Maybe it’s really obvious to those of you who have children that I don’t, but you will NEVER convince me that those are usually accidents. :mad: I really think that the people who do this are sick of caring for the baby, or are dealing with marital problems that stem from parenting, or any number of other things, and they want to get rid of the kid in a way that doesn’t usually lead to a lengthy prison sentence.
Read this - the whole thing - then revisit your theory. I don’t even have kids and that article horrified and saddened me.
Most of these incidents are parents who’ve stepped outside their usual day-in-day-out patterns.
Parents are in and out of cars millions of time per day in the U.S. alone. It doesn’t surprise me that this can happen once or twice per year. I think “wanting to get rid of the kid” is the least likely option to explain these tragedies.
People have way too much going on in their lives for this kind of stuff NOT to happen. We have to operate on automatic in this day and age. We can plan the agenda for tomorrow’s staff meeting, listen to NPR, and navigate around busy street traffic without feeling overwhelmed…all so that we can hit the ground running once we get to work. Because if you can’t do eleventy-billion different tasks, then you can’t stay competitive in this job market. And if you can’t stay competitive, then someone will take your job from you. So rush rush rush, busy busy busy. Forget forget forget.
I can totally see myself doing something like this, which is why I don’t trust myself to parent. Like a robot, I’m all about following rituals and routines. I’m great when everything is the way I expect it to be, but I’m a basketcase when it’s not. I misplace my keys. I turn off the wrong exit ramp. I lose track of time. A baby wouldn’t have a chance with me.
So I can’t judge anyone in this situation.
But I will judge you harshly for your lack of compassion.
The fact that you do not have children makes me suspect that you are not aware of the many, many stressors on a parent raising a young child.
I’ve never done forgotten a kid in my car, thank Athena. But I have lost a child to death, and that perhaps makes me hypervigilant, maybe even overprotective to the point of paranoia, on this issue. It can happen to the best of us. Please try to learn some compassion and empathy.
That was totally shitty. You should be ashamed of yourself.
Do you have a kid?
I think most parents have, at one point or another, forgotten their kid somewhere. Walked out of the house while the kid was in their room playing :smack:. Headed towards work instead of towards the day care :smack:. Let the kid stay up 2 hours too late because they just weren’t paying attention to them at all :smack:. Leaving the kid in the car is just one more boneheaded mistake. It sucks and it’s awful but think about how many kids there are in the world and it leaves a lot of chances for it to happen. Don’t get me wrong, some parents might do it ‘by accident’. Just like some parent’s ‘accidentally’ drive into a lake and can’t get the kids out in time, but I’d guess that many of them are, honest to goodness accidents.
I believe, from what I’ve read, often times they happen on days when that parent’s routine is disrupted. Dad always takes jr to daycare on Monday, but he had an early meeting so mom said she would do it. Come Monday, she put jr in the car seat and then just totally forgot about him because she took a phonecall as she was getting into the car and drove to work. He’s a quiet kid, never made a peep and that was that.
Every parent has done something, or failed to do something, that could have, but fortunately didn’t, lead to the death of their child.
I not only see how it is possible that this can happen, I am so convinced that I could easily do such a thing that I force myself, every time I leave the car, to touch the car seat and say out loud that the kids are not in the car seat.
All I can say is that I hope this pitting doesn’t end well. Dear God, really??
I’ve often heard it said that you spend the first two years of your kid’s life just trying to keep them alive. I was very lucky that my kid didn’t put stuff in her mouth, but I did catch her trying to go down a set of stairs (at a friend’s house) head first, towards a tile floor. She was just barely walking. I had turned around for, maybe two minutes, I’m not even sure if I knew she went up the stairs to begin with, but she was just about ready to head back down them. :eek:
This is absolutely despicable. One of the most awful things I have read. You are freaking despicable.
I raised three kids. They’re adults today. I think I’m a typical middle class parent.
One day, on a sunny May day, I took my 4-year 0ld daughter to preschool. Not my usual routine. Put her in the car seat which was behind me, the driver. I was 5 miles down the interstate, heading to work rather than taking her to preschool which was only a mile away at the University. She was the quietest of children. For whatever reason, she moved just enough for me to see her in a corner of my rearview mirror. I felt like a jerk. Took her to school.
I often cry when I think I might have gotten to work and left her in the car.
I never forgot I had the kid with me, but once, when he was about four months old, my husband and I put him in his car seat, drove about three miles to Borders, and got out, to discover to our horror that we had not strapped him in. Thank goodness we hadn’t gotten into an accident, or slammed on the brakes for a deer, or that the boychik had not decided to try to turn over and roll out of the seat. He was just cooing happily, and reached up for us, totally oblivious.
I think I at least learned from it, though. DH and I made a rule that whoever carried him to the car went through the whole sequence of putting him in the car and strapping him in-- no handing him off and forgetting a step. I also made a count-- 1 for opening the door, 2 for putting him in, 3 for adjusting the strap, 4 for buckling it, and 5 for closing the door. It was overly cautious, but I never made that mistake again, and I think it made me more aware of him being in the car. I never even came close to leaving him there.
What makes me mad is when I see little kids in hot cars outside stores with the windows slightly cracked. There’s no way the parent overlooked them. You might tell yourself it’s only five minutes, but we have summer days in the 90s here, and all kinds of things can hold you up, including things out of your control, like security closing the store.
My thinking on this is the same as why people do so many other idiotic things that just don’t happen to have the same tragic consequences. “Never attribute to malice what can just as easily be attributed to stupidity”. It just doesn’t “click” with some people that a car can get very hot very fast in the summer, and very cold very fast in the winter (at least up here) no matter how many times they see it on the news (“She must have been in the store for hours for that to happen. I always just run in and out”). I’m not prepared to attribute such idiocy to malice without more evidence; in fact calling it malice assumes they have enough intelligence to come up with a scheme like that - I’m not prepared to give idiots that much respect.
I’ve seen some stupid shit posted here over the years, but this is right up there. How fucking moronic must nearwildheaven be. What a scumbag.
You don’t. That’s the problem.
The OP has a morbid opinion of humanity, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the tactic has been used on occasion. But to proclaim that it’s common or explanatory tells me that the OP should get to the psychiatrist asap!
I was just reading an article on this and it gave the number of an average of 38 times a year a child died this way.
If it ever has, I would guess that it would be a mercy killing after discovering that your child had a severe for of cystic fibrosis, or something like Tay-Sachs, and not simply not wanting to be a parent. You can’t give up a baby at a safe haven after a month (in most states), but it is still possible to arrange an adoption if you really cannot care for your child-- there are lots of people who will take a four or six month old, and some people do abandon older babies in places where they are likely to be found alive; the last is very rare, much rarer than hyperthermia deaths, and what I suspect usually happens when someone genuinely can’t cope, and doesn’t know how to approach child services for help.
I hate it when this topic comes up. People, whether they have children or not, take it as an opportunity to show how much smarter or more loving they are or would be as parents. “I think about my kids too much for it to happen to me! My kids are my life! I’m not that stupid!” Whatever.
I really hope it’s just denial, because otherwise it’s just assholishness.