People who "forget" their babies in the car on a hot day

I think parents that kill their children through neglect such as leaving them to roast alive in hot cars or freezing to death in cold ones should be treated the same as we would a babysitter, nanny, etc., who caused a child’s death in the same manner. The fact that they are the parents shouldn’t give them a pass for murder or manslaughter which is probably what most of these cases would fall under.

I tend to agree that they should usually be treated in much the same way.

No one is getting a pass. They have all been charged under the law. The courts decide guilt or innocence. People make mistakes. It’s not difficult to understand why.

We all have been forgetful and done stupid things in life. All of these cases seem to include a change in regular routine. If you can’t grasp that this is possible for anyone then you’re seriously overestimating the human brain.

I have two teenagers; I didn’t bake either of them, but I can see how it might have happened to me; I am human.

Thank goodness **ZPG’s **here to add a little levity to an otherwise far too serious and depressing thread.

I thought it was going to be the Firm Handshake thread, not here.

I completely disagree with Hamlet’s main point.

However, Hamlet correctly identified the presence of logical fallacies in an impassioned post. That’s perhaps tone-deaf – ok, certainly tone-deaf – but accurate from a debate perspective nonetheless.

There is no reason to heap abuse on the guy. He disagrees with this point, and I understand his viewpoint just fine. Before I read that article, I’d have been making the same point he has. His disagreement does not make him an asshole.

The very desire to make the point makes him an asshole. I can just imagine ways to make the point with a chain of disclaimers that just might succeed in making him not an asshole, but none of that happened in this thread. Moreover, sometimes assholes have the right point to make, i.e., not only are they right but it’s important someone say it even if they have to be an asshole to say it, but this is not one of those times.

Nitpick - technically not all have been charged, but cases are (and should be investigated), but you are right that they aren’t getting a pass. How someone can think that this is some “loophole” that people are getting around - a pass my ass?

I mean what do people think would be the appropriate punishment for leaving your kid (by accident) in the car and the kid dies?

Five years, life, death?
What purpose does it serve?
Obviously not deterrence - as most of these people thought it couldn’t happen to them.

No one thinks - better be careful - I might get put in jail - there incentive is not having a dead baby - and that wasn’t enough.

Maybe we should jail people that leave the stove on and burn their house down.

The reason we don’t have (hardly any) airplane crashes is not cause the pilots are super good - it’s because there is a mandated set of procedures that is followed to the otters to prevent these from happening - they were smart enough to realize that people make mistakes - and therefore you need a set of checks and balances to prevent this from happening.

Same reason that hospitals check your name and date of birth before they do shit. Yes they “know” it’s you in the bed, but by putting this procedure in place - and not relying on their memory/brain - is what reduces mistakes.

I can’t imagine the pain having to go to bed next to someone who loves(d) you knowing it was your fault their/your child is dead.

It’s about the most heart breaking thing I’ve read (that article).

Holy fuck, how did I miss this thread?

My reaction when this kind of story makes the news is to thank God, because it could easily have been me.

I do dumb shit all the time, usually involving inanimate objects against which I hold no malice. I have ‘killed’ countless cups of coffee by leaving them on the roof of my car as I drive off. I replaced a flat tire once, and forgot to tighten the bolts (only hand-tightened them) so the doughnut wheel fell off a couple of miles later, and bounced through traffic, once.

If I’m lucky enough to have grandchildren, I’m going to put something I need in the backseat every time I have a child in a car seat.

I keep thinking some sort of super stretchy tether that is connected to the seat and then to the driver. You put the child in the seat, attach the tether, shut the door, climb in your seat and shut that door and you have this innocuous elastic line that serves as a reminder as soon as you get out.

Kind of like the key fob things on treadmills that you attach to your clothes, but even lower tech!

Oh, that’s bullshit. His post would have been fine without the sentence in question. It would’ve been better if he just posted the last sentence.

As Frylock said, he was an asshole because he just had to include those passive aggressive swipes, which makes his last sentence offensively disingenuous.

What about a device that senses when the carseat is occupied and does something when the driver tries to pull the key out of the ignition? A buzzing sound would work. Every day people are prevented from locking the keys in the car just because of that darn buzzer.

A buzzer might wake up a sleeping baby, though. But grouchy baby is better than dead baby.

I am way lower tech than you, woman!

They both have ribs, frequently get wet, and fold easily for storage.

I hope you’ll forgive me for concerning myself more with the thoughts and concerns of the poster I was actually addressing than a third party shit-stirrer like yourself.

Do we? My impression isn’t that we disagree, it’s that I broke some kind of taboo of being overly judgmental, in the Pit of all places, when posters were more concerned with sympathy and commiseration.

I think we, and most of the posters in this thread, agree on this issue. The death of a child in a hot car is a horrible tragedy that can completely ruin the responsible parent’s life. None of us can, or want, to imagine, the pain and suffering that comes with losing a child in a horrible manner, and 10x more when that loss is the result of our own negligence. It is a horrible, horrible thing.

I also think we agree that the parents responsible for the deaths of their child were, at the very least, negligent, and, depending on the specific facts and circumstances of the case, reckless or even intentional. The stories highlighted in the article clearly emphasize the most heart wrenching, most sympathy inducing examples, but even in those, the death of the child was avoidable and the parents negligent.

Despite the strawmen to the contrary, I don’t think these parents are all horrible, unredeemable monsters who need to suffer for their actions. But I’m also not going to let the fact that the horrible deaths were the direct result of their own actions and negligence slide. When I first posted, I thought it was important to point that out, because it had been severely underemphasized in the thread.

And I think you and I, and many others agree on these things. There is likely not, however, any agreement between you and the fanciful strawmen that the namecallers have tried so very hard to create in this thread. Luckily, I don’t agree with those strawmen either.

Thank you for your kind words.

I think the issue is that I apparently misread the thread. Despite being in the Pit, the thread was apparently a place of commiseration and sympathy for the parents in the article, people who will never, ever read this thread or give a single moments thought to anything anyone posts. I came in and pointed out that those parents bear responsibility for the horrible deaths of their children, which, again, I figured was proper in the Pit. But apparently I misread the thread, and underestimated the rapidity, ease, and vehemence in which certain posters would rather resort to name calling, ad hominems, and strawmen than dealing with what I actually posted. Talk about misreading a room.

Thanks for the words, though. They do help.

I don’t think we all agree on that.

Avoidable, perhaps. “Negligent” is your own conclusion. The law of negligence allows for inadvertent errors.

What does that even mean? I see this kind of statement a lot in debates. It means nothing to me. What is “slide”? Either a person is morally culpable, criminally culpable, legally culpable, or has simply committed a horrible error. The first three have societal or legal consequences. What meaning does “let it slide” have in any of this?

Yes it is. And I think most people would agree that parents owe a duty of care to their child and that allowing a child to roast to death in a car is not what a reasonable and prudent person may do. Do you really think that, had it been a babysitter and not a parent who did these acts, that the parents shouldn’t be able to sue the babysitter for breaching their duty to care if they forget a kid and it dies in a horrible manner? For example. Or another. Or another

I honestly didn’t think that anyone would conclude that leaving your child to die in the back seat of a car on a hot day wasn’t, at the very least, negligent. Perhaps not reckless, perhaps not even criminal. But certainly negligent.

You don’t understand “let it slide”? OK, I guess I didn’t expect that either. I intended that term to mean that the responsibility of the actors should not go unmentioned and that in this thread, it was noticeably under-emphasized.

I don’t know if most people would agree to not, but it’s been explained to you mutliple times now why the second conjunct is false.

In fact, it can happen that a reasonable and prudent person might allow a child to roast to death in a car.

If that looks like an impossible claim to you, you haven’t understood the arguments that are being made to show that it is true.

Let’s keep this straight. In general, in this thread, are you talking about legalities or morality?

Here you’re asking a legal question. I think it makes sense for the law to allow such a suit to be successful. I also don’t think it should be a slam dunk win if the facts of the case show that the babysitter acted reasonably and prudently and only caused the death due to the kind of distraction discussed in (for example) the article linked in post two in this thread.

You’re right. I haven’t understood. I had assumed that the “it could happen to anyone” and “it was a mistake”, and “parents screw up sometimes” was about every parent being negligent at one time or another, not that the actions of forgetting your child was in the back seat wasn’t negligent or that parents don’t have a duty to not forget their child.

My misunderstanding certainly makes me feel better about my position though. I do think that forgetting your child is in the car is a negligent act. It may be an understandable, or even forgivable act, that could, indeed, happen to anyone. But it’s still negligent.

Both. Is that a problem?