The carpool: a staple of modern parenting?

With three kids who need to get to soccer, lacrosse, football, cheer and swim team — not to mention school — Allison Stevenson says her eight-seater minivan is crucial for carpooling.

“I always have extra children in my car. I couldn’t function with a smaller car,” says Stevenson, 37, of Greer, S.C., who bought her Honda Odyssey in 2007.

Stevenson, who has 6- and 8-year-old daughters and a 10-year-old son, shares a morning carpool to school with a neighbor and swaps rides with other parents after school.

“They have lots of children involved in lots of activities, so we depend on each other to get everybody to where they need to be,” says Stevenson, adding that most of her neighbors also have vehicles with the important-for-carpooling third row of seats.

Sure, carpooling has been around for decades. Kids got carted around in the big station wagons of the ’70s and early ’80s, then the minivans of the ’ 90s and, most recently, the SUV. But the carpool has become an important piece of the parenting puzzle for some parents of heavily scheduled kids.

“Unfortunately, it’s imperative these days that your child is extremely well-rounded,” says Stevenson, who believes after-school activities can impart lessons in dedication and teamwork that are important later in life. “There is pressure for your children to do a thousand different things.”

Many parents also see carpooling as a way to save money, time, and wear and tear in a time of higher gas prices and a shaky economy.

Kara Corridan, health editor of Parents magazine, says carpooling may be more common now because more women have re-entered the workforce; fewer children walk to school; and there are more extracurricular activities, and sports being offered at younger ages. Without sharing the driving, parents say they couldn’t do all they want for their kids.

“For some parents, it’s vital,” says Corridan, whose own family began helping another with rides after the mother went back to work.

With more seven-seat (or larger) vehicles on the market today than there were 10 years ago, more families are now driving big cars, says TrueCar.com analyst Jesse Toprak. TrueCar.com found that eight of the 10 most popular cars bought by drivers ages 28 to 45 in 2009 and 2010 had at least seven seats.

“The main buyers of the vehicles are the parents with school-age children, which clearly, at that age group, carpooling becomes a factor,” Toprak says.

In Folsom, Calif., Lori Barudoni has been part of eight carpools over the last 13 years, and says they gave her the flexibility to send her children to a mix of public and private schools. She began carpooling when her oldest child was in preschool and she was driving a five-seat car. She quickly realized the carpool math: With more seats, she’d be able to carpool with more families and reduce her own driving.

“After that, when I went to purchase my next car, I said, `It’s got to be a 7-sweater,”’ Barudoni, 48, recalls of her minivan purchase about a decade ago.

While the gas for a bigger vehicle may cost more, the carpools have saved her time and money. “My gas bill actually goes down with the larger vehicle because I can carry more kids, which means more families share the burden of driving,” she says.

The number of seats car buyers seek is typically nonnegotiable, said Rob Hardy, consumer preference product manager for Edmunds.com. “There are certain things people will trade off, like price vs. luxury or speed vs. fuel economy, but the number of seats — there’s no trade-off,” he says.

Hardy’s own family bade farewell to a five-seater and said hello to a minivan a year after getting kicked out of a carpool that grew too large for his car. “Everyone except us had a minivan so we were booted,” he said.

While workplace carpooling has dropped markedly since 1980, several experts said kids’ carpools may be on the rise, although there are no statistics. Raymond De Young, a professor of environmental psychology and planning at the University of Michigan who has studied workplace carpooling, says it’s not just the economy that has more parents thinking about carpooling.

Families might be carpooling more in part to live a “green” lifestyle and be environmentally conscious role models for their children, and they’re more familiar with and open to the concept of carpooling. And he noted that parents drive more because fewer kids walk or bike on their own.

Naturally, there’s guilt if parents can’t participate fully because they have a smaller car. Corridan suggests that smaller-car parents offer to reciprocate another way, such as minding a child after school. “Sometimes there’s an element of bartering,” she said.

With all the benefits of carpooling — which include making the ride a little more fun for the kids — there are also downsides. Although parents are thankful for their carpooling comrades, “there’s a lot of negative feelings that come up because there’s a lot of opportunities to interact with parents who might do things differently,” Corridan said.

Gone are the days when kids were allowed to pile into the way back of the station wagon for a carefree, unbelted ride.

Today, there’s the parent who plays music with inappropriate lyrics, the child who misbehaves, and the mom who’s running late or texts behind the wheel, Corridan said. Some parents say they’ve heard of kids being left in the car alone or riding without a seat belt.

“We advise you to have deal breakers — something you can’t budge on, like anything that jeopardizes the child’s safety,” Corridan says.

There’s also the danger of competitive carpooling: In Roslyn, N.Y., mom Barbara Adler cites the social pressures. Some parents, she says, fill their vehicles — sometimes over capacity — with kids they want their children to be seen with, regardless of how far away they live.

“It is beyond a hot topic in my neighborhood,” said Adler, 50, who has boys ages 12, 14 and 16 who play tennis and basketball. Carpools are “talked about. They’re criticized, They are joked about. They are a source of worry and concern. There are multiple layers of issues that are triggered by the word `carpool.’ If you’re in one? If you’re not? Who’s in your carpool? That’s a standard question.”

For Stevenson, things are simpler. She feels grateful for her neighbors who take her kids to activities.

“To have people that are so close both in proximity and mindset that I would blindly hand them my children, I really couldn’t do it otherwise,” she says.