Forgetting an infant in a car

[corkboard]

@chela

I think this type of tragedy happens so often because people are used to leaving kids in cars seats for that quick dash into the store, or leave them in the car sleeping in the garage, or leave them in the car seat to sleep for a nap in the house.

I don’t want this to be moved to GD but I think you’re way, way off base here. The article was clear about the things that led up to the incidents it describes, and in none of them was there a suggestion that any of the parents were “used to leaving kids in car seats” to run into a store.

My wife and I have two young kids. We’ve always had a strict policy that when we’re out and about together, at least one of us had to have a hand on the stroller at all times; as they got older at least one of us had to have our eyes on them, and as they got older still, our eyes on one of them while the other child was being watched by the other adult. They’re old enough now that we’re slowly starting to lengthen the invisible leash we have on them, but they still have to be within eyesight. We have never intentionally left them sleeping in a car while we ran into a store.

When our second child was still an infant, my wife went to the grocery store as she does every Sunday afternoon. The store was literally a one minute drive from the house, and she only drove because she couldn’t carry all of the groceries back if she had walked. She took the infant, which was unusual because they always stayed home with me, but our older daughter was invited across the street for a playdate and I was in the middle of a renovation project at our house, so my wife took the baby.

In the minute it took to drive from our house to the store, she forgot the baby was back there. Ten minutes inside the store, she turned down an aisle lined with diapers and wipes, and froze as panic overwhelmed her. Seconds later she was running through the store, pushing past the elderly slowly meandering their carts down the aisle, burst out the doors and raced across the parking lot.

Fortunately it was a cool fall day. She couldn’t see into the minivan as she approached it due to the tinted glass, but when she was within range she was hitting the ‘door open’ button on the remote. It was open before she got to it and even though she heard the baby crying, she wasn’t satisfied until she had undone the buckles and was holding her to her chest. She sobbed there in the parking lot for ten minutes before she had regained enough composure to go back into the store.

Never before that day, or since, have we ever dreamed of leaving our children in the car without us, whether in a store parking lot, our own driveway or garage, or any other place. It is unthinkable.

[The_Weird_One]

@Labrador_Deceiver

Not really. These stories stick out because they are so terrible, but if we tried to implement a safety feature in every car for every possible scenario, they’d be rather expensive devices.

I don’t think they would have to be expensive. Cars already have a feature that sounds an alert when the engine is turned on and the driver’s seat belt isn’t fastened, so I don’t think it would be difficult or expensive to also sound an alert if the engine is turned off and a rear passenger seat belt remains fastened. I’m guessing the liability issue is a greater impediment than the expense, and that’s a hard one to solve.

[Mr.Moto]

The author of the piece, Gene Weingarten, usually does very light humor pieces. I was reading the article - and then read in his regular column that he never combs his hair because he doesn’t want to look vain.

All of you who had trouble reading it - well, I had trouble too, and I wonder how Weingarten managed to write the damn thing. He’ll be haunted for life.

[Mr.Moto]

@The_Weird_One

…so I don’t think it would be difficult or expensive to also sound an alert if the engine is turned off and a rear passenger seat belt remains fastened. I’m guessing the liability issue is a greater impediment than the expense, and that’s a hard one to solve.

This might be a technical quibble, but the seat belts aren’t used to hold my kids’ car seats in.

LATCH system.

[muldoonthief]

@PatriotGrrrl

Many new cars already have extra devices for children’s safety - switches to turn off the passenger side airbag, and special attachment points for car seats. People are apparently willing to pay for those.

The attachment points for car seats were relatively cheap (they’re just bent metal bars bolted to the seat or the frame), and it still took Congress passing a law to get them into all cars. And the passenger airbag was a different scenario - manufacturers were getting hit with lawsuits because the airbags were injuring/killing people. They put the swtches in to avoid such suits. They aren’t getting hit with suits due to the baby issue.

@The_Weird_One

I don’t think they would have to be expensive. Cars already have a feature that sounds an alert when the engine is turned on and the driver’s seat belt isn’t fastened, so I don’t think it would be difficult or expensive to also sound an alert if the engine is turned off and a rear passenger seat belt remains fastened. I’m guessing the liability issue is a greater impediment than the expense, and that’s a hard one to solve.

Wouldn’t work. With infants, you generally install the car seat and leave it there. Even the carseats you see people carrying their newborns around in usually have a separate base you install and leave there, and the seat snaps into the base. Carseats have to be TIGHT to work right - installing one isn’t a 10 second affair. Many police stations will install them for free because it takes some weight and upper body strength to get it really secure. By the time the kid is old enough to be using a regular seatbelt, they’re old enough to say “Dad, where are you going?” and get out of the car themselves.

[The_Weird_One]

@Mr. Moto

This might be a technical quibble, but the seat belts aren’t used to hold my kids’ car seats in.

@muldoonthief

Wouldn’t work. With infants, you generally install the car seat and leave it there. Even the carseats you see people carrying their newborns around in usually have a separate base you install and leave there, and the seat snaps into the base.

Well shoot, I feel a bit of a fool. That’s what I get for proposing solutions without a full understanding of the problem. :o

[lisacurl]

@chela

You know the one Mom who is an ex GI, I have sympathy for her son but she sounds like a real tool. Because she says it should not be a criminal offense and rather it is the responsibility of the car manufacturers to create a safety device so people won’t accidentally forget their babies. Also that she had to go get her self artificially inseminated while her husband was away in the service. :rolleyes:

Did you read the entire article?

“People say I’m a strong woman,” Balfour says, “but I’m not. It’s just that when I grieve, I grieve alone . . .”

The pacifier pops out of Braiden’s mouth. Balfour rinses it, pops it back in.

" . . . because deep down I feel I don’t have the right to grieve in front of others."

Balfour says she has carefully crafted the face she shows the world.

“I would like to disappear, to move someplace where no one knows who I am and what I did. I would do that in a heartbeat, but I can’t. I have to say my name. I’m the lady who killed her child, and I have to be that lady because I promised Bryce.”

The promise, she says, came as she held her son’s body in the hospital. “I kissed him for the last time, and I told him how sorry I was, and I said I would do everything in my power to make sure this will never happen to another child.”

Balfour has done this in a way suited to her personality; she has become a modern, maternal version of the Ancient Mariner, from time to time brazenly bellying up to strangers in places such as Sam’s Club and starting a conversation about children, so she can tell them what she did to one of hers. An in-your-face cautionary tale.

Unlike most parents to whom this has happened, Balfour will talk to the media, anytime. She works with Kids and Cars, telling her story repeatedly. Her point is always consistent, always resolute, always tinged with a little anger, always a little self-serving, sometimes a bit abrasive: This can happen to anyone. This is a mistake, not a crime, and should not be prosecuted. Cars need safety devices to prevent this. She seldom seems in doubt or in particular anguish. No one sees her cry.

“The truth is,” she says, "the pain never gets less. It’s never dulled. I just put it away for a while, until I’m in private. "

That woman is carrying a cross, striving to make her son’s death ultimately mean something, while carrying on her life. Good god, I’d love to have half the resilency she has. What an amazing person.

[Labrador_Deceiver]

Just to note, this really doesn’t happen “so often”. 20 times a year in the entire US could probably be described as rare.

[gigi]

@tygre

The thing that kept coming to my mind is “why didn’t the daycares call the parents?”

That “perfect storm” story towards the end was the worst for that…the phone rang in her purse and she didn’t hear it, she returned the call but got the answering machine, etc., etc.
I found the adoptive parents one the hardest for me–to finally have a baby of your own, giving him a much better life than he had in Russian, and then this.

[lisacurl]

@Mr.Moto

All of you who had trouble reading it - well, I had trouble too, and I wonder how Weingarten managed to write the damn thing. He’ll be haunted for life.

Weingarten had an emotional connection to the subject:

As it happens, I went into this story with an overwhelming empathy for the parents whose inattention led to the deaths of their children. I believed it could happen to anyone, and I believe that because it almost happened to me. Twenty-five years ago, I almost killed my daughter.

In the early 1980s I was living in Miami, working as an editor for the Miami Herald. I got to work by car, driving down Biscayne Boulevard, then hanging a left at the Herald building. This routine seldom varied; when it did, it was when I had morning daughter duty, meaning that instead of turning left, I turned right, got on a highway, and drove a few more miles to the daycare center.

One day I turned left, made another left, as customary, and pulled into the Miami Herald parking lot. As I searched for a space, from the back seat, Molly said something. She was almost three. Until that moment, I’d had no memory at all that she was in that car.

I can’t recall if, like many of the parents in my article, I was particularly stressed that morning, or mentally lost in some problem from work. I know there was no distracting cellphone conversation, because cellphones hadn’t been invented. What I retain of that moment is the indelible memory of staring slack-jawed at the little girl in the backseat, and feeling a powerful rush of physical nausea. This was Miami in the summer. Molly would not have survived fifteen minutes in that car.
I sat there breathing heavily, fighting for self-control. I probably forced a smile and said something cheerful and dad-like. And then, as though nothing at all had happened, I left the parking lot and headed for the highway. No harm done! Just the start of an ordinary day!

You may have a question. I’ll answer it simply. No, something like this does not go away. It haunts. Six years after that day, I wrote a play. It was about a man who had who had accidentally caused grievous injury to someone else; there was a backstory, about a baby left to die in a car.

When the news broke last summer about the death of Chase Harrison, I knew I had to write this story, whether I really wanted to or not. Like actors, writers know that genuine emotion is a valuable asset to draw on, not one that you lightly discard. If this article seemed to be presented with more restraint than some of my other magazine cover stories, it is probably because this was the end result of a writer fighting for a sense of control.

One more thing, before we get to some of your questions. I did not tell my wife about that moment in the parking lot, not for years, not until half a year ago when I began working on this story and needed to explain why it was keeping me awake nights. And I didn’t tell Molly about it until just a couple of months ago; oddly, I found that 25 years after the day no harm was done, I couldn’t look her in the eye.

Washington Post Magazine: Fatal Distraction -- Kids, Cars and Hyperthermia

[Anaamika]

I didn’t say it earlier, but I don’t want to have to pay extra for a device permanently attached to my car for something that happens 15-20 times a year and that will never ever happen to me because I am never ever going to have any children! Airbags, seatbelts, they have all been proven to prevent thousands and thousands of deaths, and if that were the case I would definitely think we should revisit the issue.

Until then, I would much prefer some kind of plug in device to hook up directly to the car seat. But I find it really sad and telling that this will notbe implemented because people are worrying about the liability. That says a lot about our sue-happy culture, IMO. There doesn’t seem to be a good way out of this. But why do they say carseats should be behind the driver? That seems a recipe for disaster - parent can’t see kid.

[lisacurl]

Because that is the safest place for the child to be in the event of a car crash, which happens much more often than this sort of incident.

[TruCelt]

I think the obvious solution is to put the burden not on the auto manufactuerers, but on the manufacturers of the infant safety seats. It would be a very easy thing to have a weight sensor in the seat, attached to an alarm which could go on your keychain. If the weight sensor is activated, and the keychain alarm moves more than 100 feet from it, the alarm sounds. . .

Of course, the burden is ALREADY on the parents. I’m very glad that I read this article, I would have said it couldn’t possibly happen to me. Now I am thinking through and instituting habits to ensure that it doesn’t.

As for the daycare calling, my daughters class has three teachers and 12-15 students, some of whom don’t come in every day, or only for half days. Mulitply that times the number of classrooms, and older partial day students, I really don’t see how they could manage.

If my daughter died I would want to go with her. If it was my fault, I’d have to.

Re: the lady who used the car as daycare - while I can relate to the desperation, there’s no excuse for accepting that solution. It was criminal negligence at a minimum. And the addicts who put their drug/gambling/etc. above the safety of their children need to be relieved of their kids, Gam Over. Those kids deserve better.

[gigi]

@lisacurl

Because that is the safest place for the child to be in the event of a car crash, which happens much more often than this sort of incident.

Why is it safer than behind the passenger seat?

[ENugent]

@gigi

Why is it safer than behind the passenger seat?

Behind the driver’s seat is supposed to be slightly safer than behind the passenger seat, because in a crash situation, drivers tend to reflexively steer to get their own bodies away from the impact. If the baby is closer to the driver, he gets some of the benefit of this.

But the middle of the back seat is safer than on either side for most cars.

ETA: This article is going to give me nightmares for a long time.

[Marienee]

I think it does not invariably lead to death, but I think this happens more often than people realize. I certainly never noticed a child in a car in all my life, until one of my clients (who was also a pediatrician) told me a tale of her son climbing into the minivan one day before she left, then falling alseep in the back. She never knew he was there until he popped up and had he not awakened he surely could have died, as this was Atlanta, Georgia.

After that I paid attention to kids in cars in warm weather. Four times I have said to parents that I thought they forgot something (two were on cell phones). Three were slack jawed in shock and ran back to their cars in a panic. One was cross and said he was coming right back.

I am sort of embarrassed to confess to having asked him whether he thought he would be back before the police got there and showing him my cell phone. Then he was really cross. But he did go get his kid so it was cool.

[chela]

@lisacurl

Did you read the entire article?

That woman is carrying a cross, striving to make her son’s death ultimately mean something, while carrying on her life. Good god, I’d love to have half the resilency she has. What an amazing person.

Yes she is carrying a cross, and her message should be heard.

@corkboard

I don’t want this to be moved to GD but I think you’re way, way off base here. The article was clear about the things that led up to the incidents it describes, and in none of them was there a suggestion that any of the parents were “used to leaving kids in car seats” to run into a store.

My wife and I have two young kids. We’ve always had a strict policy that when we’re out and about together, at least one of us had to have a hand on the stroller at all times; as they got older at least one of us had to have our eyes on them, and as they got older still, our eyes on one of them while the other child was being watched by the other adult. They’re old enough now that we’re slowly starting to lengthen the invisible leash we have on them, but they still have to be within eyesight. We have never intentionally left them sleeping in a car while we ran into a store.

When our second child was still an infant, my wife went to the grocery store as she does every Sunday afternoon. The store was literally a one minute drive from the house, and she only drove because she couldn’t carry all of the groceries back if she had walked. She took the infant, which was unusual because they always stayed home with me, but our older daughter was invited across the street for a playdate and I was in the middle of a renovation project at our house, so my wife took the baby.

In the minute it took to drive from our house to the store, she forgot the baby was back there. Ten minutes inside the store, she turned down an aisle lined with diapers and wipes, and froze as panic overwhelmed her. Seconds later she was running through the store, pushing past the elderly slowly meandering their carts down the aisle, burst out the doors and raced across the parking lot.

Fortunately it was a cool fall day. She couldn’t see into the minivan as she approached it due to the tinted glass, but when she was within range she was hitting the ‘door open’ button on the remote. It was open before she got to it and even though she heard the baby crying, she wasn’t satisfied until she had undone the buckles and was holding her to her chest. She sobbed there in the parking lot for ten minutes before she had regained enough composure to go back into the store.

Never before that day, or since, have we ever dreamed of leaving our children in the car without us, whether in a store parking lot, our own driveway or garage, or any other place. It is unthinkable.

I agree it is unthinkable and I’m not suggesting there is a history of neglect on the parents part.

@The_Weird_One

What’s wrong with making car manufacturers install a device to remind someone if they leave their child in the car? There are several of these incidents that make the news every year, so there is clearly a need there. And why do you disparage her for getting artificially inseminated with her husband’s sperm when he was too far away to provide it in person?

Did you read the article? It spends a great deal of time explaining exactly how loving, doting parents can get distracted and stressed in such a way that their instincts override their conscious mind and they truly believe that they have already left their child in safe hands.

Yes I did read the article. I do not believe a device will cure the distracted stressed and forgetful parent.

But he’s too far away to provide her sperm in person? Whatever that means, her sex life is none of my business, I wish she had kept it that way.

[PatriotGrrrl]

@chela

Yes I did read the article.

But he’s too far away to provide her sperm in person? Whatever that means, her sex life is none of my business, I wish she had kept it that way.

You did not read the whole article. (Or maybe you don’t understand how human reproduction works?)

He’s working in Iraq. When you’re working overseas, you don’t get to come home to the US very often. Some people are not very fertile, and would need to have sex at just the right time in order to conceive.

And it’s relevant to the story because it shows that they love kids so much that they would go to some trouble to have another one.

[corkboard]

@chela

<snip> I agree it is unthinkable and I’m not suggesting there is a history of neglect on the parents part.

It sounds like that’s exactly what you were suggesting:

@chela

I think this type of tragedy happens so often because people are used to leaving kids in cars seats for that quick dash into the store, or leave them in the car sleeping in the garage, or leave them in the car seat to sleep for a nap in the house.

[Ferret_Herder]

@PatriotGrrrl

And it’s relevant to the story because it shows that they love kids so much that they would go to some trouble to have another one.

I think this is the most relevant reason. The first father mentioned in the article was accused by some readers, around the time of his trial, of not ever having wanted children and that this was his chosen way to “fix” that situation. I’m sure the others also faced similar sideline commentary on their intent, their psyche, their “motivation.” It perhaps wasn’t the clearest in the context, but showing that these parents really, really wanted and loved their children is important.