You don’t have to be stupid or incompetent to forget about a child in a vehicle. It can happen to anyone, especially in our high stress culture.
Any chance that the fathers could be attached via bolt-gun to the back of the head using an expanding bolt anchor with a one oz charge of C4?
Get more than 30 feet… Ka-Boom! 
They don’t forget that they have a child, they just forget that they have the child with them that day. The Washington Post article goes into how this happened for several different parents. It’s something like your wife usually takes the baby to daycare, but she can’t today, so you are taking the baby, and he’s quietly sleeping, and you’re thinking about the meeting you are having today with your annoying client, and it combines to a lot of things to where you forget that your baby was in our car.
It seems like there are a lot of different devices that work, but it would be a hard sell since most parents don’t think it could ever happen to them. But I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few more years it’s more integrated with car seats and cars and becomes more automatic. No system will be perfect and there would still be some deaths but the number would be cut down.
And really this is the nub of the reason the problem is so hard to solve.
A large segment of the populace believes that only dangerously incompetent parents would ever make this mistake. And that they themselves would never do so.
Another large segment understands that even if a large fraction of incidents are due to parents who suck at all of parenting, not just this one lapse, a still-significant fraction of events come from good parents having an off moment.
These two groups of spectators will demand opposite approaches to regulation, liability, criminal or civil sanctions for the statistically inevitable events, etc.
As such little or no progress will be made.
Finally, as jtur88 says, you’ve got to expect a few losses in a big game. Whether this problem rises to the level of one we should spend resources to fix is unproven at least to me. Could we save more lives by spending the same money, and the same social outrage, political capital, etc., on something completely different?
I know that I don’t know. But I do know that we’d be a better, more rational and safer society if we used that approach to social problem-solving.
There are two systems here, one is the system that buckles the infant car seat to the car (via LATCH or the car’s OEM seatbelts), and the other is the system that buckles the child to the infant car seat. When you remove your kid, you leave the seat buckled to the car, sure…but you don’t re-buckle the child’s harness after taking them out.
This doesn’t apply to booster seats that only utilize the OEM seatbelt, but when kids are old enough to use those, they’re in far less danger of dying in a hot car, since they can unbuckle themselves and open the door.
I can only agree with this. Yesterday, someone sent a fax to the police that said that bombs had planted in some schools in Prince Edward Island. As a result of this every school on the island, from kindergarten through university was shut down and searched. Of course, they found nothing. The fax did all the damage. The cost, not only for the search, but to parents scrambling to deal with their kids suddenly not in school, was enormous.
There is a downside to ignoring these threats. If done systematically, eventually a terrorist group will decide they have to actually plant a bomb or two and some kids will die. Probably fewer than in a mass shooting, but that’s the price of living and, occasionally, dying.
Please, please, when you have a moment, maybe not at your desk at work, unless you want your coworkers to see you a sobbing mess, read that Washington Post story. Here’s the link again. I ran across that story a few years ago before my son was born. Over here we have a thread from someone who got a call from work and forgot the trunk full of groceries. I’ve done that sort of thing before, and the idea that such a lapse could possibly happen to my son and to me terrified the holy shit out of me. I set up two mirrors in each car so that a glance up to the visor would show the reflection of his reflection in a mirror on the back seat headrest. Did that help? I don’t know. Maybe my awareness of the issue did. But even then, there were days…if I didn’t get the expected emails from the daycare’s logging system – cue a mild panic attack (“I’m sure I dropped him off today…didn’t I? Or was it my wife?”) One of those days I even ran out to look in my car. Routine is a powerful thing, and the way your brain just doesn’t even bother to try storing routine activities is just wretchedly terrifying. I would distinctly remember taking him to school…or am I remembering yesterday morning? Never has my human imperfection been so obvious to me. Being human sucks, bring on the cyber-implants already.
Now that he’s almost three, though, it’s a constant chorus of “what’s that? I see a bus! A truck! Two trucks! Three trucks! Another bus, two buses! A machine!” and in a parking lot “Find a space? Park the car. Want to get out. There’s a space! Park the car. Want to get down.” So that helps. But I still have the mirror on the visor, and can’t help but to watch him even when he sleeps, and repeatedly checking even the empty seat to make sure it’s still empty.
Dey do be? :eek: I didn’t knows me dat. Fighting ig’nance for the win.
Just curious, what year is it, for you?
It is often argued that forgetting a child is somehow a different class of phenomenon to forgetting something like a pile of groceries (or over here, other objects). It isn’t The outcomes are very different (and I would not dream of equating a child to some replaceable object), but the phenomenon of forgetting is pretty much the same.
We are fallible creatures - and our failures can have simple and trivial outcomes, or severe and horrible outcomes. But the severity of the the possible outcome does not automatically change whether we will or will not be fallible. You can trip and fall on a grassy knoll and you can trip and fall headlong down the stairs - one will not kill you and the other will - but the trip itself is the same kind of accident.
Who would buy one? ME! I’d buy one, you damned well better believe it. I have a two year old; I am absolutely terrified of leaving him in the car, because I know how easily it could happen. I’m not one to stick my head in the sand and tell myself stories about how it could never happen to me because I am such a good parent. I’ll take two, please.
The advice I find most helpful is to keep the diaper bag in the front seat, and your work things in the back.
I read that Washington Post article when my daughter was an infant, and I was terrified it would happen to me – and I don’t even own a car, making it not the most rational parenting fear that I had.
I’m surprised that the belief is that it wouldn’t sell. Baby stores are FULL of safety devices that people purchase regardless of their actual need. I received two baby monitors as gifts – and didn’t really use either because my daughter slept in my room for a long time, and even after, it was just as easy to hear her in her room even without the monitor. So I think they would sell, just like all the other stuff society deems you have to have when you have a baby. Getting people to use them, or to use them correctly, might well be a different story.
It’s good, but any routine like that can be disrupted - and it’s precisely that kind of disruption that causes the exact problem that is under discussion. If you have a brainfart and leave the diaper bag on the roof of the car, or just forget to pick it up when you leave the house, your aide-memoire is not there, you’re at risk of making a dangerous mistake.
If there is a solution to this problem, it needs to be fully automatic - it needs to work regardless of any action taken by the driver, not because of a specific action taken.
Firstly, to those happy to assign these errors to bad or incompetent parents, I’d just like to endorse everything that **Mangetout ** has said.
On a practical note, my run-of-the-mill car already has weight sensors and buckle indicators for the rear seats. In other words it already knows that there is a person on the seat and the status of the buckle.
I get an immediate visual indication if I set off without a rear-seat passenger being buckled in, it doesn’t take a technological leap to also include a warning about fastened buckles when leaving the car.
Perhaps it won’t lock unless all buckles are undone or you are required to give a positive feedback that the back seat has been checked.
Nobody would propose that every adult wear a helmet because even intelligent able-bodied respponsible people can fall on their heads. The statistical probability of an accident rises according to factors that are often in correlation with duh.
How many mothers do you know who have ever dropped their baby? Things like that happen with spectacular rarity, and with a high probability that the agent has a behavioral pattern of things going wrong.
Any mother who has dropped a baby is likely to have something wrong with her? Really?
I agree that sloppy chaotic people do relatively more sloppy chaotic things than do more careful and organized people.
But after that, what’s your point? Your post seems like a bald assertion inviting us to connect 4 more dots leading to some inescapable conclusion. But I don’t know what 4 dots or what inescapable conclusion you’re thinking of.
Care to enlighten us more plodding methodical types with your complete line of thinking? Perhaps with data on the relative frequency of sloppy chaotic people vs. careful organized people in the population at large and in the folks making these errors.
Well, shit. I never dropped him but I did smack his head into more than one door frame, and once I dropped a fork on him. Guess I got a behavioral pattern.
Oh man, who knew babies get taller? I smacked her head on our bedroom door frame several times before realizing that the issue was that her head was sticking out more because she was growing.