I don’t feel like I need to justify my personal opinions on what constitutes being a shitty parent to you. Suffice it to say, I’d rather be over aware than neglectful and forgetful.
This is why it’s taking longer than we thought.
Nothing like the righteous rage of the not-yet-a parent, telling all those who have been-there, done-that how it should be done. Best plans in the world never survive contact with the enemy…
The hell? All I’m saying is “don’t forget about your kid, especially when said kid is in your presence.” Is that not how it should be done?
I’m not feeling it.
From the story, it seems, he thought it was clear that the child was in the custody of her Aunt, and her Aunt thought it was clear that the child was in the custody of another girl’s parent. It really was just a misunderstanding. No cause for outrage that I can see.
You said they should be “100% certain” where the child is. Why do you think they were not? Remember that “100% certain” is not the same thing as “correct”.
-FrL-
From the article. File this thread under misplaced RO.
Of course that’s how it ideally should be done. But like most things, easier said than done, something you seem totally unwilling to acknowledge.
Atomicbadgerrace seems to be assuming that forgetting is something one has control over. I have had conversations with a few others who seem to make this assumption. This assumption seems clearly wrong to me, but I am prepared to admit there may be some sub-population of the human species which has the ability to exercise control over what it forgets and does not forget.
Of course, we all can, through mental exercise, acquire a general habit of forgetting-less-often-than-we-might. But that is not the same as to say that we can control what we forget and what we do not forget.
Something else we can all do is undertake a specific focussed activity which has the explicit purpose of minimizing the chance that we will forget some specific item of information. (Repeating a phone number over and over again until I have the chance to dial it, for example.) But again, this is not a way to control what I remember and forget, since it can only succeed in minimizing the chance of forgetting, not eliminating the possibility altogether. Furthermore, this kind of activity requires both the recognition that the activity is needed, and the absence of distracting factors which might confound the purpose of the activity. As to the first requirement, when it comes to remembering that your kid is in the back of the car, it is not generally the case that one, upon placing the kid in the car, thinks to one’s self “It is especially important that I not forget this,” because one does not generally expect to forget it. Regarding the second requirement, distracting factors abound in this world and when they distract us, it is a misfortune, and it is not generally our fault.
-FrL-
…ideally? This is not an unreasonable standard of behaviour!
…like most things? Most things are not easy, especially children!
…easier said than done? How hard is it to remember you have a child you are responsible for?
WTF? Why would anyone be willing to acknowledge such rhetoric? Throw in another cliche!
Stop making excuses for bad parenting! It seems there were several factors, all a result of irresponsibility, that led up to this event. This is a “miscommunication” that could have ended tragically and because it didn’t should not excuse the parents.
Anyone hedging the issue because you committed the same or similar mistakes were irresponsible and therefore bad parent. Acknowledge that, learn from it, and move on.
Honestly people… turn off the cellphone, turn off the TV and the laptop, turn down the radio, and interact with your kids. Everything else can wait! That way you won’t “forget” them and they won’t forget you! They grow up fast and you might miss it!
That’s the basis for good parenting.
NOBODY FORGOT THE KID!
This was a mistake. A miscommunication. Yes, it could have been a life-threatening one. It wasn’t. Leaving a cake in the oven too long can be life-threatening.
I’m a pretty harsh critic of other people’s parenting. But I can totally see how this could happen without anyone being particularly stupid or neglectful, and so do the police in the town where this happened: ““We have not reason to believe that it was anything other a lack of communication,” Lt. Draper said.”
Jeez, mon! If you want to be righteously outraged about shitty parenting, aren’t there half a dozen Brittney Spears threads to post in?
I’m a parent of two children, ages 6 & 8. While I have had plenty of “D’oh” moments in my time as a parent, I have never forgotten that I have a child with me in the car, at the store or anywhere else. I would not consider forgetting a child to be in the same category as my usual brain farts.
I do not believe that a majority of parents have forgotten their child.
And most people don’t forget their children in the back seats of cars. Which is great. But the fact is every parent behaves non-optimally some of the time. Some parents fuck up more often. Some parents fuck up to a greater degree. Some parents get lucky, and their relatively major fuck ups have no major consequences. Other parents get unlucky, and their relatively minor fuck ups end up having very major consequences.
I think the kind of RO that’s being thrown about should probably be reserved for parents who are intentionally evil or habitually negligent, and sympathy should be shown for people who make an occasional mistake with very unhappy consequences.
And I’m not hedging myself against some major parenting mistake in my past, because much like the apparently perfect atomicbadgerrace, I don’t have kids.
Frylock,
Your intelligence gives you nothing to hide your ignorance!
This is not an issue of whether you can remember your high school locker combination, it’s whether you can care and provide for a child. It cannot be learned by rote or mental gymnastics. For some it may be innate, maybe not for others.
When we fail to reduce or block distractions, it is not bad luck, although it may be fortunate that there are no consequences, but in all cases it is definitely our fault.
If you have a hard time remembering to feed your fish and they die, it is not misfortune, it is your fault, you are irresponsible, and you are a bad fish owner.
If you ask someone to feed your fish and they don’t, and the fish die, it is not misfortune, it is your fault and you are as irresponsible as them for selecting them to care for your fish, and you are a bad fish owner.
I’ve never forgotten my child in the car either. But I’ve zoned out on autopilot before, while driving my daughter to school. I was not ignoring her; we were talking (or better put, I was trying to get her to converse), but instead of heading towards her school, I pointed my car the way I went every other day of the week. Lovely girl that my daughter is, she neglected to point out to me I was going the wrong way.
She’s a high school sophomore.
Every morning, I work on autopilot. It throws me off when I have to do things differently in the morning. I can’t count the number of times I said to myself, “Self, make sure you do THIS before leaving” and when I leave 5 minutes later I’ve forgotten, because it isn’t part of the routine. So while it would be a tragedy if I was the guy who drove to work with his child in the car and forgot to remove her, it certainly wouldn’t be “murder” or anything remotely close to it. It is a far cry different from the parent who knowingly locks the child in a car in 90 degree heat while they run into the store “for just 30 seconds”.
(That reminds me, I have to drive my daughter to school in the morning again tomorrow. There goes another morning routine.)
To all of you who think it’s impossible to forget a child is in the car with you it’s not like forgetting a four year old chattering away in the back seat. It’s an infant in a rear facing car seat. You can’t even see the baby in the car. If you only have two seatbelts in the back the car seat could be buckled in behind the driver’s seat. It almost exclusively happens to the parent who isn’t used to dropping the child off . Combine that with the extreme exhaustion that comes with having an infant and I can totally understand how it could happen.
I find it a little odd that the aunts in the Chuckie Cheese incident didn’t say goodbye to each other, at which time they would have noticed the child wasn’t around. A child that age shouldn’t be out of sight in the restaurant either so there is some weird family dynamic going on that the aunts were in the same place not interacting at all.
If both aunts also had a lot of other children with them I can see it happening though. The more kids are around the easier it is for one to slip away and disappear. In my family we obsessively count children when we are doing things together and the kids keep changing their minds about who they are riding with. My husbands family, not so much. I wouldn’t leave my kids with the husband’s family when they were young but not everyone has a choice.
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I think the kind of RO that’s being thrown about should probably be reserved for parents who are intentionally evil or habitually negligent, and sympathy should be shown for people who make an occasional mistake with very unhappy consequences.
And I’m not hedging myself against some major parenting mistake in my past, because much like the apparently perfect atomicbadgerrace, I don’t have kids.
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I do not mean to belittle those who don’t have children but you cannot understand.
I did not believe it, until it happened to me, but being a parent changes your perspective.
If I can try to explain… good, caring parents can’t “forget” their children. They are in our hearts and on our minds constantly, from morning to night and even in our dreams.
Hence the RO… we refuse to accept these cases where “good” parents use the excuse of “forgetting” their kids since we know it is not possible.
Bullshit.
Obsessive parents, who have nothing going on in their own lives, are focused 24/7 on their children.
The rest of us, while not “forgetting” about our children, are busy juggling many priorities, including things like jobs that we have to go to in order to feed our little rugrats. And while having children should and does change one’s perspective, it does not mean that all likes, dislikes, hobbies, habits, etc. are gone and forgotten.
I love my kids (at least, when I don’t want to wring their necks). And while they are my most important responsibility, they are not my only responsibility, and yes, I do have thoughts during the day that are not of my children.
This tendency to scarequote “forget” is common amongst those I mentioned earlier who seem to think it is possible to control what one does and does not forget. This is actually further evidence for the possibility I am willing to admit: That there is a subsection of the human species which actually is able to control what they do and do not forget. For what would lead someone to assume that, when I forget something, I actually just “forgot” it? They would seem to have some ingrained suspicion of claims of “forgetfulness” and their status as prima facie excusing a wide range of apparent offenses. But why would someone have this kind of suspicion? Its hard to see why they would, since the phenomenon of uncontrolled, accidental forgetting of things is so widespread and by the very logic of the notion of forgetting is indeed excusing, prima facie, of a wide range of apparent offenses. But here is a theory as to why someone would be so suspicious of such claims in such contexts. Perhaps their suspicion derives from a more basic suspicion of the notion of “forgetting” in general–in other words, perhaps they don’t actually believe people forget things. Or at least, more plausibly, perhaps they don’t actually believe people forget things involuntarily. The know that the way the English Language works requires that forgetting can happen involuntarily, but they don’t believe Reality works this way. In frustration at this mismatch between the language they must use and the way they think reality works, and in anger at what they percieve as a widespread tendency to hide behind language by claiming to have involuntarily forgotten things, these people resort to placing “forget” in scare quotes, as a way to mark their suspicions about the whole business.
But why would someone believe there is this disconnect between language and reality? Why would they fail to believe that people can involuntarily forget things? That’s a hard one, but here’s another theory: They fail to believe it because they themselves are incapable of involuntarily forgetting things. They assume everyone else is just like them (very often a safe assumption about many issues in many contexts) and so assume forgetting is a completely voluntary matter for everyone. And when they encounter claims to the contrary, they can’t help but read these claims as dishonest, since the claims run so clearly counter to what is plainly evident to them (and what it is plainly evident to them that it is plainly evident to everyone)–that people in general (because they themselves) can control what they forget and do not forget.
Of course, it’s not necessary to theorize that there are people who actually can exercise this kind of control. To explain the anomalies I’ve mentioned, one need only theorize that there are people who think (falsely) that they themselves are able infallibly to control what they do and do not forget.
But that would just be crazy.
-FrL-
My own post contained a subtle jab in the first paragraph, so I can not complain against jabs in general. (This is the pit, after all.) But the above was, as a jab, far too silly and overblown to be taken seriously. (But, again, this is the pit after all.)
I’ll take the rest of your post seriously, though.
The innateness issue I touched on in my own post. Some people may just be better at remembering things than others. The best argument I can make along the lines your suggesting here is that people who know themselves to be forgetful should, for that reason, refrain from having children. This seems severe, but even if I allow it, outrage against parents who forget still does not become an appropriate response. For people who are not forgetful still forget. And people who are forgetful may justifiably not know the extent of their forgetfulness.
Remembering my locker combination and remembering that my child is in the car are indeed different in an important way. (This was touched on in one of the later paragraphs of my last post.) When I am given my locker combination, the occasion is marked by the necessity to remember. I know I am being given information, difficult to remember, which I must take pains to remember. But when I put my kid in the back of the car, the occasion is marked by no such necessity. I’m just routinely putting him where he is supposed to be on this occasion. Nothing hard to rememebr about that. So there is no reason to take pains to try to remember where I put the kid. No reason to think I need to constantly remind myself about this fact.
And I almost certainly won’t forget. For it’s a relatively important, easy to remember fact. But since I am making no special effort to remember, it is possible for distractions to cause me to forget in some cases. The main kind of distraction I have in mind is just the distraction of routine–if it is not routine for me to have the kid back there, then the force of routine may well take over and cause me to forget he’s there. The answer to this is to try to make it part of one’s routine to ask “is my kid in the back of the car?” (For example, I have made it part of my routine to put my hands in my pocket and grasp my car keys before closing any doors on my car. This prevents me from locking the keys in.) This would work quite well–but it would also be an immense, difficult, and even complicated task to insert this little subroutine into all the routines of one’s day–especially since most of us have countless routines we are not even aware of and which are therefore not available to us for conscious editing like this.
It is easy to forget things, even important things, and one reason it is easy to forget is that forgetting often (I think usually) happens because of things not within one’s direct control. One’s attention is directed by whatever action one is presently engaging in. The great majority of actions are governed by routines or habits. One is not in direct control of these routines–one is only in indirect control. I can only control my entrance into a routine, or edit the nature of a routine, if the routine itself is brought to my attention for some reason. During the execution of a routine, this will only happen on certain kinds of occasions in which the routine somehow goes wrong (and this is brought to my attention), or it is brought to my attention that the routine is not applicable. Outside the execution of a routine, the routine can be brought to my attention in other ways. (My insertion of “put hands in pocket, grasp keys,” was enacted during such an episode–my wife locked her keys in yet again, I wondered to myself how likely I was to do such a thing, and this naturally brought my “closing the car doors” routine to my attention, and I was then able to consciously edit it. Of course, that was not enough–practice at the routine was also necessary.)
My control over routines (and I would be very suprised if this was not true of everyone, but who knows) is in this way somewhat passive and opportunistic. And forgetting like the kind we’re talking about happens exactly when there is a routine that takes attention away from the information forgotten. It follows that my control over forgetting–even, in some cases, forgetting of important information–is somewhat passive and can only be adjusted when certain opportunities arise.
As should be clear from my previous post, I mean to refer to the fact that not all distractions can be reduced or blocked.
-FrL-
These are false sentences. But I can not think of a way to argue the point. I can only point to counterexamples–but you have said elsewhere in your post that you refuse to countenance the possibility that there are counterexamples. Is there a way for the discussion to continue?
-FrL-