An encounter with the nosy Nanny Staters

The start of my Thursday commute was pretty normal: a missing cell phone, a drained coffee mug in the center console and a 3-year-old melting down in the back seat.

Good thing he was strapped down tighter than Hannibal Lecter. Sometimes, that car seat protects me as much as him.

The parking lot of my son's preschool, however, was anything but normal. More than a dozen people in orange and yellow vests had the entrance staked out and sealed off.

A stern-looking woman quickly stepped in front of my car as I tried to park, her palm raised at windshield level. I hit the brakes. Buford T. Justice didn't wear sunglasses that big.

Another woman approached, and a tap at the window followed. I was trapped.

"Sir, does your child attend this preschool?"

No, I'm cruising for hot, hurried mommies trying to get to work. Of course he goes to this preschool.

"We're conducting car seat inspections."

And you are?

"How old is your child?" she demanded. Still no identification.

Mrs. Barney Fife finally acknowledged she was with Safe Kids Clark County, the local affiliate of a nonprofit dedicated to preventing injuries to children. She looked through the window at my son, saw that he was sufficiently restrained (and concerned) and handed me a coupon for a free cup of yogurt.

That will certainly taste a lot better than a heavy-handed road block.

After escaping the checkpoint, dropping off my boy and making it to the office, I called the Safe Kids office to find out why, exactly, their volunteers were putting working parents through the Stasi treatment.

Jo Preston, a supervisor who had been at my son's preschool earlier in the day, said the group received a grant to conduct a study on booster compliance as part of its efforts to toughen Nevada's child safety seat law. The current statute requires that children younger than 6 and weighing less than 60 pounds must sit in a child restraint system. Violators can face fines, community service and the suspension of their driver's license.

Preston said Safe Kids Clark County intends to lobby the Legislature to mandate safety seats until age 8 and 80 pounds. Preston added that, ideally, children should stay in booster seats until they are 4-foot-9 -- when they're generally 10 or 11 years old -- and should ride in the back seat until they're 13.

By and large, my generation has turned 180 degrees on safety, from wrestling in the back of station wagons as children to spending untold sums of money on protective devices we somehow survived without.

But today's cars are different. My parents' vehicles were suitable for combat in Iraq. The airbags in current models can do more damage to a child than the fender bender itself.

Preston, a law enforcement retiree, said she's always motivated -- and haunted -- by an accident she responded to in which a 10-year-old girl was decapitated by a front-seat airbag.

It wasn't the first tragic mistake by a parent, and goodness knows it won't be the last -- even if we pass new, tougher laws intended to spare children from any harm whatsoever.

There are those who hold that no amount of inconvenience, no cost and no level of intrusion is too much to save one child. Like so many other interests -- whether it's animal welfare, health care or taxes -- their policy goals are incremental. Once you get that first law on the books, there's no getting rid of it, and its scope grows over time.

That's why, should Safe Kids succeed in persuading lawmakers to adopt the age 8/80-pound car seat standard, it won't be long before the group (or another like it) is back in Carson City asking for a 10/100 touchstone. Already, Nevada lawmakers have considered imposing mandatory training in the installation of child safety seats.

But because some parents won't comply with whatever benchmark is on the books, all parents must be treated as suspects. The bluenose I had to deal with last week is a totally predictable, logical outgrowth of the Nanny State. We simply can't be fully trusted to keep our children safe, no matter how many times we contort ourselves into Cirque du Soleil-style positions to get those car seats strapped down correctly.

After all, if having any child safety seat law were enough, Safe Kids wouldn't need to swarm a preschool parking lot in the first place, would it?

In Las Vegas of all places, where so many kids are at risk and so many moms and dads don't care, there must be more effective ways to help children than to harass parents who pay to keep their little ones under close, caring watch (See last week's column, "Single moms, boyfriends and dead kids").

Preston said Safe Kids volunteers are told to identify themselves first, to be polite and to not step in front of cars. The irony of a purported safety advocate getting run over in a parking lot was not lost on her.

There are a lot of fine, well-intentioned people behind Safe Kids. But so many parents complained about Thursday's shakedown that my son's preschool director said Safe Kids wouldn't be invited back.

That doesn't mean people like Miss Sunshine are going away anytime soon.

Glenn Cook (gcook@reviewjournal.com) is a Review-Journal editorial writer.