again, the problem is with the word “negligence”. It doesn’t automatically mean a criminal event. It’s not a crime to forget something. It’s a tragedy when something bad happens as a result. But it is not necessarily a crime.
Which has nothing at all to do with my post.
Easy. Parents have known both sides of this, and non-parents have only been on one side. I know how I felt before I had kids (“I could never possibly leave my kid in a hot car”) and I know how I feel now (“I can totally understand how it is possible to forget the kid in the car”).
If you haven’t had kids, you can only possibly know the before.
I doubt most parents read news stories about a child dying in a hot car and shrug, “Oh, it’s just a death, nothing to take seriously,” but then read about jail time and suddenly change their mind, “Oh, jail time? I’d better check my car twice from now on to make sure I didn’t forget my kid!”
Excuse me.
Some of us who do not have children of our own nonetheless have both sufficient experience with caring for children (baby-sitting, visits, etc.) or invalids (dying parents, for example, that require extended care similar to that of a toddler or infant) and sometimes with other endeavors in life requiring a high level of vigilance for extended periods, can ALSO understand how it is possible for this sort of thing to happen.
Do I understand on a gut level what it is to be a parent? No. But I have sufficient life experience to reach an intellectual understanding. Not quite the same thing, but it does increase my empathy for parents.
Agreement. I’ve driven around with my computer in the back seat of my car, and you can be darn sure I never forgot it and left it!
:rolleyes:
That’s not what I meant and you know it.
A comparison was made upthread with flight and this sort of situation. Successfully completing and airplane flight requires you to perform a certain sequence of actions correctly every single time. Despite training, checklists, and severe injury or death being a possible consequence of a screw-up I don’t know a single pilot who hasn’t had an occasional brain fart. Fortunately, there are redundant backup systems in place (in most aviation) such that a brain fart is seldom fatal. But it can be.
An inexpensive, easy to use alarm system for cars to warn of a baby or child in the back seat would go a long, long way towards reducing these deaths to even fewer numbers than currently occur and would be more effective than punishing after the fact. Rather than insist that people be perfect 100% of the time, which we know they won’t be, we should use our ingenuity to come up with ways to compensate for known human imperfections.
Doing that has made aviation the safest form of transportation despite the inherent risks of leaving the ground. Doing that has vastly improved the safety of modern surgical anesthesia. There are probably other examples out there. Rather than harangue parents I’d prefer to see someone come up with something helpful and likely to reduce deaths.
Since when is a standard of not strapping your kid into a car seat, driving somewhere, then forgetting them there, leaving them to bake to death in the hot sun such a high unreachable expectation that it should be deemed “perfection”? I think it’s perfectly fine to expect parents to not make egregious, fatal mistakes with their kids. Will some “good people” still make such mistakes? Sure, but given that 99.99% of parents can manage to not make such mistakes, achieving this level you deem perfection, maybe we should stop pretending we need expensive devices on every car to prevent a handful of people from being negligent.
When you have a duty to provide a basic standard of care, a fatal accident can rise to a criminal matter. Doesn’t matter if other people did it, or if “it could happen to anyone”.
Once the various guestlings were used to cars enough to not wail every time we went somewhere, but still small enough to not be easily seen in the mirror, that’s exactly what I did
I’d be more than happy to dig something up as soon as you make it possible for me to understand exactly what it means to be you. I didn’t say non-parents couldn’t understand anything about being a parent, I said non-parents can’t understand what it means to be a parent. I can understand some of what it means to be you, but I can never understand truly what it means to be you. Can you truly understand what it means to be fully responsible in every sense of the word for the life and well being of another human? For making all the sacrifices large and small, mundane and extra-ordinary to insure they survive and hopefully prosper as well balanced and productive positive members of society, of knowing that this human looks on you with (hopefully) total adoration and is completely and totally dependant on you for all needs and wants. Can you understand the emotional attachment and involvement resulting from all of this?
Your position that all accidental car deaths of this nature are and should be criminally prosecuted smacks of legalistic thinking without any hint of that thing that we give judges, prosecutors and juries discretion for; humanity. Your position is, to me, utterly depraved and inhumane.
Yes, there are some people this postion is absolutely the correct position. These are the hitters, the truly neglectful, the actually criminally negligent, the ones who leave their children at home alone in a place filled with trash and garbage and a baby in a diaper that hasn’t been changed in days and the kids are slowly starving.
It is for the sake of mercy and humane treatment of others. that some of these cases are NOT prosecuted criminally. If all such accidents were treated as you would prefer, before long we all, parent or not, be convicted felons.
All of us will be convicted felons? Are you joking? How many homicides - intentional or unintentional - do you think people are involved with during their lifetimes?
I don’t have kids and it only took me reading the article that was linked near the beginning of the thread and putting 2 + 2 together (IE: these never happened before children were forced into the back by fears over airbags). Add in how easily people can get distracted when they’ve got a million things going on and out of their routine and it makes me wonder how
anyone doesn’t understand. Or thinks so judgmentally.
no I am not joking, I specifically and purposefully did not say murderers, but convicted felons all the same. Everybody has, or will have a slip of the mind due to whatever set of circumstances that if we lived in a world as restrictively simplistic and legalistic as the one Pantastic’s argument implies, would lead to at least one felony conviction for everyone.
missed the edit window.
I do need to acknowledge what broomstick said about invalid care being pretty much the same as child care in many respects.
End of Life care maybe, but the outcome and emotions are so very different that its somewhat difficult to see a complete direct comparison.
Baby sitting doesn’t really give you the full or true experience, its like the difference between being married/civilly unionized/whatever your locality calls it to your SO and merely living with them.
I emotionally get what you are saying here, and I agree with your conclusion (after being a parent I can totally understand how it happens).
But in real life, my emotional gut instinct doesn’t hold true with a lot of things about parenting. And I don’t even mean criminally awful parents. But other parents, who seem to be getting their kids raised and at school and moderately civilized, pop out with stuff about parenting ALL THE TIME that boggles my mind. So being a parent in and of itself doesn’t seem to create a whole bunch of universal views.
Likewise, I had some views about parenting that completely changed for me pre-kid to post-kid. At the same time, I also had some other views that stayed the same – so going back in time, high five to the non-parent me! Thus I figure that other non-parent people might also have perfectly valid viewpoints about child issues. I might not agree with them, but I don’t think the disagreement is necessarily because they aren’t parents.
I have three kids. My wife and I, who both work, are on a rigorous daily schedule that involves, day in and day out, the exact same routine. To the minute. It is rote, it is tedious, it is boring and it works. But, if something comes up (and it does), and messes with that routine, it is not unusual for my brain to still be in routine mode. I can, very easily, understand that a kid gets left in a car under these circumstances. There but for the grace of god have gone I.
I have never taken care of a dying parent, and I would not presume for one second that my experience as a parent is a surrogate. And, I know it won’t convince you otherwise, but occasional babysitting is not remotely similar to what I’m describing here. But, my example here is more to talk to non parents who think that it is only these horrible self centered people, and that they could never do such a thing, and you do appear to understand that anyone could do this.
Right, which is why I said any such incident should be investigated. That doesn’t mean it should automatically be prosecuted.
I mean, parents should supervise their kids near bodies of water so they don’t drown, right? But it still happens. Parents shouldn’t back over their kids with the minivan, but it still happens, right? Actually, both of those fatal accidents are much more common than kids roasting in hot cars, they just don’t get the national publicity.
Humans can’t be perfectly vigilant 100% of the time.
I specifically said it wasn’t the same thing, however, chasing after a toddler for an afternoon can give one some insight into the job. End of life care is likewise be a round-the-clock on call 24/7 situation where your life can be taken over by someone else’s needs. A little extrapolation can lead a reasonable person to understand that yes, parenting can at times be so overwhelming that a person can lose track of things that, from the outside, should be “obvious”.
Parents aren’t perfect, yet increasingly society and the law expects them to be. It’s one thing to set a very high standard, another to set an impossible one.
Comparing notes with my sister who has done both apparently there is some significant overlap.
I’ve cared for more than one dying parent. You are correct in that until you go through the experience you don’t know on a gut level what it is like. However, it is possible for someone who hasn’t gone through it to gain an intellectual understanding of the situation than enables them to better empathize with someone who is going through it.
There are a bunch of situations - going to war, surviving a catastrophe, having a loved one commit suicide - that can’t be understood fully unless one experiences it for oneself. However, I refuse to throw up my hands and say if someone hasn’t gone through it they can have NO understanding whatsoever. That’s just ridiculous.
My experience with occasional baby-sitting (both actual babies and dying adults) gives me an understanding of the level of attention needed to keep the baby-sat out of trouble. Having had to wake up at two hour intervals to tend to the needs of another human being even when I’m exhausted myself does give me some insight (chasing a hallucinating mother around the house at 2 am in order to keep her from turning on the stove and setting the house on fire, or tripping over her oxygen hose, or wandering outside into the snow in her nightie, IS a lot like chasing a two-year old around the house except she’s a lot bigger, taller, and can operate things like switches and doorknobs even better than a two-year old. And you can’t physically pick her up and carry her to her room in the same way you can a toddler in order to keep her out of trouble. Had two months of that at one point). My experience with various other things requiring vigilance and responsibility also have taught me a great deal. It is those very experiences that allow me to extrapolate when thinking about issues like this and make me more sympathetic and understanding of parents, even if I don’t, as I’ve said, fully understand actually being a parent.
See, you don’t have to be a parent to be a responsible human being. In fact, that notion that parenting somehow makes you responsible if you weren’t before is a pernicious idea, just as the idea that not being a parent means you’re irresponsible. There are plenty of people who reproduce who still shouldn’t be trusted to take care of a goldfish, much less another human being, and plenty of people who haven’t, for whatever reason, reproduced but could make fine parents if that situation arose. Those people who are and have been responsible also usually have some understanding that even the most responsible of human beings make mistakes, get distracted, or otherwise suffer from less than perfection. Most of the time when that occurs nothing permanently bad happens, but once in awhile it’s tragic.
No crime is automatically prosecuted, so your point makes no sense whatsoever.
What does any of this have to do with whether a crime has been committed? Again, if it’s so easy for such a thing to happen, why don’t we see these fatal accidents more often? Why do you never hear about some guy allowing his kids to bake in a car more than once? You don’t even hear of close friends or relatives of someone who did this doing it themselves. I don’t even see people who’ve had more than one preventable fatal incident involving a kid where they were at fault. If this were truly random, you probably would, no?
Several points here:
First, these incident are, in fact, rare. About 35-40 kids a year, each a tragedy, but in a country the size of the US (over three hundred million people, 1/3 of a billion) that’s actually a very low rate. A quick google gives 700 kids a year drowning as just one example of a more common form of death. What these deaths are, are publicized and sensationalized so they seem more common and prominent than they actually are.
Second, this site claims 29% of such deaths are children playing in unattended vehicles with no adults involved. Kid climbs in a car, shuts the door, is overcome by heat and passes out… tragedy ensues.
Third, most sources on line that I’ve read use the phrase “parents and caregivers” which implies that “caregivers” besides just parents are involved in some of these cases. How certain are you that none of these cases involve people other than parents?
Fourth, I expect any parent involved in something like this is going to become hyper-vigilant if they retain custody of any remaining children, and it wouldn’t surprise me to find it never happens again because they do, in fact, lose custody of their remaining children in some cases. Given the rarity of this happening at all, having lightning strike twice is even more unlikely.