Why has it become the case?

Answering that question requires asking the question: What business is it of the government – of other people with various titles – to decree such things? Do these other people own your children? Do they own you? They are implicitly asserting at least partial parental oversight authority.

Where did they get this authority?

Did you, the parent, give it to them? If you did not, how is it that these other people have come to wield it over you?

It is said – by some – that it is  "unsafe" for kids to be in cars without being in saaaaaaafety seats. And yet hundreds of millions of them – almost everyone who achieved adulthood before the early 1990s, before the government mandated child (almost teenager) ssssssssaaaaaaaafety seats for all – grew up not being strapped into them without suffering any injury at all.

Some did, of course. Some also tripped and fell. Others fell harder. Some drowned. A few also died from various things, some of them possibly avoidable.

So there is a degree of risk. As with everything in life. We all face risk every day, to varying degrees. That is not at issue. What is at issue is who gets to decide which risks – and to what degree – are acceptable.

There is a degree of risk that attends strapping a child into a  saaaaaaaaaaaaaaafety seat that is strapped into a subcompact car  . . . relative to one that is strapped into a full-size truck. The subcompact is not as "safe" to be in – hypothetically, if there is a crash – than being inside the full-size truck if it crashes.

Yet it is perfectly legal to drive a child around in an "unsafe" – relatively/hypothetically speaking – small car, so long as the child is strapped down.

But why should it be so?

According to the logic of the Safety Cult – full-size trucks ought to be mandatory, too. It is no less arbitrarily hysterical – or tyrannical – an idea than forcing child safety seats on all. Or forcing hundreds of millions of healthy people to wear a Face Diaper on the assertion of risk to a handful of hypothetical old and sick people ("granny" being abstract as well as her putative death a potential.)

The core tenet of the Safety Cult is that risk of any kind – as defined by them – is unacceptable and must be ameliorated, regardless of the imposition or the expense on us.