My mom used to leave me everywhere. She would drop me off at a store and tell me to go get milk or bread or something and that she would go and do another errend and come back and pick me up. I used to stand by the road, jumping and shouting and waving when she would just drive by on her way home. Reading this thread reminded me of how fractured my heart was everytime she did it.
It really hurt when I’d finally walk home and she would yell at me because the milk was warm or WHERE WERE YOU!
At least I survived being left in a car, but I have heard stories about that as well.
I can’t have kids, but I transport animals on at least a weekly basis. I’ve never forgotten that I have animals in the car or needing to be picked up somewhere.
Good thinking, but it won’t work. Infant car safety seats are designed to flip up and against the seat back in case of a crash. This protects the child from objects (missiles) flying around inside the car. Your bungee cord would prevent proper operation of the seat in a severe crash.
You could clip it to something beside the seat, but this also makes me nervous. It’s just one more step to forget=>forget the baby. Not finding the clip attached would trigger you to get out of the car and feel perfectly confident walking away. Much better to use some ruse that requries your checking the car seat even when the baby is not in it. I trained myself to look at the carseat at every stop light, and left anything I needed in it so that I never left the car without looking into the car seat.
Good idea! This might not work as well for male-types but if you got in the habit of putting your purse on the seat next to the carseat, or IN the carseat if it’s unoccupied, you would ALWAYS look at the seat before going off.
Not that this occurred to me when my kids were that age, mind you…
I remember once, stopped at a light preparatory to entering the Beltway, thinking in a blind panic that I FORGOT TO PUT THE CARSEAT IN THE CAR!!! Because I honestly didn’t remember having done so. A quick glance in the rearview mirror and I could plainly see the carseat clipped in place (baby was facing the rear so I couldn’t see him). I was obviously on autopilot when I put him in the car, just not mentally processing the action.
Not forgetting a kid, but: twice, when the kids were infants, I did some grocery shopping, left the groceries in the cart at the front of the store, went to get my car (so I could drive up and curb-load them)… and went on my way. Once was only for about 5 minutes, the other time I went off, had the car’s oil changed, etc… several hours when all was said and done. Whoops!
If it was an “add-on,” (and such products do, or did, exist) no one will buy them. You’re basically announcing to yourself and the world that you feel you’re such a shitty parent, you might leave your child in the car. No one thinks it will ever happen to them, so they won’t feel a need to buy it. Though it would make for an interesting commercial…
(cue black and white world) How many times has this happened to you? Run inside the store for a few items, and you forget the kid in the car! OH NO! Dead baby! Well, not anymore, now there’s Baby Alert!
Yeah, I’m not predicting high sales on that…
Ok, you say, make it a mandatory safety device, like airbags…wouldn’t fly. Again, because of the above, no one would want to pay for it, but the cost has to put somewhere. The auto lobby would fight tooth and nail if it was a federal legislation, because either they pay for it and take a hit on profit, or it bumps up all new car prices by $500-$1000 (or whatever it costs) and sales take a hit because, once again, no one will ever want to admit they cold forget their kid, so they’ll buy a used car, or last year’s model, that doesn’t have what they see as nothing but a “nuisance alarm.” To which I can see a point. I mean…if it’s just something like a weight sensor, how fucking annoying would it be when you just have some groceries or whatever in the back seat and it keeps going off?
Not to mention we’d all become desensitized to it, anyway. How many people still leave their lights on or their keys in the car, even though cars go “bing bing bing!” when you try to do that?
At the grocery store, I was sitting the the kiddie seat part of the grocery cart, mad as hell because my sister was in the main part of the cart pretending to be Benji locked in a cage and I wanted to play Benji too. Anyway, my mom evicted my sister from the grocery cart so she could put, y’know, groceries in there. Apparently, my sister responded with some epic tantrum, about being Benji, that lasted the duration of the shopping trip.
My mom unloaded the groceries onto the conveyor belt at the checkout, while my sister was still pitching her Benji-themed fit. My mother grabbed the grocery bags, and marched her rabid-Benji daughter out to the car. My sister was still pitching such a huge fit, my mom was afraid people would think she was being kidnapped. My mom’s really not cool when it comes to public embarrassment, so as soon as the groceries were stowed and seatbelts were belted, mom fled the scene.
Yeah, so I was still sitting in the shopping cart over by the checkout.
Second-hand info said that they made a few announcements over the PA, then wheeled me in to some office and gave me a popsicle. I don’t remember any of it. Somebody claiming to be my mom came and got me, and took me home. But I maintain that I may be the long-lost child of some really cool, wealthy people - like royalty or something! - and some day my real family will find me… Some day.
Someone submitted a camera phone shot of a ‘check for the baby’ sign to a “Parent Fails” website. Fortunately most of the responding posts were of a “this is not a fail” kind. If a little sign in someone else’s car makes some people judgmental, imagine the looks a parent might get at a store buying a “baby in car” reminder device.
No one believes they’ll forget, but incidents have happened, mostly involving changed routines, that have had terrible consequences. I won’t cast aspersions on anyone who tries methods to ensure they won’t make a horrible mistake someday.
Hey, does it count if a parent accidentally dumps you someplace? Ever have one of those days where if feels like a Wednesday, but it’s really Tuesday? My mom once dropped my sister and I off at our Saturday morning “Learn to Skate” program. Neither one of us had piped up and asked her why we were going to skating two days in a row because we were both really stupid children.
She didn’t get far before she figured it out though and came back to get us. She was pretty mad that we hadn’t said anything.
Not long, probably less than a week, after my wife went back to work from her maternity leave, I went to go pick her up from work, got in the car, got to the end of the street, and turned right back around, because I forgot my daughter.
She was sleeping at the time and probably didn’t even know I was gone.
So far (I say “so far” because we just had a baby, and now we’ve got another 18 years to pile up the screwups), the worst thing I’d done along these lines was this:
When my oldest daughter was about 18 months old, I was watching her while my wife was out. At the time we lived in a large apartment complex. I had to go down to my car to find something (I can’t recall now what it was, but at the time it was important - insurance papers, or a bank statement or something), and took her with me to the parking lot. I got in the passenger seat and started rifling through the glovebox, expecting to find whatever I was looking for pretty quickly.
I couldn’t find it after a couple minutes, and was getting pretty frustrated, when I heard a car horn, and instantly realized “Oh, wait, I had a baby I was supposed to be watching!”
My daughter was standing out in the middle of the parking lot, staring at a car’s bumper about 12 inches from her. She’d wandered off while I was looking, and I completely forgot about her. I felt like the worst parent in the world for about a week - 10 years and 3 more kids later, just to think about it gives me a twinge of guilt.
{{{{Flatlined}}}}