In the Pit that’s less weird too. Rants don’t have to be conversations.
Risk compensation / risk homeostasis is, possibly, real–a “seat belts cause people to drive faster” type of thing. But it’s only really applicable when there is an underlying benefit to the risky behavior (like getting to the destination faster). That’s not true for what either smoke detectors or child detectors protect against. No one wants to forget those things. So there’s no reason to believe there would be a compensation effect.
And at any rate, usually the compensation effect is smaller than the overall safety effect. Maybe seat belts do cause people to drive faster, but they still have a massive net positive benefit.
Your priorities sound perfectly fine to me. 
As other posters have noted, this is a really silly analogy. Being aware of your young child’s presence in the car that you are driving is not like mental arithmetic. It is not a purpose-specific technique or skill that is allowed to atrophy when the practitioner acquires a technological device that can perform the same function.
Drivers who have seatbelts and airbags in their cars don’t just give up on safe driving practices because they assume the technology will protect them. Dog owners who get their dogs chipped don’t just throw away their dog-walking leashes because they depend on the technology to prevent permanently losing their pets. And parents who get some kind of “child check” reminder device for their carseat aren’t going to just stop being aware of their child’s physical presence because they rely on the technology to remind them of it.
Shee- flipping- eeeeesh.
That is quite plausibly not true:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0001457594900957?via%3Dihub
The main result was that beginning wearers (group iii) showed signs of continuing behavioral adaptation, in the form of increased speed and increased propensity for close following, as well as several minor effects. The “incentive” group (group i), however, did not change driving behavior in the expected sense, i.e. in the safe direction.
But that’s not the same as the smoke detector case. There’s an incentive for driving fast. Not so much by doing dumb things that might burn your house down.
Hmmm, that’s a pretty strong inference about the behavior of “drivers” in general you’re trying to draw from one study’s quite tentative findings about specifically incentivized driving-speed behavior on the part of a study population of drivers who habitually resist wearing seatbelts, which is where they got their “beginning wearers” subjects from.
And driving speed, of course, is just one small part of safe-driving practices. Even drivers who habitually resist wearing seatbelts don’t just stop paying attention to traffic laws in general when they do wear seatbelts. Any more than parents driving their young children will just stop being aware of their child’s presence when they have some kind of technological reminder of it on their carseat.
I’d argue the opposite is more likely. Someone who is willing to go to the trouble to get a technological reminder is already acting on concern for their child, and I’d expect would be more likely to check for their presence than someone who hasn’t invested in such a device.
Just as I expect that people who choose not to wear seatbelts just don’t prioritize safety, and in general would be more likely to drive unsafely than those who do.
Not once have I clicked a seatbelt, thought, “Now I’m invincible,” and then proceeded to drive like a maniac due to the rush of power brought on by the power of a nylon strap saving me from any and all vehicular consequences.
“Quite plausibly not true” is not exactly a “pretty strong inference”. But risk compensation is not some unknown concept. It’s been studied a fair amount in varying contexts:
Like all social effects, it’s almost impossible to study in a reproducible manner. So take it as you will. But it is not an idea to simply scoff at.
As I said, I think there is an inherent difference between the cases where risk compensation (seemingly) has an effect vs. other cases: people compensate when there is an incentive to do so. Driving fast, having more sex partners, doing more advanced skydiving techniques, etc. But those incentives are not there for things like smoke detectors or the proposed child detectors.
When our daughter was tiny, we were playing with her on the family room floor. A neighbor came to the door and we started chatting; a few minutes later we realized we’d left her alone. She was fine, but it was the same phenomenon–nothing interesting was going on and we just got distracted. Over three decades later I still get a sinking feeling just thinking about it, and nothing happened. Imagine if it had!
^It equals answering phone while baby is in the bathtub. People get distracted easily.
I wonder is there any stats on babies being left in a car during freezing weather and dying? Surely it’s happened.
Having a kid is not for the faint hearted.
Yes. Warning: distressing-incident descriptions.
Car companies have been teaching drivers for years that careful driving is a thing of the past. How many commercials have you seen where the driver is not looking while backing out, or looking at the kids, or fiddling with the radio and almost kills themselves and/or others only to be saved by some safety features. Do the drivers in those commercials look like they almost fucked up most royally? No-They look like something slightly interesting happened for about two seconds, then continue on.
What am I missing ? I don’t understand why you would get a sinking feeling thirty years later because you left her alone in a room for a few minutes while you were at the door unless there was some detail left out, like a flight of stairs she could have tumbled down or something similar.
Long-standing guilt? I dunno.
Unless you left her in a room alone with a pack of wild hyenas (which is generally frowned upon) or something similar, I too think you’re being too hard on yourself.
The last car I rented (a new Ford Escape) did the same.
I was thinking “security baboon” myself.
One time I was loading up my dog in our hatchback with some camping gear. I got in the car and started to back up, but left the hatchback open. My dog jumped out and I came very close to running over her. That was 20 years ago and I still think about it.
Horrible mistakes can happen.
I truly believe that people today, from even an incredibly young age, are completely overwhelmed with not only today’s technology for navigating the day, but also the expectations placed on people to navigate so much of that technology at the same time. There’s just way too much going on in one’s life now to not make some incredibly bone-headed mistake. This Pickles comic strip from yesterday shows how easy it is to make a drastic mistake.
I agree.
I saw a lady in a parking lot go to her driver door. Baby on the hip. I’m thinking, oh no, she’s gonna drive holding the kid. Nope she started the car. Left her door opened (restarting unaided from a fob sometimes causes keys locked in a started vehicle).
Opened the backdoor and spent a long time buckling the kid in a car seat. That always makes me happy. I had escape artists, the only way to insure they stayed seated was proper tight buckling.
Put her purse in. Got inside and buckled herself in. Looked around the car. I assumed she was looking at the backup camera or the radio or something.
All this time she had her phone squeezed to her shoulder by her head, yakking the whole time.
She drove off without loading her purchases from the shopping cart into the car.