It’s 15-20 times a year that a child dies, but I think it’d be interesting to know how many near-misses there are a year. How many people here have admitted that it almost happened to them? How many kids are left accidentally as their parent walks away and then remembers? How many parents DO get the call from the babysitter/daycare and run to their car? I don’t know what the solution is, but I think the numbers underestimate the problem.
No. Are you implying that a quick dash into the store while leaving a child in the car is neglect? Or leaving a sleeping child in the infant car carrier in the house or in the garage is neglect? I’m not.
I am saying that it is often considered convenient to leave a sleeping child in a car seat rather than disturb them for a quick dash into the store or to transfer to him to a cot. When one gets used to such a convenience I can see how it may factor into the tragedy of forgetting them in a parking lot at work for a day.
I don’t. If we’re talking about implementing a safety device in order to save lives, then the death statistics are the most relevant. A lot of the people who have almost forgotten a child wouldn’t have been helped by the hypothetical device.
Absolutely it is. It is leaving a child unattended in a public place. What if he/she woke up without you knowing, how frightened would they be? What if someone hit the gas instead of the brake and crashed into your car? Even at home, if you got sick or passed out, how long might it be before anyone thought to look there for the child?
An infant is worth about $45,000 on the black market in the US, and is generally sold to folks who are not just looking for a child to love.
Would you leave $45,000 cash on the seat of the car while you “run into the shop for a moment?”. Is your child not a million times more valuable to you?
Unthinkable, I wouldn’t do it, ever. For any reason.
That’s one reason I’ve never let my daughter sleep in the car alone. Not even to run into 7-11 and buy some nachos. If I don’t feel like bringing her in, then I don’t go. I’m FAR too absent minded to chance getting into a routine of leaving the car without taking her out of her seat. Hell, I sat in the car in front of my house for two hours once cause she was sleeping and I didn’t want to wake her.
While I would never leave my child in the car unattended, I have no problem with a child in a car seat sitting on the floor of one’s house. I think that’s what s/he meant by the second example.
Where did you find that information?
A quick dash into the store with the kid in the car is a total 100% no-no these days. Leaving a sleeping child in the car seat in the house is, IMHO, totally OK. It’s just another piece of furniture, and the kid is as safe as if he were in his bouncy seat, or crib.
However, none of these tragic scenarios bears any resemblance to these (right or wrong) uses of a car seat. These tragedies are when the parent believes the kid is safe and where he should be, when the kid is actually in danger. It has nothing to do with the terrible idea of leaving the kid in the car seat while you run an errand. It has everything to do with people being busy, and needing to let other people care for the child while they are spending hours working or doing some other task. Making one mistake, thinking the child is with the other care giver when he isn’t, is enough to cause a tragedy.
I don’t recall where I first read it, but just google “Black Market Babies” if you’d like to see more info. Actually, the price seems to be up to $50,000 now.
If you don’t know where you found the info, then how do you know that now the price is up to $50,000? I just did the Google search you suggested and didn’t turn up anything indicating the current sale price for babies on the black market.
Did you use the Black Market Google? Cause the normal Google won’t give you any results.
The former site (black - market - babies.com) was a hoax site. I believe that is what TruCelt is referring to.
Yep, absolutely, at least where I live.
Nope, not at all. There were times when I would haul out my beach chair and read a book in my own driveway rather than wake up one of my boys by taking him out of the car.
Leaving a child in the car while you are not in it or next to it? Out of visual range? Yes, I would call it negligent.
As a former child who somehow survived a completely scatter brained parent who left her many, many times, many, many places…
I have the utmost sympathy for these parents. And absolutely none for the parent who do not restrain their children.
I can’t imagine they can’t get something marketed that addresses this. We got an alarm for my daughter bed (which we refer to as the “dead baby alarm” that was sensitive enough to notice when they stop breathing. It is my default baby gift for new parents. I could never understand people who say they would know if their child stopped breathing. Uh, what is the sound of nothing? I will say it worked, because it was triggered twice for real and no, she wasn’t breathing. Later, it became useful to tell us when she had crawled out of her crib. Of course, by then, she was smart enough to go turn it off. Damn kid.
Anyway, what I’m saying is that I completely agree that it can happen to anyone. And the stuffed animal in the seat is a good idea, btw.
Keep 15 feet of twine in the car. Tie one end to the infant’s car seat and the other to one’s wrist.
A phone is a device, program it to text/call/sound an alarm as soon as you arrive. Wear a tracking bracelet and keep the other on the infant seat, it shocks you if you wander to far? Think you need a device to avoid tragic mishaps, program yourself to look in the backseat? :dubious:
Nobody thinks they need a device to prevent tragic mishaps. That’s the point. I don’t understand your :dubious: smiley.
Based on the stories that these parents tell, of being distracted and on auto-pilot, and the number of them who were fielding phone calls on their way into the office getting the phone out is the last thing a parent should do with a kid in the backseat. It would reduce the number of accidents, too.
There is nothing in the world so important that people need to have phone conversations with work when they’re on their way to work, unless you’re the president of your nation or perhaps an open heart surgeon talking someone through a complicated life-saving procedure. In the car is not the place for a phone conversation.
When my group had smallish kids, we would all meet on Thursdays at the local gymnastics place. The kids got to play on cool equipment for an hour while the Mom’s got to chat uninterrupted.
We were/are all middle class, suburban housewife types- some of whom work or are/were temporarily not working while the kids were little. Our group is mostly nurses and teachers with a smattering of secretaries, real estate agents, etc. Normal, average, intelligent, educated moms.
After gymnastics, it was our custom to all head out to one of our houses for a couple of hours. We didn’t have a formal, rotating schedule or anything- whomever had the cleanest house or the most peanut butter sandwich stuff would usually volunteer. Whoever it was, we usually allowed them a 5 or 10 minute headstart in case they had any quick tidying up they wanted to do before the horde descended.
This day, Sue volunteered, so she headed on out first.
The rest of us soon arrived and were quickly involved in herding kids or making sandwiches.
Soon, Sue’s husband came in. He asked “Where is darling young son?” (Their darling daughter was present and accounted for). I said, “I think I saw him run through here with another kid a few minutes ago” so he went off to locate the boy…
And found him in his carseat in the driveway.
The boy was red and hot and crying so he got dunked into the bathub very quickly and the nurses in the group gave him the once over. After his bath and some hydration, he was fine and ready to play.
And all of us who had walked past or near the car to get to Sue’s house learned that this is something that could happen to anyone- even one of “us”.
Perhaps parents don’t. Engineers do. When a piece of industrial machinery is being worked on, such that it would be dangerous for the worker if someone turned the machine on, they put alockout on it. This not just a reminder, it is literally a hasp on the switch with a padlock, or a locked device around the electrical plug.
But that’s to protect adult workers…