I’ve got a toddler who’s almost three, and a baby not far behind. One of the first words my eldest picked up was car. This was encouraged by our maternal child health nurse as a nice, simple first word after mum and dad. A staple of picture books is also a shiny red car.

It makes me wonder. Why is car one of the first words we teach our kids?

Suprisingly to me given they are a 20th century invention, the word goes way back: Latin carrus meant cart or wagon. When motor cars appeared, English dropped the extra bits and kept car. Somehow it lucked into one of the best words possible in English - three letters, a single syllable, simple phonemes, with a hard starting consonant making it really easy to pronounce.

By comparison:

• bus is pretty good except ending in s makes it slightly tougher for kids,
• the end of bike is a tougher phenome, and
• train has a starting cluster of consonants which makes it a touch harder still.

Car basically won the linguistic lottery.

Despite it’s privileged placement, socialising kids into car culture from their first words comes at a cost. I’m an avid fan of public transport and micromobility (e.g. bikes) but when I hear my kids say car I don’t blame them. As I showed above it is a great word to learn for development. I do wish though average picture books showed more bikes and trams, more walking, more safe streets and fewer cars.

Unless you are privileged enough to have visited safe streets found in large parts of Europe and Asia, young kids riding on the street without parents might be a complete unknown and basically negligent. Making this work however is of enormous benefit. Car-centricity robs children of autonomy - you literally need to be an adult to legally drive a car. Giving some more freedom with bikes allows for exploration, healthy living and development of risk awareness - but this can’t safely be done with most of our unsafe street prioritising cars.

Cars are the number one cause of death for kids between one and fourteen and it shows no sign of going down. This is a policy choice - other countries like Norway and Sweden have implemented policies to eliminate these avoidable deaths.

Words aren’t neutral. I genuinely believe giving car such a privileged place in our language facilitated the privileged role of car culture in our cities. What if the books they see first showed bike or tram instead? Or of playing in the middle of a street? Maybe we’d realise just how much we are stealing from our kids by dominating the landscape with cars we’d inject less of their childhood with the vehicles.

At least I can try and do that for my two.