The 'baby hammock'? Child car safety in 1970 | RetroFocus
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ก.ย. 2024
- Just before the first Australian standard for child restraints in cars was introduced, Four Corners looked at some of the child seats on the market and investigated their safety claims.
This report by John Penlington aired on February 21, 1970.
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I was placed on top of a blanket in the passenger side footwell. My mother would even leave me there when she went into the shop. Sometimes I wonder how I'm still alive.
This doctor was definitely on the right track. Nice logical thinking and not falling for any of the marketing of the products. Good man.
Whoever invented that baby hammock is not very smart
My folks would put me and my brother in the boot if we made too much noise, so we deliberately made racket to get away from their cigarette smoke. Good times.
Hahaha
Lmao
Yes the good old days when you could go out and leave your front door unlocked
How Aussie
And my dog wandered far and wide and never bit anyone 🤔
"Commonest" I haven't heard that word in such a long time.
I remember rolling around in the back of the V8 fairlane while the old man drove at 100 mph on the dirt with a Southwark stubbie in one hand. The ‘good’ old days.
I love good ole days. Who knew they would best days
Back in the days when your doctor would light a durrie whilst giving you a diagnosis of lung cancer
He said at 4 years old it was safe for a child to sit on a cushion with an adult seatbelt ! Wow! We sure have come a long way now !
I think the doctor was on the right track! Most kids are out of baby car seats by age 4. The next step is a ‘booster seat’. The simpler models are essentially just a plastic cushion.
Yeah....for this time period!
In the 1990s we used adult seatbelts once kids were 4
That is a lot better than the other seats in this video!
He was saying that in the situation where parents were not willing to spend any extra money, that a cushion would suffice. It's basically a cheap precursor to a booster seat.
We should all be thankful we survived childhood... It was very dangerous to be a kid back then!
You look really young in your picture...
@@ericag5346 I was born in 84! 😄
@@bexfloo4511 haha that adds up, I was '86 😜
It’s interesting that they keep bringing up cost. I haven’t got money to burn but if ever there is a time to splurge, this is it.
Compare (1971) Ford's logic regarding the Ford Pinto. They decided to face liability claims resulting from burning cars over installing a simple bladder in the tank that would stop it from burning/ exploding after accidents. Simple fact- money trumps human lives. There are many shocking examples till this day.
a disturbing look at the old Four Corners opening
I love it, to be honest!
Only disturbing for people that are tripping on L.S.D
Reminds me of Play School.
You win the internet today 😂😂
Pre-computer graphics are groovy.
I remember laying down in the rear window looking at the stars at night whenever we went out somewhere. We never wore seatbelts back then. We moved all around the car. Climbing over seats in everything. Smh. We're people more careless or stupid back then?
Uneducated of the risks. We know better now, and the information is readily available.
More free 😉
I remember the same. My favorite times on long drives!
Love seeing these original segments. Nothing like a primary source I say. :)
Thank goodness for Four Corners. Established 1961 (when I was three) and still going strong now I am nearly sixty. Investigative Journalism at its best.
Why is that?
I agree, we need a proper 4 corners, proper unbiased and informative journalism, unfortunately, they are too aligned with the far left now......muppets
In the US, I can still remember people getting upset & yelling about their rights when child safety seats were made mandatory - in the late 80s , early 90s.
Baby "hammocks"? lol. Might as well just let the kid stand up in the front seat & bounce around freely.
I remember these seats with my younger siblings and cousins in the 60s and early 70s.
I find it particularly interesting that they were talking about keeping children rear facing. There's currently a lot of push for this even now, keeping a child rear facing to 3 years of age if possible, or at minimum 18 months of age. Great to see they were on the right track back then too.
except for that hammock/fishnet thing called a seat, but yeah sure, safe
@@m2heavyindustries378 The hammock was what they were warning against though.
This man was trying to warn people back then of the dangers for children being unrestrained in cars but I still see parents today riding their kids around without seat belts .
"claims to protect your upholstery, not the child" damn right, I don't want little Timmy pissing on my seats! damn it Timmy, your brains are dripping from the windscreen to the dashboard! that's the last time I have a child!
Some of the cold truths about how we didn't care about our children back then...
Now the most scary thing about what I see in public is more about the shopping centres... nobody does the speed limits and no parent holds their kids hands or keeps them close... nothing can go wrong I guess, especially with my car being 1058kg compared to your kid being 15kg
wow on the 1970s 4 corners intro.
8:17 that was me at approximately 4 years old just before child safety seats were introduced in Australia & seat belts weren't installed in every car.😕 As kids in the 70s we also sat in the parcel bay of the VW beetle. We would play in the rear of the station wagon while moving & we'd encourage our father to speed up going over the rises along a country road so that we would fly off the back seat of the FJ Holden & hit our heads on the roof.
To us, nothing was more fun than that feeling of butterflies in our stomachs as we lifted off the rear seat & flew in mid air for a second or two.
I think there's a lesson in that for everyone. Kids in the 60s & 70s knew no fear.🤓
It's a bloody miracle any of us are still here.😉
We would sit inside vw van on chairs.
@@trewqpoiutl9774 Hahaha, the time when there were very few rules & the cops just didn't care as long as you weren't causing a problem for everyone else.
In the United States, (back in the 70's) kids rode freely in the back of pickup truck beds all the time. Crazy that we thought that was acceptable or even allowed it at all. My parents had a station wagon with flip-open seats in the very back that were sideways. Again, total deathtraps!
@@jankypop-a-matic58 😆And yet, we lived to embrace the memories with fondness.
@@6ixConfessions Oh absolutely! Wouldn't trade it for the world! : )
This was great to see! It would have been amazing if they had kept in touch with the baby boy's family to see how well he recovered. Thanks for this.
I remember we had the one with the steering wheel and I have the memory of pretending I was driving
When I was 6 years old in the late ‘60s I sat in the back of a Ute with 4 other children as we drove down the highway for 3 hours to go camping.
We had no restraints, of course, and we were sitting on flannel sleeping bags that were unrolled, and covering the 4 rifles we were sitting on so they wouldn’t be too hard on our bums. Different times. We all survived. I like those days.
What about newborns ? In 87’ when I was born my mum strapped the bassinet across the backseat and hoped for the best
The Safe n Sound baby capsule came out in 1987, your family perhaps had you just as they were introduced. I was born 85 and same thing, bassinet in the back seat or on the floor.
Omg the accent is so amazing. Why dont we sound like this anymore? Its so spot on.
shabberto A lot of the time people didn't sound like this either. There was an accent for television/news readers. There was also an accent based on elocution and people, particularly people in the media were taught this accent. There is also another accent that's dying out called cultivated Australian in favour of the general accent we know today. Our accent has changed but newsreaders accents aren't a great yardstick for the general Aussie accent as they were designed to sound more professional/dignified.
Whenever I watch old movies o notice that we Americans used to talk different too. They talked more proper back then.
Evolution
Because our generation was too cool for school 🏫
@@ladybug-mv8tn that was the transatlantic accent. It was invented to communicate on the radio during the war, and of course actors would learn it too
I rolled out the door of our Charger and hit my head in the gutter. Being a kid in the 70's rocked!
Major Lexx was the Charger okay?
Yes, fortunately after I rolled out, the door slammed shut exiting the corner. Great car. The only time I didn't see a cigarette in my parents mouths was while driving in that beauty. Good times.
Rolling out the door was the ‘safety feature’ in the 70s wasn’t it? ✌🏼 Hey Charger.
@@msg6214 I rode a bicycle without a helmet or knee pads. I rode it fast. And barefoot. And I did wheelie's. And I crashed into trees on purpose to practice wrecking. Then I went and had rock fights and bottle rocket wars with my friends. And when we got older, none of us needed prozac, changed our gender, or sued K-mart because we found Santa Claus offensive. Which generation was really more dangerous to grow up in?
Kube Dog D. All of the above
The interior of that HK Holden looks so new!
Quite a cheery opening sequence on 4 Corners back in the day!
Safety has to start somewhere, this is before computer simulations, where only real testing has to occur which is expensive to a company.
My favorite place to ride was on the little shelf in the back window of the car. I spend many a happy ride there "late" nights driving home to our country house from a movie, (gazing at the stars and the lights of cars) in town ....
Love looking at these old clips.
These comments bring back memories.I remember playing in the floor pan
We found out what Dr Michael Henderson is up to these days! www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-01/the-baby-hammock-a-disturbing-look-at-child-car-safety-in-1970/10561962
“Just take the hooks and attach it to the back of your bucket seat” yeah.... about that.... in the event of a violent crash, that seat is going to come off that slippery vinyl/leather car seating and send your kid straight into the front or back seat, if not through the windshield.
I remember as a child, going on car trips, with 8 of us packed into an old Holden., ( no seatbelts), the car had air conditioning from the floor.( large rust holes in floor).
For $2-$3 wow
I can remember people putting a seat belt around a bassinet in the 70s and hoping for the best.
i was born in November 1983 and for my first 6 months, I was in a carry cot on the back seat of an Austin Maxi. When I hit 6 months, I was in one of those convertible car seats with a play tray which clipped on to the front, a flimsy thin foam covering over the seat which had wings like a winged armchair either side of my head but no arms. It was shaped like a giant inverted shovel, it had a frame on the bottom of the seat with two little arms extending halfway up the back of the seat and it had a 5-point parachute chest harness, so, bit between the legs, around both hips and over both shoulders with a round chest clip or whatever the bit on the stalk of a car seatbelt is called. When I was around 5 then, my mum didn't buy me the booster seat with the guides and no back, which is not recommended these days, but I went straight from the shovel seat to the adult back seat of the car, but with a slightly larger parachute harness which my Grandad installed in the original mark 1 1976 Ford Fiesta which was a family car, originally belonging to my Gran, but mum drove it because Gran has never really enjoyed driving. those cars didn't have any, child or adult restraints in the back seats, what so ever, so the afore-mentioned shovel seat was simply, pushed through the back of the seat with the little webbing strap there being the only thing which would have hopefully, stopped it in the event of a smash. I'm still alive to tell the tale today.
I was born in August of 1983 and have no clue What I sat in as a baby, lol
I was born in 85, and was in a bassinet in the backseat for first 5 months, then into a child car safety seat, they had introduced these thankfully well before I was born. Then the baby capsule was introduced in 1987. Australia really lead the way in child car safety. I was then put into the big foam booster seat with a harness at about 16 months old.
In the United States (back in the 70's), kids rode freely in the back of pickup truck beds all the time. Crazy that we thought that was acceptable or even allowed it at all. My parents had a station wagon with flip-open seats in the very back that faced sideways. Again, total deathtraps! 🤪
Why am I watching this?
What was with the child being the height of an adult? Haha
1970 was the year car seat belts were mandatory in Victoria.
looking at these old crash tests makes me feel like il keep my crumple zoned, plastic fantastic, fall apart in a fender bender new safe car over 1 of these old death traps
The Car Baby Hammock thumbnail totally got my attention.
Comment section is full of survivorship bias. Quite surprised how knowledgable the specialists were on this broadcast way back then.
Funny thing is we have returned to no tests being done and the 5 star rating is really 3
It should have been renamed the baby slingshot.
0:25 - A Simca Vedette crashing into a Renault...I wonder if this was from a French movie?
I wonder what that doctor wouuld say today if he were interviewed again.
How dangerous was the 1970
It was a head on between an FB and a Volksy!
Nah...that was a Simca Vedette and a Renault.
Wow, we have come a loonngg way since then. Jesus!
Many poor children could have survived crashes with this information especially in the 3rd world
someone should do an honest report on car seats today.
i remember my parents using a belt as a seatbelt when i was little.
My Mom used what looked like a tiny bed. It in the floor in the back seat in 1970
I solve all my problems with a hammock
In the1970s they had car seats for kids.
The ones the triplets were in seemed the best
If I didn't watch this, I wouldn't have believed it.
if this clip is anything to go by australians sounded alot more british back then than they do now.
Padded body suit. Problem solved.
What he doesn't bother to say about a child who simply just sits on the regular seat and is belted in is that the child isn't meant to fit in an adult seat belt and due to that the child could become decapitated by the seat belt.
was that a baby in there at 14:07???
I wouldn’t put a baby in a string hammock like that if it was stationary...
I like the old 4 corners intro
Isn't it interesting that NO ONE talks like ANYONE in this clip these days - with the exception of the yank :)
Why were they so insistent on elevation? LMBAO!
So THATS why we have a huge amount of regulatory standards now
Now we just give children ice
That intro is so british
A hopeful look forward at child car safety
No one has yet mentioned the inadvertent horror show at 9:50?! 'My name's Cindy, and I don't like you anymore'.
Whoops! I lost my head for a moment...
Ahh, pacific hwy Gore hill
WA gov wants to get rid of the law that requires pools to be fenced.
Seriously? What the hell...
yeah fuck the fence, you don't see them around the beach or council lakes. I have fences already, it means keep out, why do I need a fence within a fence?
What if someone has a pond or lake on their property. I can understand car seat laws but putting fences around pools? Too much regulation.
I agree with WA. Take down all pool fences, because walls don't work.
The people of the future think you baby hammock people are crazy.
This is why I'm glad I was born on the 21st century
@TitanSilver354 hopefully you make it to adulthood
@TitanSilver354 also enjoy dying in a world without all the medical advances we have now and one's coming with the next couple decades
Yeah me too
Interesting
What’s disturbing is aussies can’t drive to save themselves, still In 2018, if they drove correctly there would not be injuries or deaths on the scale we have.
i was born in 1970
Come for the video, stay for the comments!
At 3, I used to run around in our 2 seat panel van. Weeee!
The hammock....
So it's true when i heard that Australia is sooo wild that it turned Britishers into Aussies.. :
1:00 Brylcreem yikes 😂
Hahahahah
Geez we never had rear seatbelts as kids and we survived
smart man