Am having trouble finding data on this. Every summer there’s a steady stream of stories about parents who inadvertently forget their kids in the car all day long, usually ending in tragedy due to high summer temperatures. Then fall comes, and the stories stop until next summer.
It seems that most of these stories result from parents mistakenly assuming that the other parent has the child, or that they have already dropped the kid off at daycare (but didn’t). Does this happen routinely throughout the rest of the year? Are there kids that get left in a car for 8 hours while Mom or Dad is at work, but the outside temperature is 40 degrees so the only result is a hungry, traumatized child? It seems like there must, but you never hear about this.
(N.B. I am looking for specific information about this query and not a debate about why parents who do this should rot in hell or whatever.)
Not exactly what you’re looking for, but I did find this *url=http://snarfd.com/2008/01/11/another-case-of-dad-leaves-kid-in-car-at-strip-club-in-the-middle-of-winter/ story about one such case.
Unfortunately, the story’s not conducive to GD prevention I must admit…
David Carr, in his new autobiography, talks about leaving his infant twin daughters for hours in the backseat of a car on a cold day while he got high. It’s excerpted here, a little more than halfway down.
Here there was a Mom who left her baby twins and an older child (maybe 8 or 9) in a car for about 6 hours while she was in the shops. It was late winter, the police were called and she was charged with child endangerment and had to appear in court. I guess the kids were mostly ok.
I remember a case a few years ago up here where a baby got left in a car all day in subfreezing weather and froze to death. From what I remember, the father said he never knew the baby was in the car. The mom usually dropped the kid off at daycare, but on that particular morning she had strapped the kid into the dad’s car for some reason, and told him he had to drop the kid that day. I believe the dad said it was one of those things where he just never heard her, or it didn’t register or whatever, and that he never had a clue the kid was in the car until he got done with work that evening.
It was scary to me because I could see something like that happening to us. I’m not the most alert person in the mornings, and my wife has to tell me everything five times. She’d make damn sure I knew about something like that, though.
I’ve read a couple of news reports locally about parents leaving kids in their car while they drink in bars. At least a couple have been charged with child endangerment; and this was in more agreeable weather conditions.
I’ve seen occasional stories about toddlers who were left in cars and froze to death.
However, I think you’re correct, in that there are many more stories in the media about babies dying in hot cars than in cold cars. I think the reason for this is because the majority of the continental United States doesn’t really get that cold in the winter, so a car left in a parking lot all day doesn’t really get that cold. It also absorbs infrared from the sun, which would tend to bring the inside temperature up.
And in the winter most babies, at least those not from totally dysfunctional families, tend to be bundled up, at least with a coat, if not a full-rig tiny baby parka, which would lead to additional survival time in a cold car. But there isn’t any survival clothing for a hot car.
So while the number of babies left in cars may be the same winter and summer, it’s more likely that they’ll die of heat in the summer than of cold in the winter, because most cars just don’t get that cold.
The baby might be very uncomfortable and unhappy, even a bit dehydrated from not having lunch, but it won’t usually freeze to death, absent unusually low temperatures. And babies that are left in cars but are only messy and unhappy when discovered don’t make the news.
If it does happen as you describe, you’d never hear about it. If you find your child unresponsive in your car, you call 911, EMTs show up, they get declared dead, news organizations pick it up. If you find your child hungry & traumatized, but otherwise healthy, you drive them home and give them all the candy they want, and hope no one ever finds out about your mistake.
Yeah, I think that’s probably the answer (i.e., it doesn’t make the news when someone leaves their kid in a car and no injuries result). Thanks for the input, everybody.
Locally, a young married couple bundled up their infant and went walking one clear, crisp winter afternoon. When they got home, or wherever they were walking to, they unbundled the child to find it had suffocated.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that there doesn’t seem to be any substitute for parental responsibility.
A little - my first reaction was a sinking feeling in my gut. But, then again, I have an infant daughter, so any thought of harm coming to a baby makes me hurt.
To add to this, most people have a understand what “freezing cold” feels like, while many are ignorant of “killing hot”: except in cars, it doesn’t really occur very often, and in many parts of the country it never gets “killing hot”–that’s why all the elderly died in Chicago in a heat stroke–they knew they were miserable, but it didn’t register as life-threatening danger.