing have changed over the past few years
December 2010.
KIDS’ TECHNOLOGY – The intransigent pushchair and its mates, the kiddie car seats!
When our kids were small, they rode up and down the length of the country in what were effectively cardboard boxes, bundled into the car between all the luggage. The oblong body of the pushchair was either placed in the oblong metal frame on four wheels or lifted out of the frame and stashed somewhere in the car. Calum once travelled from Birkenhead to Sussex, lying in his “box” on top of a chest of drawers, his nose only inches from the roof of the car. When a child became old enough, he graduated to a car seat. Ours was a square of canvas attached to a couple of metal hooks which hooked over the rear of the bench car seat. There were no restraining straps but the seat, when carried into the lunchtime cafe, doubled as a high chair when hooked over the back of a wooden chair. Once again, our kids travelled thousands of miles in this precarious arrangement, happily without incident. Later, when we had estate cars, it was not unusual to carry four kids in the back seat with another three sitting in the rear of the vehicle. These days, such behaviour would be totally unacceptable and, of course, extremely dangerous. The kids would be at risk and there would be so many exploding social workers vapourising by the roadside that they would become an endangered species (mmm).
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