Can you envision any response by me, after you shared that highly personalized, heart wrenching story, that wouldn’t immediately paint me as a jerk? Even simply pointing out the straw men or challenging your unsupported conclusions would gain nothing except raising the ire of those who want a reason to.
I am sorry for your losses.
You would have done better to leave out everything here but for the last sentence. 'Cuz you’ve still painted yourself as a jerk, and a holier than thou jerk at that.
Yeah, that’s about the most insensitive, dickish thing one could say after already painting one’s self as a jerk. I don’t think anyone could do as good a job of making others look down on him than he’s doing.
Bricker, asking for a simple answer to a complex question, I know, but…is this self-evidently negligence? I realize that this would have differing answers depending upon the jurisdiction and specific facts. But in general, assuming a case like those in the article where the parent had a mental hiccup, where prior routine led to a circumstance where the person literally walked away in a mental state as if his child was not in the car–does that meet the definition of negligence?
IOW, when wording like this (from Wikipedia) is offered…
…it seems to me implicit that there must be some element of deliberateness in knowing that the activity places someone in peril. These are people (excepting the bogeymen offered in the OP) who would NEVER knowingly have placed their child in such a dangerous circumstance. But obviously I must be wrong, since so many charges have been advanced by so many prosecutors.
Any clarification or thoughts would be appreciated.
I’m surprised that you’re surprised. Many of our friends with kids feel the same way. I don’t recall the whole thread, but do you have children?
One thing I dislike greatly on a message board is when I invest time, energy, and emotion into a post and it, and the points contained in it, gets ignored. In my posts, I generally try to show respect to my fellow posters and actually respond to the points they made rather than ignoring them or pretending they didn’t raise any. Choie obviously put a ton of emotion and reason into her post and raised issues that deserve a response and seemingly asked for one. I wasn’t about to ignore her post and the issues she raised without explaining to her why. I wanted to afford her the respect of acknowledging her post without actually responding to it and explain to her why I wasn’t.
If that makes me a jerk in you eyes, so be it. I have a gut feeling I would have ended up there regardless of what I post.
ABSOLUTELY NO ONE IS SAYING IT’S UNAVOIDABLE
If it was, no one would survive to adulthood.
It is, fortunately, a mistake that doesn’t happen often, and even when it does, usually doesn’t result in a death (because most of the time it’s not terribly hot or cold and, as others have noted, someone notices the baby/kid has been forgotten in time to fix the situation.)
I don’t get why it’s so hard to understand that it MIGHT happen to anyone.
Do you normally slice your finger with a knife while cooking dinner? Is that unavoidable? Aren’t you careful with knives? I don’t know anyone who hasn’t sliced a finger while prepping food by the time they’re 30. MOST of the time it’s not horribly serious but sometimes it is (the current mayor of Chicago lost part of finger to a meat-slicing accident). And you can get hurt no matter how careful and conscientious you may be - a distraction, you’re a bit tired, whatever. You slipped and the knife cut. It’s not because you wanted to injure yourself, it’s not because you’re careless or stupid or whatever, it’s because you made a mistake.
Same thing here - really, 38 deaths a year in a nation this size is a small number. It’s still tragically too high, but what it does mean is that nearly all of the time people do get this right. Even the parents in the linked article got it right nearly all of the time, always until that one fateful day. Rather than heap more and more scorn upon them the smart thing to do is to really look at those days, turn down the emotion, and figure out how smart, responsible, loving parents could wind up in such a horrible position.
Fortunately, some people have done that. What they’ve found does relate to how the human brain is “wired”, how it works or sometimes doesn’t work. And THAT is why we are now getting suggestions like “get in the habit of putting your purse/briefcare/cell phone in the back seat” so you will ALWAYS look in the back, or seat sensors to detect weight, and so on. That didn’t come from people spitting on the parents saying how awful and terrible they were, or those wanting to impose harsh penalties on those parents, or people sanctimoniously saying “I would NEVER do such a thing!”, it came from people willing to look at a tragedy dispassionately in an attempt to better understand how and why such things happen.
I can only imagine that you missed the part of the post where I explicitly acknowledged that a baby is not an umbrella. That wasn’t remotely the point.
Having a child with you is not something that, for most people, generates compulsive behaviour. It quickly becomes normal (it would be intolerable otherwise).
Let’s look at this another way. Do you think you’re absolutely infallible in this regard?
I didn’t miss it. But you’re the one who compared forgetting the baby to losing an umbrella.
For practical purposes, I’d say that, yes, we were infallible in that rtegard. I askied Pepper Mill about this a little while ago, and she replied that she could see it if a person were really tired. But it would have to be a pretty pathological torpor. Alien Invasion, total chaos, all that, maybe. But just walking out on an ordinary day and leaving my kid forgotten iin the car for periods longer than many seconds? Inconceivable. And I know what that means.
For the first two weeks or so, it went well beyond that. we knew where our daughter was. The question we kept asking was Is she breathing?. I’ve been told this is not unusual first-time parent behavior. If I’ve just gotten over wondering if she’s still breathing, I’m not at all likely to forget where she is.
I never wondered about whether my umbrella was still breathing.
The people who this happens to also think they KNOW where their children were. They’re not like “La-di-da … let the baby fend for himself!” Something happens to disrupt their normal routine and they THINK the baby is at daycare or with the other spouse when actually they’re still in the car seat.
Your conviction of your infallibility creates a dangerous situation. It’s not enough to KNOW where your children are. You should put routines in place to catch times when you THINK you know where your children are, but are actually mistaken.
Not in an individual, specific case. Those are completely avoidable. Which is the precise point I have been attempting to make over and over.
But the “it’s just a mistake, and everyone makes mistakes” does make it unavoidable. Someone, somewhere is going to be negligent/reckless and leave their child to die a horribly painful death in a car. It is thus unavoidable. I would prefer (and you would agree) that we would like it to become completely avoidable.
I do understand that. I just don’t see thd import of such a statement. Yes, it could happen to anyone. And? Does saying that somehow negate the person’s negligence/recklessness? Does it mean that pointing out the actions that led to the death makes one a jerk?
There are a couple ways to react to these horrific actions. “It could happen to anyone” garners sympathy for the person whose actions caused the death and “it never should have happened. These parents fucked up big time” is certainly judgmental, but also accurate. In this thread, I pointed out that there was a great deal of one, and very little of the other. Apparently that is enough to warrant almost non-stop ad hominems and name calling.
No, I didn’t. I said babies and umbrellas are incomparably different. You then felt the need to tell me what I had already said, as if correcting me.
Have you never injured yourself, never stepped out into the road almost in front of a car? Never done anything out of carelessness, absent-mindedness, or just plain tiredness that could have had serious consequences? If so, you’re pretty unusual.
This is the really important point - the point of failure is typically not where they get out of the car and leave it - it’s where they fail to stop and drop the kid off at daycare or with grandparents, etc - by the time they park the car, the error has already happened.
Do you obsessively think about where your kid is every few minutes when you are, say, at work and know your kid is at home or at day care? Or when you know your partner has the kid across town?
Dude, I used to think something like this, too. Then I realized a basic fact. Parents are people, and people fuck up on occasion. Sometimes when they do, it has tragic and horrible consequences.
I suggest you sit down and rethink your position. Think long and hard.
Mangetout, not that you’re asking for my advice, but I wouldn’t waste too much energy here. My theory is that there’s two branches of that tribe: those who obstinately refuse to see this as anything other than a reckless act, even while they acknowledge the research, etc. They will not concede that this is essentially a “mindless” tragedy, one that ONLY occurs when a particular human reacts to a non-routine sequence that appears routine in a human way. It is absolutely unavoidable in the sense that any human circumstance that does not infallibly prevent such an event will ultimately end up with a few tragedies. Could any given tragedy have been avoided? Well, sure. That could be said of many, perhaps most, tragedies. Can all tragedies be avoided? No. It’s that whole “we’re all only human” assertion that in this discussion seems like an excuse to them rather than a self-evident fact that implies certain perilous things about our condition.
The second branch of this group (in my theory) are those who are so frightened by this possibility that they have to convince themselves that such a mistake is an impossibility for them. They’re more easily able to convince themselves if they view the people this has happened to as simply less vigilant than they are. Because to conclude otherwise is to conclude it could happen to any of us.
Perhaps there are some people who are wired in such a manner where they are infallible in such a matter. Aliens maybe? Because humans are subject to human thought patterns and cognitive processes, and those patterns and processes are all subject to flaws and mental hiccups.
Again, not that you’re asking me. But this feels like one of those (many, many) threads where there’s a faction not interested in exploring the opposing viewpoint, where engaging them simply gives them a soapbox to spout their “You namby pambies are just a bunch of sissified enablers, not a right thinker like me” or alternately, “Maybe you could make such a mistake, but you’ll just have to accept my assurance that such an error is an impossibility for an uber-vigilant parent like me; you lesser parents do have my pity, however. But this could never, ever, ever, ever happen to me. No, uh-uh, never.”
The people in here claiming they are absolutely above making such mistakes, that good parents are above such mistakes, are the same sort of people who say “[X evil thing] could never happen here” or “[X bad person] is an inhuman monster, completely different than the rest of us.” Good people wouldn’t do X, and they are good people, so of course they wouldn’t do X. (And then, of course, when and if they do X, it’s not the same thing, not at all.)
If good parents never leave their children, then so long as you’re a good parent, you’re covered. You’re not at risk. Because by definition good parents don’t leave their children in the car.
Bad, mean, horrible, negligent parents who don’t care leave their kids in the car to die and roast. I’m not a bad, mean, horrible, negligent parent, so I won’t leave my kid in the car to die and roast. How do we know these are bad, mean, horrible, negligent parents? Because they left their kids in the car to die and roast.
What if they thought they were good parents? What if they thought it would never happen to them? Well, they were never good parents. They were always wrong. We know this because they left their kids in the car to die and roast.
Bad things happen to other people because they deserve it. Good things happen to me because I deserve it. I am a better person than they are, so I will get better results. We know I’m a better person because I’ve gotten better results.
And because this can’t happen to me, I have no need for sympathy or empathy for these parents. Because they are terrible, stupid people, unlike me. They are terrible parents, unlike me. They are prone to error, unlike me. They are nothing like me. I am completely different. It could never happen to me. Nothing like that could happen to me.
Great post.
My mom did that at least twice a year all through middle and high school. She would just blank on the fact that I was at school waiting to be picked up after a meeting or practice, and head for home. She never got more than a mile or two out of town before she realized I wasn’t there, but still.
It’s not just the fob thing, either. Those safety latches on back doors, so that kids can’t accidentally open the door and fall out, can trap someone in a hot car long enough to have serious medical consequences. It damn near happened to my husband as an adult, while someone with the keys stood not ten feet away. He rode to lunch with some co-workers, sitting in the back because he’s short and that way they didn’t have to move the front seat up. On the way back out to the car, they ran into someone the co-workers knew and he didn’t. So he went on and got in the car, expecting them to just be a minute or two. But it was July in Kentucky, and his co-workers were apparently having Old Home Week. And when he tried to open the door for some ventilation, he couldn’t because the safety latches were activated. They finally wrapped things up and came on before any real damage was done, but it’s still scary to think about what could have happened.
Your errors have not, to this point, resulted in the prolonged tortuous death of a child, sure. But you could say the exact same thing about any of the parents this has happened to, right up until the moment they made their single, fatal mistake. Everyone is above that error right up until the second they’re not.
FWIW, my mom is totally right there with you 100% in wondering how on earth could anyone forget they have a child in the car with them, and pointing out how horrendously neglectful these parents have been. You know, the same mom who forgot she *didn’t *have a child in the car with her more than a dozen times. Mom’s brain farts didn’t result in anything worse than annoyance and frustration and the occasional “WTH, am I a complete non-entity in this house?!”–but that’s because she was lucky, not because she was above making a mistake that could have really bad consequences.