Seriously, it’s Dio, best to just drop it now.
Generally speaking, and NOT addressing this specifically to Dio, I will venture to say that most likely all of the parents that have had this happen, were 100% confident that it couldn’t happen to them. I actually think it’s probably safer to not be 100% confident that it couldn’t happen to you, because that makes you paranoid and keeps you checking the back seat every day before you go in to work or whatever.
Yes I am. I am vastly different.
I’m not the only one. It would never happen to most parents. “It can happen to anybody” is bullshit.
Yer funny. 
I already do that. That’s why it absolutely can’t happen to me. Parents who do that crap should be jailed for life. They are murderers. I am better they are. I will not be told that I would ever do the same thing. There’s no way in hell.
You say you’re too “keenly aware” to ever let this happen but then you also say:
“I will say that I’ve had lapses for a few seconds when getting out of the car and starting to walk away, but I’ve always caught myself in time. I get the brainfart thing, but I can’t imagine being able to forget for hours at a time.”
You don’t see a difference between those two things? Because you really should.
The parents in the article aren’t murderers and shouldn’t be in jail. They made a terrible mistake that could happen to anyone including yourself. The more aware you are that you are just like them, the less chance there is that you will make the same error.
I’m guessing that a child dies after being left in a car in the US about ten times per year. So the odds that it will happen to any individual are astronomically small.
In the past ten years, I have left my purse somewhere and returned to find it was gone. All my money was gone. Each time this happened, I swore to myself that from now on, I would never carry more than $50 cash at any time and I would take extra measures to ensure it never would happen again. But a few weeks ago, I had to go out to make a large cash purchase (I bought a bed for $700) and I left my purse in a coffee shop that I had stopped into on the way. You guessed it. It was gone and all my money was gone tool.
The point I’m trying to make is that no matter how hard one tries, and no matter what kind of measures one tries to employ to prevent bad things from happening, they can still happen anyway.
It may be extremely rare. It may only be one chance in a billion. But if I can lose my purse three times in ten years from sheer absent-mindedness, I just would hate like hell to send someone to jail for life because they forgot their kid in a car.
I know that leaving a kid in a car is a terrible thing to do, but I also know it is a kind of accident that can happen to any one of us. And frankly, I’m amazed that it happens as infrequently as it does.
In my OP I said that maybe we needed someone to invent a combination alarm clock/bleeper.
But a better idea would be an invention that detects when a child (maybe someone who weighs less than 50 lbs?) is left in a car and the car has been parked for more than a few minutes and the temperature inside the car rises above 80 or 90 degrees.
Then, it should start an alarm (like the car horn) and a big flashing beacon or light or something designed to attract the attention of anyone within a few hundred yards of the car. Or maybe even better would be to call 911?
There is no contradiction. A few seconds is not a few hours.
I am not just like them, and you do have to put parents who do this in jail or you’re just giving people a legal way to kill their kids on purpose and get away with it by saying it was an accident.
Put innocent people in jail as an example to would-be murderers? You’re right, you aren’t just like them. They’re sane and you are something else entirely.
How are they “innocent?” Because they feel bad about killing their children? Because they did it negligently and not intentionally? You’re just having your heartstrings tugged because middle-class white people are going to jail for something. Grow up.
Except I haven’t accidentally killed my kids.
I sort of get the oh-yes-it-can-happen-to-you mentality. But the odds are astronomical to the point where I will gladly call it a 100% certainty I won’t do this. Since I’ve now posted twice about it, and given my nature, I’m equally guaranteed to stay vigilant as much out of spite than thoughtful parental care. Super-pinky-shotgun-in-mouth-suicide swear.
They’re not innocent, they killed a baby, and if you don’t want to jail them, then you’re saying it should be legal to leave a baby in a car until it dies. Why do you want to legalize that? That’s horrific.
This is the best you can do? How sad.
I don’t really have much in the way of heartstrings but I dislike hubris. People are fallible. They make mistakes. Sometimes they make really awful mistakes. But if you were to ask me which is worse, a tragic mistake vs. conflating a tragic mistake with a crime, I think it’s pretty obvious which I would choose.
And yes, they’re innocent of any crime. And it has nothing to do with race or class. That you’d even bring something like that into the mix says more about you than anything else.
Because they might grow up to be someone like you.
I don’t post here all that often, but this is one of those issues that I feel pretty strongly about. If you forget your kid in the backseat of your car and it dies, you need to be jailed. It’s not just an “accident”, it’s negligence. I don’t buy the argument that the parents are suffering enough. They let a child roast to death because they were too damned stupid to remember they were in the car.
I have a terrible memory, but not once have I ever forgotten my daughter was sitting happily in her carseat, confident that daddy is going to take her out when the car stops.
I’m thinking something simpler. Something as simple as tying a length of rope on the carseat and then attaching it to the keychain of your car keys would be enough to make sure someone remembered to check the carseat before leaving the car, if we could get enough people to start doing it.
As the article posted here notes, this doesn’t just happen to middle class white people. It happens in every social class and race.
Having had many times where I have driven to a store I routinely go to only to realize after I was done shopping that I have absolutely no memory of where I parked my car because I was on auto-pilot during the drive and parking, I can’t judge these parents too harshly. Maybe in some cases people do purposely do this to kill their child, and in other cases they may do it because they are really awful parents, but I am willing to believe the majority are just normal people who were unlucky enough to make a mistake that had horrific consequences. We all make mistakes. Most of us are just lucky enough that they don’t cause a death.
But it’s not really about you or your children, now is it?
My final thoughts on the matter are this. I see lot of people shouting to let the world know they would be incapable of such a thing but what I don’t see is any empathy for the children involved.
So really, this isn’t about people getting upset that these children died needlessly but more about some people getting off on playing the superiority card. I find that unattractive.
Well, I am superior to them; I’ve never killed my child (or anyone else’s).