Every summer, there’s a spate of stories about an idiot who wanders away leaving their child to broil in the blazing temperatures that a closed car can reach in the sun.
How can these morons do that?
I have a more nuanced reaction now to these tragedies after reading this story in last Sunday’s Washington Post.
It’s a long article, but I urge you to read it completely through.
I did a couple of days ago. I almost cried.
I am pathologically absent-minded, I can see myself doing something like that. I am glad I haven’t had an outside job since I became pregnant. So far so good, plus my kid is in the “doesn’t shut up stage”, so the chances are vanishingly small now.
I’m so glad you brought this up. that article has been haunting me all week. (I read it online last Thursday.) I was always soooo hard on these folks. When the Miles Harrison story first came out, all I could think was, “He remembered his LAUNDRY?!?”
Now I realize they are describing me. Sleep deprived, over stressed, constantly trying to track multiple variables.
I’ve made a rule that I never get out of the truck without putting my hand in the babyseat. My hope is that it will become as automatic as removing the seatbelt or taking out the key.
I’ve been having trouble sleeping ever since I read it. My daughter pulls on her hair when she’s stressed. 
I read that last week and it was a very difficult thing to read. I think that with the right combination of stress, distractions, change of routine, etc. that many of us are closer than we like to think to being in that situation.
One of the things that struck me were the differences in the charges filed across jurisdictions.
I couldn’t even read the entire story.
I’d like to believe I could never do such a thing… then again the people in the article surely felt the same way. You get on “auto pilot” and sometimes do things without thinking consciously about them, and later on don’t explicitly remember doing them (or not doing them). Hell, just yesterday I was driving my daughter (sitting in the front seat) and another girl (sitting in the back seat directly behind me) home from a girl scout event. About 15 minutes in the direction of home, the other girl was leaning to the side, where I could not see her in the rearview mirror, and suddenly I COULDN’T REMEMBER HER GETTING IN THE CAR.
She had, as it turned out, and her lack of immediate response to my questioning was because she’d fallen asleep… but I had a bad moment there thinking I’d stranded her 25 miles from home.
I did a thread a while back linked to a story so similar to this I’m wondering if this is a reprinted story. I have sto search for it.
I am so absent-minded even during my best times - and as per one comment in the article on p. 5 from the professor, I did forget my cell phone this morning. It really clicked for me when someone explained the mindset when you’re confusing what you did today with memories of previous days, and interruptions in your usual routine happen, and your brain would say “baby’s at daycare, whew! - I don’t have to worry about him until it’s pickup time.”
I don’t have real sympathy for those cases where they lock their kids in a hot car intentionally, to go shopping or gambling or whatever without having to deal with them. But this - this, I could see me doing, and I don’t even have kids or plans to have any.
These stories are always heartbreakers. Since I know I have the kind of mind that is routine-based and easily forgets things when I go “off-script”, I always used to put my briefcase in the back seat right next to the carseat when I had an infant I was bringing to daycare. So I had to open the back door to get it, and worst case, I’d get into the office and realize I don’t have it, leading to a trip back to the car. Never happened, but I was still thankful once the girls were all old enough to announce themselves and ask why the hell I wasn’t dropping them off.
No kidding. As I read that article, I kept thinking how good it was to have a kid old enough to ask you where you’re going and old enough to climb out of the carset and unlock the door of the car himself. Thank God I never had to learn how those parents felt, because the other thought I had as I read that was that I would literally been unable to live with myself. I would have eaten a bullet, or maybe something more subtle to make sure my wife got the insurance money. But I honestly don’t know how you go on living after that. I wouldn’t have had the strength.
Christ, what a depressing thread.
I read the entire article. I then wiped away my tears and sent it to both Hallgirls–Hallgirl1 who doubts that she will ever have kids, and Hallgirl2 who will be coming next month for a four week visit with NewBaby.
Thanks for linking to the article though. It was difficult to read, but I’m glad I read it.
And I think I love my nieces and my god-daughter just a little bit more today.
You can say that again. I made it through about one half of one of the five pages before I had to stop. Hats off to anyone with a toddler who was able to make it through the whole thing.
Damn.
I have no children and I already have tears in my eyes, on page 2. The guy who was trying to snatch the gun from the cop really got to me.
…
Jesus now I have read through the whole article. It does open one’s eyes to the people that would do this.
I’m not sure why changing the whole car is the right thing. I wonder if they can’t do something similar to an iPod. Can we “plug in” the car seat, somehow, to the cigarette lighter? So when you walk away without unhooking it, it sounds an alarm? Plus the cord is right there. It seems maybe too simple.
I shouldn’t have read that in a public place.
Finished it. It doesn’t get any easier to read, that’s for certain.
What I came to say.
The part about the poor baby who pulled her hair out was the hardest for me to read. It’s just one of those things you can’t bring yourself to think about. I’m absent-minded too and if we ever have a child I’m going to have to do SOMETHING to remind myself that Baby’s in the car. How many times have I gotten to work and thought to myself “Wow…I can’t remember driving here this morning…”?
I can’t imagine that the one couple will take her up on the offer to carry a child for them to adopt. It would just be too painful.
This article was linked from metafilter last week. I found it pretty unsettling, particularly the poor bastard that turned off his car alarm a couple of times when the motion sensor set it off, and he didn’t see anyone messing with it. I can’t begin to imagine how that must run around in his head.
I read that a few days ago. I have an almost-seven month old, and it was brutal to read.
If reading it gave you a better understanding of how it could happen to you, as it did for me, don’t read the comments. They bring stupid and mean to a whole new level.
Several gadgets to help people remember that their kid is in the car seat were proposed on the online discussion of this article on washingtonpost.com. The problem with such a solution seems to be that companies are worried about liability if their gadget turned out not to be 100% effective.
This was a suggestion made by several people in the online discussion.
Another suggestion was to hang your office and house keys on the car seat (obviously, they would have to be on a separate key ring from your car keys). That way, you have to look back at the car seat to get your keys, and if you forget, you’d remember when you couldn’t get into your office or house.
Yet another suggestion was to keep a large brightly colored stuffed animal in the car seat when it was not occupied by the baby. The idea is that when you take the stuffed animal out of the car seat, you put it in the front seat and you notice it’s there.