We’re not talking about making the decision to smoke or play the stock market. (Or smoke the stock market, for that matter.) It’s a matter of a child’s life. It’s not like the mom could just say “Oops, my bad. I’ll know better next time.”
Having said that, and making a few assumptions, I don’t think what she did was all that big a deal. But I agree that it’s hard to draw the line between no big deal and huge fucking deal.
As the only boy in a houseful of girls(5), I wasn’t allowed to just stay at home alone, so I always brought a book along on their clothes-shopping and hairdresser’s appointments and always found the car a more comfortable place to sit and read than any waiting room or mall “common area”.
I’d have hated being dragged into all those “girlie places” just because some politician thought I’d be too stupid to lock the car door if someone suspicious-looking approached or to honk the horn if he tried to break in. Of course, the boogey man avoided me all of my childhood, just as he did 99+% of everyone else during all of theirs.
“If you go into the grocery store with me, don’t nag me for candy or pop,” was a common admonition,aswell. Frequently, we stayed in the car under those conditions. Whenever I have to put up with screaming kids at the market I wish that Mom and Dad had left THOSE brats in the car–the spare car back home in the driveway!
I don’t even need a newsletter, it’s real simple: GET A BABYSITTER AND LEAVE THE KID AT HOME!!!
We do all sorts of things to minimize risk though. Things like seatbelts, car seats and insurance are all there to minimize risk. The chances of you being in an auto accident, or being in an auto accident involving your child; or your car being stolen or towed is also negligible. Yet I bet everyone in this thread wears seatbelts, uses car seats and buys insurance. Why? Because you only have to have and accident once for those things to be important. Guess what it only takes once to cook your kid in a car in a car too, it only has to be stolen once. The only difference is that we can’t mandate a safety device to prevent that; no insurance covers that, the only preventative measures we have are the judgment of the parents and the community.
It’s not in the linked article, but from my girlfriends’ discussion of the event I read where the police handcuffed Mom and took her to jail, leaving her other 2 children (aged 8 and 9) unattended in Wal*Mart.
The linked article is gone, but here’s the quote someone had posted:
Keep all this in mind next time you wonder why grocery carts don’t always get returned to the corral. There are days when I can do it, but there’ve also been times when it just wasn’t prudent, when they were ornery and wouldn’t have stayed buckled in. Kids can undo seatbelts starting at about age 2.
Oh, and I was paying cash for gas for a while there, when I managed to lose my ATM card.
What’s really ironic and bizarre to me about the whole thing is that the children who are at greatest risk of being snatched and abused by some stranger are the 11-14 yr olds. The older kids left at Wal*Mart were in much greater danger, IMHO.
:rolleyes:
/Tim Conway
Thank you for that there solution, Mr. Genius.
If you’re ever driving through Nevada, you’ll have to. The last time I stopped to fill my tank in Nevada, I had enter my zip code at the pump. It wouldn’t process my transaction as I wasn’t from Nevada, so I had to go inside.
In terms of the actually OP, I don’t think she did anything wrong if the car was actually in sight and she could hear the alarm go off. But she shouldn’t sue over not getting an apology.
I hate zero tolerance policies.
Brilliant. I could bother rebutting this, but I think I’ll just let it sit there in all its craptacular glory, for all to see.
Yeah I can’t figure out why people need that spelled out for them either.
Reminds me of yet another example of my horribly negligent parenting. When driving alone with a kid I often let them sit up front, even after laws were passed saying kids up to a certain age/weight had to be in a child seat in the back.
What I think a somewhat humorous facet of this is the reason laws were passed requiring that the kids be restrained in back - because air bags were required to go off with a force sufficient to restrain an unbelted adult male. Wait a minute. Seat belts are required. But it is also required that air bags go off strongly enough to save someone who ignore the law? How about, instead, simply passing a law that under no circumstances is someone able to recover damages for injuries sustained when unbelted, and letting air bags go off with nonlethal force? 
What, that they should hire a babysitter in order to go to the ATM or drop a letter in a mailbox or do anything else that requires them to step outside their car while (OMG!) children are inside it?
The idea that being outside your car while your children are inside it is always 100% of the time a very dangerous thing to do that can lead to your children being KIDNAPPED or DYING (because, as we all know from watching the news, child predators are stationed every 100 feet along all paved surfaces in the US), is ridiculous. Flat-out ridiculous.
Further, I fail to see how someone could “cook their kid” when they were running a short errand within sight of their car, which are the conditions I mentioned earlier. Every single news article I’ve ever seen, bar none, about kids who died in hot cars, involved either a parent who forgot their kid in a car for an entire day, or who went on a lengthy shopping trip while their kid was in the car. Leaving the car for thirty seconds, or even – GASP! – as much as two or three minutes, is not going to cause heat stroke. Especially on a cool day, which is another of the conditions I mentioned earlier, if you’d bothered to actually read my post.
This nonsense is a lot of hysterical fear-mongering, similar to the line of thought that says that children must not be allowed to play outdoors on their own because one of the aforementioned omnipresent child predators might come along and swoop them out of their yard. What. Ever.
Well, I do pay at the pump, unless I want a bottle of water or something (no smokes, I quit).
But that wasn’t really my point. I could have used the example of running into the grocery to pick up milk, or running into the library to get books, or running into the hairdresser for a trim…I don’t leave stuff that people can take (like my iPod) in my car. I can’t understand leaving a child there, but I don’t have kids. I hate to say this, but you took on the burden, including “too much of a hassle to take them out of the car” when you decided to have kids. And if it is OK for this woman to leave her kid, does the lady getting her hair colored (on average, it takes 1.5-2 hours) get a pass if she can see her car with the kids in it the whole time? And so on?
In what form of math does leaving a child in a car for <5 minutes = leaving a child in a car for 120 minutes?
Yes, mothers do know the difference.
If we couldn’t be trusted to make that kind of judgement in public, then by what logic would we be permitted to raise them WITHIN the home?
Hell, I’ve had 3, and believe me, there are days on which you really wish that all it would take is leaving the kid in the car while you run in for an errand! 
Sorry I got so hung up on the “gas station” scenario. Its just that I was trying to think of a bunch of mindless chores I might do with my young kids in the car. Let’s say I needed to return some books to the library and pick up dry cleaning. No, they don’t ned to be done this moment, and my world won’t end, but the books are due and I’d really like to wear that shirt tomorrow. And I’ve been stuck inside the house with a kid all day and just want to experience the outside world however briefly. And I knwo I’m not the only parent who has found that when a kid is fussy but won’t nap, a car ride might be just the trick.
So I drive to the library, leave the car running in the library parking lot, and walk about 20 feet to the book deposit (no curbside drop-off available) while my baby sleeps strapped in her car seat. Anyone have a problem with that?
Well, if I manage to avoid being carjacked during that errand, I make my way to the dry cleaner’s, where I park immediately in front of the floor to ceiling plate glass windows, lock the car, and step inside the store for the minute or 2 that it takes to pick up my laundry. Are people seriously suggesting that instead of making this a 2 minute transaction (perhaps as little as 30 seconds), I ought to take a minute or 2 to unfasten the kid, either wake them up or carry them with me while I get my clothes, and then spend another minute or 2 strapping them back in - hoping that they did not wake up fussy during the process?
I assume you see where I’m going here. My next stop is the Salvation Army kettle in front of the WalMart - after which I might go to the boat to play the slots for a while.
In my opinion there is somewhat of a continuum. Now I’m not sure exactly where I think leaving a kid of what age in a car for how long becomes endangerment, but personally, I’m comfortable saying a few minutes in front of a WalMart is not, while hours in the hot sun while gambling is. And I think unless there is a pretty overwhelming showing of danger to the kid, this is an area preferably left to parental discretion than government legislation.
Oh, my bad! Wait, no it’s not, since I said in this very thread…
Got me there, oh wait, I didn’t say that either! Just who are you are you arguing with?
You’ve read all incidents of this happening every year and were able to ascertain that the risk for your kids is minimal, good for you. I’m sure you can keep coming up with situations that if every single thing goes absolutely right all the time that the risk will be minimal all those times too. We as society don’t make laws considering optimal conditions in the best possible of all worlds. In this world some parent have bad judgment, some tow truck drivers are inattentive, and a car thief can steal a car in less time that it takes you to walk for your car to the door of the mall.
I just keep hearing stories about cars that have been carjacked with kids in them, kids dying in hot cars, parents leaving their kids in the car for hours…so obviously not ALL mothers know the difference. Your <5 minutes might be someone else’s “they will be OK for a half hour”. Should it be judged on a case by case basis? Where is the line?
Nobody’s ever managed to outlaw stupidity.
The line is being a responsible adult and judging each situation for what it is.
The latest case of baby dying in a car that I saw was a result of a change in routine. I think it was the Dad who simply forgot that he had the baby that day.
There are a LOT of headlines about that kind of thing, because it’s so bizarre. Not because it’s the biggest RISK. Headlines give us a really skewed perspective.
I think it is very simple. If you are close enough, and paying enough attention, to return to your car immediately if a cop shows up then it is okay. If you aren’t, it is not. Under this principle it really doesn’t matter what the law is. Even if a cop does cause problems, I have a hard time believing a case where a parent was right there would go very far.
Wow, this IS simple! Let’s just abrogate common sense and use all means necessary to guard against every conceivable danger, no matter how unlikely or remote!
In fact, I have decided to take a few more precautions based on the wisdom contained in this post. I live in a bungalow with my husband and my two kids under three. Sometimes, when my husband isn’t at home, I like to do some laundry. My laundry room is in the basement. My children’s rooms are on the main level. I guess I could wake them both up from their naps to cart them downstairs to throw a load in, because, you know, someone might break into the house in those two minutes and spirit them away. I think I’ll just hire a babysitter instead, to sit in the hallway between the kids’ bedrooms while I’m downstairs. But, that babysitter won’t be able to see both kids at the same time, and maybe someone could crawl in one window when she’s tending to the other kid. Better hire two babysitters, one to watch each kid while I’m downstairs. Plus one extra in case one of the other two has to go to the bathroom at some point.
Or maybe not.
Please provide cites for instances where harm came to children that were left for a few minutes in a locked car with the ignition off, on a cool day, within sight of their parents. Which are the conditions I mentioned earlier and have not deviated from. Make sure you provide at least a couple of cites per year for the last several years, since apparently this sort of thing happens “every year.”
It shouldn’t be hard to turn up information on this, as the news is happy to pounce on stories about small children coming to harm.
Here’s the thing I’ve pulled up before, from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, here (where they explain the different types of abductions). The numbers are from 2002.
Frankly, I think children who are home being babysat by young adult males are at much greater risk than those left in cars. I’ll see if I can find some numbers to back up my assertion.
…percent of… number of…number of
…70,000,000…“stereotypical”…rough…non-family…rough
Age (years)…child population…kidnappings…likelihood…abductions…likelihood
0–5…33%…20…1 in million…4,300…2 in 10,000
6–11…34%…24…1 in million…6,800…3 in 10,000
12–14…17%…45…1 in 250,000…13,000…1 in 1,000
15–17…17%…20…1 in 500,000…34,100…3 in 1,000
This is so frustrating - I know I saw it on a headline in the past couple of months, but I have lousy Google-fu.
Here’s the one piece I can find, from msnbc last fall. Long story short, 500 kids die from abuse each year in the U.S., and a child living in a home with unrelated adults is 50x more likely to suffer abuse.