All right. I do not recognize myself in any part of that story.
All those are highly likely to require the agreement of other parties. Yes, even the last one, unless you think that a person who gets home to find their child gone and their spouse saying “oh, I just figured I was sick of the little brat and left them at the hospital” will answer “ah, ok, that’s all right then.”
Re. the people saying “well, I didn’t ever do that; those are evidently bad parents”:
When they only had me, my parents thought their friends and relatives were very bad at disciplining their children about bedtime. Why, all they had to do was say “you may go to bed now” and I’d teleport inside my jammies, say my prayers and be under the covers as quickly as the laws of physics allow it.
Then my brother Ed was born, and their smug convinction about the superiority of their childrearing techniques merely was reinforced.
Have I ever mentioned that my youngest brother, Jay, is not a morning person and combines it with being bad at changing tasks? My parents weren’t better at discipline than my uncles and our friends: they’d just hit the luck of having two children who were very much morning people and for whom “you may go to bed” wasn’t an order, it was delightful permission to go do what our bodies were already screaming to go do.
Like my parents before Jay’s arrival, I suspect you guys are merely lacking information.
Uh, yes it IS that. I don’t know where my sunglasses are RIGHT NOW! And I haven’t known where they were for at least a week. But you know what? I DO know where my children are, because they are, in fact, too important to forget. At least they are too important to ME to forget.
I’m cutting out the rest of your story, but the one important thing that you seemed to exclude there was:
In between all of those distractions (boss calling, thinking about shopping, blah blah) not ONCE did you add “Check to make sure the baby was okay”
You know, like responsible parents would do.
Take a call from the boss? After you hang up, make sure the baby is okay. Been driving for a few minutes? Check to make sure baby is okay. Parked the car at the grocery store? Check to make sure the baby is okay. And on and on and on.
I don’t think the people who left there child in the car are horrible people. They just let other things in their life overcome the importance of their child. Maybe it was only that one time, who knows. And yes, I did read that article, several times. But those parents are responsible for their baby’s death. It doesn’t matter if they only forgot that one time. Or were having a busy day. They are still responsible because they let some other things distract them from their child. Something I have never done. And THAT’S how I can say I would never leave my children in a hot car because I “forgot” they were in there.
Well there we go folks, and we all thought infallibility was restricted to the pontiff.
What kind of question is that? Do you think ALL people are the same at parenting? You think there are not good parents and bad parents? If you believe there are good parents and bad parents, then SOME people must be better parents then others. I would say that a parent who DIDN’T leave their child to die in a hot car is a better parent than someone who did.
If that is arrogance, then so be it.
And I’m cutting out all the rest of your post because it merely re-hashes your misconceptions from previous posts.
I think it is well understood that all the time we are consciously aware of the need to check on the baby, we do just that. In the example I gave you can assume that during most of the drive you are checking on the baby.
However, when multiple distractions collide the conscious awareness of that baby can be pushed from your mind. Especially when having the baby in that situation is unusual and you are carrying out a task that you often do on semi-autopilot. Once that happens there is a risk that you cannot simply remind yourself to “check to make sure that the baby was OK” because you are now mentally operating in a different mode.
Feel free to distrust me as a random dude on the internet if you like but both you and Hilarity N. Suze show a classic fallacy of “argument from personal incredulity” and it holds no water.
As it happens part of my career saw me studying and training others in all aspects of Human Error identification and reduction. This was in an industry where tiny mistakes kill people stone dead.
I’ve waded through case study after case study and in many cases the errors made are, on the face of it, utterly ridiculous and perpetrated by people far smarter, organised and well trained than either of us.
They seem blindingly obvious in hindsight and one is left wondering how these came to pass. The answer is, so often, exactly the situation we have discussed on this thread. In a time of fatigue, high stress and distraction, having someone perform a novel task or remember key information is a recipe for disaster. The brain risks reverting to autopilot unless something tangible is present to act as a reminder.
Your flat-out refusal to even consider you might be affected too is pretty common. I’ve often started out with people saying exactly the same things that you do but by the time we walked through the exercises, case-studies and theory, everyone accepts their own fallibility. Which is a good thing because from there we can build systems and processes to guard against it.
Why doesn’t it happen with much more frequency then? 99.99% of the parenting population manage to not kill their kids by leaving them in a hot car. With millions of parents out there, if it “could happen to anyone”, shouldn’t it happen with more frequency?
It’s an issue of parents not being able to overcome broken routines and not being aware of the most important thing in their life. Yes, life as a parent sucks. Yes, having to work, go to daycare, and losing a routine sucks. You still don’t leave your kid in a car to die.
It sounds like a ton of lives. Yet, despite that kind of stuff happening alot, almost every other parent in the world somehow is able to stop from letting their kids horribly die in a hot car.
But every year and a half or so, this issue comes up. And the same old “you’re arrogant, it could happen to anyone” stuff gets thrown around. I’m sure they’ll be strawmen built saying that the parents are monsters or that they deserve to go to prison. That’s the way these threads go.
Well, we don’t know how often kids get left for 5-15 minutes or so, and then the parents suddenly remembers, or the daycare calls, or someone else notices a baby alone in a car. In fact, it may happen frequently that babies get left in cars, it just happens infrequently that they gets left there long enough to die.
And this is YOUR misconception. No, the conscious awareness of my baby cannot be pushed from my mind.
Could you perhaps relate one of these case studies? I’m actually curious what the reasoning for making the errors were.
This reminds me of an opinion another poster had in another thread: “All men are potential rapists” which of course I disagreed with.
I will never rape another person. I know that for a fact. Would you consider that statement “a flat-out refusal to even consider you might be affected”? There are many rapists out there, but I will never be one. There are a lot more rapists out there then parents who left their child in a car. But unsurprisingly, I will never be one, just like I will never be a parent who leaves their child in a car. I will also never rob a bank. People rob banks, it happens. Doesn’t mean it’s going to happen to me. Am I also delusional to think that raping someone or robbing a bank will never be something that I will do?
If you recall I said
A perfect storm of complications and stresses and distractions have to occur plus external factors. The weather would have to be hot enough, no third party there to rescue the child, absence of cues, reminders and alarms for the carer.
The perfect storm of a situation is not likely to come around very often at all but I guarantee that children are left in cars far more often than you imagine but that they very, very rarely die and so are not newsworthy.
You’ve already had people in this very thread tell you how they forgot to fasten their children into car-seats. That is just as much a potential killer as leaving them in a locked car and the reasons for doing that are often exactly the same.
There’s a fallacy in there somewhere, I just don’t know what it is, but ‘just because something CAN happen, it should happen more often, therefore since it doesn’t happen more often it shouldn’t happen ever’, isn’t correct.
IOW, maybe if [just using you’re number] if 99.99% of the parenting population doesn’t do it, then that’s the ‘correct’ number.
In fact, that’s sort of the reason that people get annoyed with mythbusters. Something would actually happen, they couldn’t repeat it after one or two tries and say ‘busted’.
Here’s another example. In your life, you’ll drive hundreds of thousands of miles and in all that time you might get into, what, one or two fender benders, maybe one bad wreck. I think we can all admit that a car accident can happen to anyone. We can all get distracted and veer off the road, we can all get clobbered by a drunk driver that we didn’t have a chance of even seeing coming, we can all forget that we pulled into the garage with at a funny angle last night and clip the side view mirror on the way out, right.
It’s the same thing. All those things can happen to anyone, but somehow you manage to get to work everyday with your car in one piece. As do most of your coworkers, friends, relatives.
If it can happen to anyone, why doesn’t it happen with more frequency?
Next time you say ‘it can happen to anyone’ ask yourself why it doesn’t happen more often. That’s a terrible argument against why something happened.
Wait, so parents don’t deserve to go to prison when their child dies from being left in a hot car?
I never would have left my child in the car, either. But I know why, and it’s not because of my superior parenting skills. It’s because the cases where children are left in cars unintentionally* have certain things in common , and those things didn’t apply to me. And also because there were things I did for reasons unrelated to having my children in the car that acted to prevent it.
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Most of the cases I’ve seen involve people who don’t normally do the daycare/babysitter drop-off. Either it was a rare occasion for that parent to do the drop off or the parents alternated the drop off- but I’ve never seen a case where the parent did the drop-off almost every day. I did the drop-off almost every day.
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They mostly involve a single child - there were only three months that I drove to work and had only a single child to drop off.
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They almost all involve a sleeping child or at least a silent one - my commute to work at the time was ten minutes, not long enough for either of my children to fall asleep. And my kids were not the type to sit silently for ten minutes- they would gurgle, or play with the plastic keys or drop the plastic keys and cry when they dropped the plastic keys or…
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The car seat was installed behind the passenger seat. And I kept my bag on the passenger seat ( which was my habit from when I started driving, long before I had kids). In order to get the bag out when I got out of the car, I had to turn enough to see the car seat.
Change those variables - and I’m not absolutely sure it couldn’t have happened to me.
- People who intentionally leave kids in the car because they’re “going to run into the store real quick” and it turns out not to be quick enough are a different issue, and I’m not talking about them
I think I don’t have any difficulty pointing out the posters in this thread who haven’t read the linked article.
The issue is about large numbers: if enough people drive their kids to daycare, eventually someone will forget to drop off the kid and drive to work with the kid sleeping in the backseat. This is not about bad parents, it’s about dumb luck.
Losing a child is horrifying as a thought exercise. As a reality, it is almost unsurvivable. Living with any degree of responsibility for the death of a child is infinitely worse. I suppose this is why some people are so insistent that it can’t happen to them. To justify this belief, they have to invent the fiction that parents who forget children in cars do so because they are bad parents. They know it can’t happen to them because they are good parents, and they know they are good parents because it hasn’t happened to them, and they can be comfortable and safe inside this circle. They would just as soon forget that this tragedy also happens to good parents, and fails to happen to bad parents. They need to ignore the fact that pretty much every parent is sometimes great, sometimes good, sometimes bad, and often just so-so. Rape and robbery are inane analogies: one doesn’t commit those crimes out of distraction or inattention, and asserting that kids in cars is a purposeful crime is another counterfactual defense against an insupportable thought. What I can’t understand is how people can have just enough imagination to be this frightened of the scenario, and respond to it by vigorously suppressing and empathy for the parents involved.
Yes, living with any degree of responsibility for the death of a child is infinitely worse. I suppose this is why some people are so insistent that it could happen to anybody. They have to invent the fiction that anyone can be susceptible to forgetting their child in a hot car in order to assuage the guilt they feel for leaving their child in a hot car.
If you aren’t even willing to concede the possibility then there is no point in talking to you.
The investigations I have personally been involved with are commercially sensitive and subject to NDA’s.
Will it make any difference? Really? If I give you evidence to show you the stupid mistakes that intelligent humans are capable of, will you be moved by it at all?
One famous incident was was theKegworth air disaster. . In which the pilot shut down the wrong engine.
I’m glad to hear it. Nor would I. Neither of us would choose to rape another person. I’m not sure what relevance this has to the argument though because I’m not suggesting that any parent would “choose” to lock their kids in a hot car
That makes no sense.
I have no guilt about leaving children in a hot car because I’ve never done it. In that respect I’m as good and a diligent a parent as you.
And yet, despite having no guilt to assuage I appreciate that indeed it can happen to anyone. I’m a fallible human being who just happens to have dodged multiple bullets by pure dumb luck.
My heart bleeds for those caught out and no, I don’t believe a prison sentence is necessary.