When a person does something that involves lack of appropriate attention, it’s known as being “careless”. Technicially, it’s quite correct to say that those parents “don’t care” about their children. Does this equal “not love them”? Probabaly not. But the lack of the attention to detail that they SHOULD be paying regarding their children’s safety IS lacking. It’s not their.
Perhaps, in every other area of this child’s life, these are loving and attentive parents. And perhaps some of the other posters should have stipulated this statement “not caring about your children” to be specifically targeting their safety. But considering the ease with which a person CAN make sure that their children are safe in a vehicle, you gotta be a SPECIAL kinda stupid to not even make the effort to snap the child’s seatbelt.
Hearing about some child being dragged to death because mommy had to have her Krispy Kreme fix and couldn’t spare the time to even lock the car door, IS enough to make a reasonable person sick to their stomach.
As far as should they be imprisoned for it? Considering all of the deaths and injuries to children injured or killed due to not being seatbelted in, or in a carseat. Hell yes there should be some consequence. Better some community service a night or two in jail and a whopping fine than yet ANOTHER child die when it could have been completely preventable.
The difference is, and you said it yourself, " I would have seen him anyway when I got to work (I mean, even if he’d fallen asleep and was quiet, there is no way I’d have missed him),…", that a person who was THINKING, and had that natural caring parental instinct going on, WOULD look, just as a matter of course.
See, THAT is the thought process and action of a caring, responsible, reasonable, THINKING person. You would have noticed anyway. When one becomes a parent. Things change, your thinking changes (or should), and you are always aware of that little mite of humanity.
Again, you have to be a special kind of idiot to “forget” a child in a car.
Not to mention, I have never been able to figure out, who in HELL, children or not, doesn’t take a quick last look at their car before leaving it to make sure it’s “locked up, that you’ve got your lunch, workout clothes, work papers, etc”???
How the hell long does it take to glance at the back seat of your vehicle as you’re locking the door, slipping your purse over your shoulder and walking past the back of it??? I mean what the hell?? Do these people get to work, point their heads up to the sky, lock the doors while averting their heads completely from the vehicle, and don’t even see it as they’re walking by it? It doesn’t even make sense on a purely physical/logical point of view, let alone whether or not they care enough about their children.
Having your carseat not installed 100% up to what the fire or police department determines to be “correct” is a FAR cry from having had three brand NEW ones given to you, and not even attempting to install them AT ALL.
And no, they’re not hard to install. And yes, the police and fire statistics state that they’re “not installed correctly”. Some people interpret that to mean that they’ve been installed so that they’re completely useless, as useless as if the child were NOT belted in.
What the statistics REALLY mean, is that they are perhaps not quite tight enough (which isn’t a matter of incorrect, but of the mom’s not having the upper body strength to get the damn belts all the way as tight as they should be), and things such as you mentioned like they’re not being kneed in far enough.
Not installed correctly does NOT necessarily = not still safe and useful. Unless the person has got the thing fastened around one leg of the carseat, or not fastened in at all, the point is, that using the stupid things is the caring thing to do, not having the child sitting on some teenager’s lap, unrestrained, in the front seat.
I doubt you’d see anywhere near the what you call “self-righteous” attitude if the it WAS a case of a child having been injured due to a carseat not having the belt tight enough, or being kneed in far enough to the seat (correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe there’ve been any injuries or deaths due to that).
And if installations of carseats WERE that big a problem, and were to mysteriously start causing serious injuries and deaths, then again, parents who didn’t take advantage of a simple solution, that of visiting the local police or fire department, would again, be SOME kinda stupid.
It’s the attitude behind the actions that I think people are objecting to so strenuously, not so much the actions themselves. I, like many others here, don’t believe that such horrible accidents would happen without the attitudes that are behind them.