By David Menzies

It's conventional wisdom - not to mention the law in most jurisdictions - that if you plan on hitting the road with a kid in the car, then Junior better be strapped into a child car seat.

Yet, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner appear to have compelling evidence suggesting that child car seats don't really do as much good as we've been led to believe.

Levitt and Dubner, authors of the recently-published Super Freakonomics, examined decades' worth of data and even conducted their own experiments to debunk the premise that child car seats are a safety panacea when it comes to collisions.

The duo examined data amassed by the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, a compilation of police reports from all fatal crashes in the United States since 1975. As the authors note in Super Freakonomics: "A quick look at the FARS data from nearly 30 years of crashes reveals a surprising result. For children two and older, the rate of death in crashes involving at least one fatality is almost identical for those riding in car seats and those wearing seat belts."

Indeed, Levitt and Dubner found that in certain types of crashes - rear-enders, for instance - car seats actually performed worse than seat belts.

Could it be the data is skewed by the number of child car seats that are improperly installed? Perhaps. But to address this valid concern, the authors decided to commission two crash tests: one with a three-year-old sized dummy in a child car seat versus an identical dummy in a lap and shoulder belt. The second test involved a comparison of a six-year-old sized dummy in a booster seat versus the same dummy in a lap and shoulder belt. (Of note, simply conducting these tests was problematic: almost every crash-test facility in the U.S. refused to partake in the experiment for fear of offending their biggest customer base - the manufacturers of child car seats.)

But after conducting the experiments, the authors had their smoking gun.

"The adult seat belts passed the crash test with flying colors. Based on the head- and chest-impact data, neither the children in the safety seats nor those in the seat belts would likely have been injured in this crash. So, how well did the old-fashioned seat belts work? They exceeded every requirement for how a child safety seat should perform."

Compelling food for thought for those parents thinking about investing more money into pricey devices that apparently aren't as safe as they're cracked up to be.