Mom Charged in Children’s Sunburns
How can people be this stupid with their little kids?
Cruel people who either have no brain or don’t care. Good thing that she took them to a public place like a county fair: it got her noticed by the authorities!
prolly too drunk to notice.
Bless the cop who noticed it. I’m sure he could have let it pass, but luckily he didn’t. According to some of the articles I’ve read, she has been reported to child authorities on the past.
Over the years, I’ve been horrified by preschools and primary schools not paying adequate attention to sun protection - especially scheduling day long events during the summer at venues where there is inadequate shade. More than once, I’ve had a child return home badly burned.
This thread was a lot funnier when I still thought it said “sideburns”
Sheesh. Speaking as someone who frequently got sunburned very badly as a kid, I think making it a criminal case is a little extreme. I don’t think this compares with leaving a child in a car on a hot summer day which is what I would consider gross negligence. This is just a serious “Oops, don’t ever do that again” type offense. At some point, we have to accept that parents aren’t all knowing demi-gods and that they sometimes screw up with painful results.
Did you happen to notice that she lives in a town called Brilliant?
WTF is going on this summer?! It seems like more than once a week a new report pops up about a kid getting kidnapped or killed/abused by a guardian. Does crap like this happen every year and I’m only super-senstive because it’s the media’s cause du annee, or is everyone going insane this year?
:mad:
I can’t decide what I think is stupider, the fact that this woman let this happen to her poor kids, or the fact that she could be looking at fifteen YEARS for a sunburn.
Having had second degree burns from sun exposure during my lifetime, I can assure you they are extremely painful and leave nasty scars. That said, I’m curious what kind of penalty the woman would be looking at had her children acquired the burns through some other kind of inaction on her part.
FTR, one reason Australia has toughened up its child endangerment laws (especially those related to leaving children in cars unattended) is because the message just didn’t seem to be getting through to some people. Perhaps the authorities think that throwing the book at this woman might make other parents more aware.
The article said that this wasn’t the first time the authorities have been called in relation to her treatment of her kids.
Also, second degree burns are not just “whoops” they are serious.
When I was 12 or so, my mom took me to Daytona Beach for some ungodly reason, and because my Florida relatives told her that sunscreen “makes you sunburn worse” she let me stay on the beach ALL DAY without any sunscreen at all.
FTR, I am VERY white–I never tan, no matter how much time I spent in the sun.
On the way home that day, I could hold my hands four inches above my legs and FEEL the heat baking out of my skin. It was incredible. I threw up all night, ended up with 2nd degree burns on my shoulders and back, and was in excruciating pain for days. I still have scars.
Those poor babies. 
I don’t think a sunburn alone should be grounds for removal of the kids, but if she’s been investigated before and other charges have been proven, then something of this magnitude should be the final straw.
Side note… When I was an itty bitty kitty (must’ve been under a year), my parents were having a back porch built by a friend of the family. All he’d done at that point was pour the slab for the floor. The 'rents decided to have a summer party, and put sleeping little bobkitty in her babycarriage out on the slab. Sure, they put up the bonnet so I, being the extremely light-skinned child I was, was shielded from the sun, but they neglected to think that the light reflecting off the white slab would pose a problem.
Three days in the hosptial for that slip-up.
So, my excuse was I slept through most of my time out in the sun, and it took someone glanced into the carriage to notice that there was something wrong. Why the hell weren’t these kids squalling?
When I first heard about this, I almost laughed. Sunburn? Hell, we all get sunburned. Then I read the article. Dipped in a can of red paint? OMG! How could this woman not even notice that her kids were turning red?
Dammit, what an idiot.
And dammit, don’t put the idiot in prison! We don’t have enough room for everyone anyway.
But make it clear that she’s in deep doodoo if she does something so stupid again. I say again, what a moron.
Yeesh, on all counts.
I had much the same experience as bodypoet at Daytona Beach when I was 12, except it was 1969 and sunblock was not in the vocabulary yet. We had Coppertone suntan lotion, and we used it once at about 9 am and floated on rafts for much of the day. My sister and I were so badly sunburned that wearing even light cotton nighties was excruciating, but the thought has never crossed my mind that my parents were at all negligent.
And when my daughter was a month old, in Colorado, in April, I had her in a front-pack carrier, with a bonnet on at 4 o’clock in the afternoon when I took her for a short walk around the block. The one little strip of skin on her cheek that was showing got burned in those few minutes. When I called the peds clinic to ask what type of sunblock was safe to use on a one-month-old, they were very rude and said I should not be taking her out in the sun. I lost my temper, told them that I was not exposing her on a hillside for 6 hours during the heat of the day. She was so tiny her legs didn’t even stick out of the front pack legholes! She had been almost completely covered up at 4 pm! It was one little section of her cheek! She had a hat on! How was I to know she’d get a sunburn? They finally told me what was safe to use on her (this was in 1982, before the Babyblock brand was available).
My point is just that little ones can burn quicker than we realize (and it doesn’t show up right away) so let’s not send this woman to prison for this. Maybe she herself rarely burns (she wasn’t reported as being sunburnt, was she?) and she just didn’t realize how quickly it can happen. My brother was with us on that same Daytona Beach, and he didn’t burn at all.
The reasons that I am in favor of coming down harshly:
- the ages of the kids (a 2 year old and two 10 month olds)
- the length of time they were out (the article says “all day” so I doubt it was just an hour or so)
- the severity of the burns
- the fact that she has prior complaints with children’s services
I saw that in a referenced online article, too.
After a bit of thought, I’m a disturbed by the inclusion of this information, as it’s gratuitous and not specific, inviting the reader to - at least subconsciously - “add a conviction” for some unknown occasion of poor parenting. It’s suddenly a factor in forming our opinions of this woman, where such report may have been something as innocuous as failing to send a sick note to school with one of the kids after an absence.
And another side of me says this woman should not have been arrested, as it may impede the future actions of Uncle Darwin on her and her family.
AmbushBug
[sub]i don’t let that side of me out to play very often.[/sub]
the government can throw the book at you in the Services if you get sun burnt. under damage to government property.
but for this woman, I think 100 hours comunity service in a Burns ward in a hospital should do the trick.
I’ve never been sunburnt, so I have no idea what it’s like - but throwing her in jail for years seems excessive (though I do wonder what authorities had been called for in the past).
How long does it take to get burned, like that? Is it something that you notice right away? (I remember in school, the kids with burns didn’t seem to care unless they were touched - then it hurt them, but the burns themselves didn’t seem to hurt). Would the kids have been screaming bloody murder, or not? How common is it to put sunblock on infants and toddlers? If you do notice a sunburn, and you are out at a place like a fair, what do you do? (I’m assuming if you’re at home you go inside, but it also seemed like once people had gotten burned (on their boats, or out at the beach) they just kept going as the damage had been done - was that observation incorrect?) How bad off are these kids, and how long will it take them to heal?