Medicalizing irresponsibility: a term as ridiculous as "affluenza"

The BBQ Pit
1

A tragic story about forgetting a baby in a hot car: Mother suffered 'forgotten baby syndrome', death inquest told - BBC News - sadly more common than before, although that could just be the media reporting more of these stories than before.

I’m not sure how believable the first part is, but I suppose it’s possible. Unfortunately, the psychologist defending the parent used the term “forgotten baby syndrome” to describe what had happened.

I wasn’t aware that being sleep-deprived and stresses causes “forgotten baby syndrome”. Even if that causes a severe memory deficit, it’s not going to specifically cause you to forget your baby without causing you to forget other things too.

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Well, it probably does happen more often in the last three decades than ever before, for several reasons: one is dual income parents each with their own car, another is dual income families who drop kids at daycare. I had two working parents, but my mother stayed home with me for two years before resuming her Ph.D program, and then pursuing her research/publishing (later teaching) career, and my daycare was my aunt. When my brother was born, one of my grandmothers had retired, and so moved in with us for a couple of months, the it was summer, then in the fall, my brother went with me to my aunt’s with pumped breastmilk, but by then he was eating some food as well.

Moreover, it was the 1980s that saw required car seats, and the 90s that saw the really strict rules governing them, like the carseat being in the back. Before air bags, people put them in the front.

So while I don’t know whether medicalizing the phenomenon is warranted or not, it is an artifact of modern life.

I’m not surprised that someone sleep-deprived is more prone to it. Now whether being sleep-deprived is the deprived person’s fault, like being drunk is definitely the fault of the drunk person, or whether it is ever an organic disorder, as it sometimes is in people with primary insomnia, maybe that really is a question for a jury.

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I dunno, we all have brain farts. I know that when my routine is changed up of done similar things. I HAVE taken my kid to work when I had her on a day that I wouldn’t normally. However, a small car and a short drive to work (so she didn’t fall asleep in the backseat) and the fact that I do/did routinely bring her to work anyways prevented me from forgetting she was back there. But it sure as shit can happen.
Ask a parent that’s been divorced for more than 5 or 6 years how many times they started to leave work at 2:30 to pick up their kid from school only to realize, wait, we switched days today.
Being in a routine for that long is hard to break and, like I said, if you have a long enough commute that your baby falls asleep on the way to work, I can see how this can happen. Also, think about the millions of kids and the millions of parents driving back and forth everyday. To work, to home, to the store. There’s lots of chances for accidents.

Yeah, it sucks that this person lost a baby, but if it was truly an accident because she has a shitty memory or a had a brain fart, then that’s all it was, an accident.

Of course, having said that I really don’t like the idea of there being a syndrome for it. For two reasons. First of all, there are going to be people that will use that as a way to get rid of their kids. Whether they go so far as to kill them or just leave them somewhere that someone will find them, either way, they’ll claim ‘forgotten baby syndrome’ and be child free at last. Yes, I think people will do that.
The other reason is that, the article states that forgetting your baby is as easy as forgetting to mail a letter. If that’s the case, then it doesn’t need it’s own special label. You have a bad short term memory, period. Otherwise you need a label for each thing you forget. Personally, I should be diagnosed with ‘forget what I need to buy as soon as I walk in to the grocery store’ and ‘forget to bring my gloves in the house, now they’re really cold in the morning’ and ‘forget to get gas before work now I really need to get it after work’. Yes, a few times in 11 years I’ve brought my kid to work (always ended with laughs, though, when I walk in with her), but I don’t need to be diagnosed with ‘forgotten baby syndrome’. (But if something tragic did happen, maybe I would, and maybe it would be further backed my coworkers telling the jury that I did sometimes walk into work with her when I was supposed to be taking her to daycare/school etc).

Anyways, hopefully that all make sense, I try not to ramble at the internet too much early in the morning.
I think the TLDR of this is that people make mistakes and that’s all this is. As far as giving it a name, it’s just to help get her acquitted.

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If there’s not already a punk band called “Hot Car Babies,” I call dibs on the name.

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If one of the tracks on your first, self-titled album, isn’t “Forgotten Baby Syndrome,” then you suck and your band sucks.

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I’m lost as to how either “irresponsibility” or “affluenza” is relevant to the OP. This just seems another case of someone blinding himself to the reality that yes this kind of tragedy can happen to anyone.

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I would like to know exactly how sleep deprived she was. I am finding it difficult to believe someone would be so stressed and sleep deprived they mistakenly thought they had dropped their child at daycare. I can understand maybe being sleep deprived and finally getting some rest and dreaming the child had been dropped off, only to wake up to the baby crying in his crib and that causing a few moments of disorientation. Was the mother taking a sleep aid or some other medication? That would make more sense to me although I still have a hard time with it.

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Threads on this topic have gotten quite heated in the past…

It might be worth reading the “Fatal Distraction” article from the Washington Post. It gives some insight into the mechanisms that allow parents to “forget.”

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If I am reading the OP correctly, the issue being decried is the propensity to label an event as being evidence of an identifiable “syndrome”. Setting aside the specifics of this story being about leaving a baby in a car, I find that this technique has been in use for a long time. ISTM it is used by defense attorneys to get their clients off, by redirecting the argument away from the perpetrator and separating the act from responsibility. Recall the “Twinkie” defense when Harvey Milk and George Moscone were killed in San Francisco? So, it’s really all about defense attorneys doing whatever they can to get a client off.

10

Personally, I think if someone’s so messed up/unable to cope/psychotic that they would kill or abandon their baby to get rid of them, maybe a good idea would be to, well, provide a safe alternative for the kid who would otherwise, at best, be brought up by someone who wishes them dead.

Sure, not a ideal solution, but it’s not an ideal problem.

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There’s already ways to do that. You can leave it with a relative, a neighbor, the other parent. You could, I assume, turn them over to Child Protective Services. You’ve always, so far as I’ve known, been able to leave them at the door of a fire station and take off into the night (or just hand them over, no questions asked). I’d be willing to bet you can do that at a church/convent or a hospital as well.

Suffice to say, there are and have always been options available, yet people continue to do horrible things to get out of being a parent.

Someone I know has made her life out of adopting kids. I believe she’s adopted (in addition to her own) 5 kids. All special needs, all given up at birth because off drug issues where the mothers didn’t want them. The last one was a special kind of messed up. She had already told the mother she would take the kid, she got the call as soon as the baby was born, but she suffocated it, on purpose, just to seal the deal. I don’t remember all the details, but IIRC, she wanted to make sure the baby would have problems to make sure this person, that adopted special needs kids, would take this one. This was all while she’s standing there saying she’ll take the baby, you don’t have to make it worse.

So, yeah, people will do messed up things to not have to raise a baby.

But having said all that, if you’re going to kill your kid(s), I’m guessing that, short of someone seeing the signs and intervening, just being aware of the options isn’t going to stop you. I can’t imagine anyone not being aware of the foster/adoption system, so I’d guess that someone in this state of mind already has reasons (right or wrong) why they don’t want to go that route.

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We’ve had these threads before, they don’t end well simply because people are so convinced that this could not happen to them and so cannot understand how it can happen to others without it being malicious or reckless.

To those, I suggest you educate yourself. It can happen to anyone.

In its essence it is no different to looking everywhere for your glasses and realising you had them on your head all along, or completely missing your exit on the motorway because you were talking to your wife. If you’ve ever done anything like that then you are at risk from something more serious like leaving a baby in the car.

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Pulitzer prize winning article that is must reading for those who assume people who leave their babies in a hot car are monsters.

For the most part parents who do this aren’t unfeeling monsters who hate their kids, they are often good people who are distracted for a few minutes resulting in tragedy. I can easily see how lack of sleep and change of routine could lead to an increased chance of distraction.

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I’ve told this story before, and I’ll tell it again.

We once forgot to strap my son into his car seat. We put him in it when he was about 4 months old, drove about 2 miles, and got out at out destination to discover we never buckled the straps.

We were horrified of course, and lucky nothing happened. We even immediately made a new rule that one person carried him out, put him in the car, and strapped him in, because we knew the mistake happened from our “Hey, you do this-Hey you do this,” non system of getting ready to go places.

When I told my mother the story, she didn’t share my horror, because she remembered when people would lay their babies on the seats, or the floor of the seats, all the time, if they had to go someplace alone, and there was no one to hold the baby. I also remember my parents buying a 1972 vintage carseat for my brother, solely so no one would have to hold him on a long car trip to visit my grandparents.

Anyway, I never had to drop a kid of at daycare and then go to work, but I can see how this could happen.

I have no illusions. I would avail myself of any device to help prevent forgetting the baby-- alarms, door springs, anything. I’m a little bit of a paranoiac, but of all the times I went back to check the stove, there actually was one time I discovered I’d left it on. So, there you are.

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I think syndrome is a poor choice of terms. It implies that an incident is part of an ongoing problem. It appears to be the opposite; it’s a break in routine that appears to trigger people forgetting their child’s in the car.

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Has anybody developed some kind of alarm for this? Something like an bracelet that you can put on your baby that sends you an alarm when the temperature rises above a certain point. Or something in your car that detects that there’s a living body inside and the temperature is rising (which would save pets as well as babies).

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My now ex-wife and I did exactly the same thing when our daughter was just a few months old. Strapped her in, drove a few miles from one store to the next and found out she was just laying in the seat. The thing is, as we were bickering about who which one of us didn’t buckle her up, we realized that we didn’t even know who put her in the seat or if we brought the seat into the store with us or just took her. It’s easy to judge from the outside, but when you’re in the moment…I mean, I hate to compare leaving a kid in a hot care to forgetting to mail a letter, but when you’re on autopilot, it’s all pretty blurry. How many times have you lost your keys, spent 10 minutes looking for them, and it turned out they were in the ‘other’ pocket. The funny thing is, more often than not, you don’t remember putting them there, it just happened.

I agree, and as I said before, I worry that people will use it as an excuse for something or another. Even if it’s not as drastic as killing their kid, it’ll be something. If it happens one time, is it really a syndrome? If someone forgets their kid in their car so regularly that they need to be diagnosed with something, maybe then their parenting skills need to be looked at and/or monitored.

Regarding an alarm, yes, there are various alarms. Most of them, that I’ve seen, are set up in one way or another that when the vehicle is shut off, the alarm starts chirping and the driver needs to push a button, located near the child seat, to turn it off. They’re designed for day car vans and the button is put near the back of the van so the driver, each and every time, has to walk through the entire van and if some kid is asleep on the back bench, they’ll get seen.
They do make some kind of similar thing for regular cars. There’s also ‘hacks’, like tying a string from the kids shoe to the parent’s wrist so they remember. But, honestly, no one is going to do that more than once or twice.

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Yes – and in the Washington Post article previously linked to, one of the most tragic cases involved exactly that. The father silenced the alarm multiple times because he “knew” the child was not in the car.

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I wasn’t saying it couldn’t happen, I was saying I find it hard to believe. There are many things I know are possible but have a difficult time believing.

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Just skimming the article (so I may have missed it), he had a car alarm (like the annoying ones that go off all night) that was going off and when he looked at his car he didn’t see any one near it. That’s different than an alarm specifically to alert you to the presence of a child in the back seat or one that forces you to check your back seat each time you turn off your car.