I, too, wouldn’t judge the mom too harshly especially when I don’t know the details of what happened. The OP’s article mentioned there were other kids. The mom might have been buried in “Mom, I spilled milk!”, “Mom, lookit! Mom, lookit! Mom, lookit!” and “Mom, WHERE’S my SANDWICH!”. And when things quieted down, she checks on baby and realizes (too late, sadly) that baby is still in the car. It’s possible that she’s a negligent parent who deserves to be jailed but I won’t rush in and join the lynch mob until I know more.
What an excellent idea!
It might be better as an electronic implementation.
But, simplisity is always acceptable.
Good on you!
I was coming here to post that article because it completely changed my mind on the subject (nice to see that the Pulitzer people appreciated it as well). It also has an interesting analysis of the phenomenon we are seeing here where people get extremely angry and want to punish the parents involved. I don’t have children, but I could see this happening to me and in some way I think that knowing that it could occur to you makes it less likely to occur.
The good news is that it is extremely unlikely that anybody posting in this thread will ever face this situation and I personally hope that nobody here ever does.
Several people in that article also had multiple children. Just because you haven’t forgotten *yet *doesn’t really mean anything.
Also, when MsWhatsit said:
you replied:
but earlier you said:
So if you check the carseat every single day when you go to work, how did you manage to leave your kid alone even for a few seconds? Did you just think you’d give her a few minutes to see how the hot car felt? Or do you not actually check the back seat every day?
After reading that article (which brought me to tears many times), I feel that being unintentionally responsible for the slow, painful death of your child is the worst possible thing that could happen to a parent. Enough to drive any sane man off the edge. Too horrible a thought for a parent to even consider.
Which is why I feel an understanding with the parents here who swear on their lives that they would never, ever have it happen to them. Many parents who had it happen to them did in fact consider suicide for months, years after the fact. It is just too sickening a thought to admit. But that doesn’t mean it can be ignored.
This happens. When bad parents do this purposefully, it is unforgiveable. That it happens to good people is horrifying and depressing. But it does happen.
The article also mentions that after a NASA scientist accidentally left their child in their car, NASA designed a perfect warning mechanism - one that alerted the parent with a beeper on the keychain when a child was left in the car. It failed because nobody would buy it, because what parent would? Buying a reminding device insinuates the possibility of forgetfulness regarding their child, a disgusting assumption.
All the sensor gadgets in the world won’t prevent this from happening. To quote the story linked above:
I know it’s horrific and repulsive to believe the opposite, and yet I do think, in some cases, children have been deliberately killed this way. Probably not a majority, but I do believe some of them are actually murders.
Think about it. Again from the linked story, in about 40% of cases, the death is determined accidental and no charges are filed. The remaining 60% get charged with various crimes, but not all of those cases end in convictions. If a babysitter or daycare worker were to do the same thing, they would almost certainly have criminal charges brought against them, and probably be convicted; they’re held to a higher standard, yet it is a fact that children are most at risk of harm from their very own parents. In nearly every case, people from prosecutors on down to those who know the accused personally say, “The parent has suffered enough.”
The reality is that if someone really and truly wanted to get out of parenthood, this would be a way to do it with a pretty good chance of it not backfiring. What if Susan Smith or Andrea Yeager had just left their kids in hot cars instead of drowning them? (OK, sure, Yeager had too many for that to be a real alternative, but still.) Of course there has to be mental illness at work, and maybe a Munchausen’s-by-proxy sort of desire for attention, but the result is the same.
I read that story when it first came out, and it just strikes me as so glaringly obvious that over and over, they say the parent was distracted by using their fucking cell phone. Gah. Nobody’s that important! Hang up the damn phone and pay attention to your driving AND the baby in the back seat!
So, nobody defending these parents thinks any of them left their children in the vehicle to avoid them making a scene in a store?
If they had and they weren’t admitting it - who would? - how would anybody know otherwise?
None of these stories involve a store as far as I can tell. The vast majority of the ‘accidentally left the kid in the car’ stories seem to involve parents who were supposed to drop their kid off at day-care, then forgot and went to work. I don’t see how that jives with deliberately leaving them in the car so they wouldn’t make a scene.
Somehow, that seems even less forgivable. I’ve been to the shop and walked away from it after riding there on a bicycle, but I’d never have left a shop and walked away leaving my dog tied to a nearby fence. That someone can actually forget they’ve got a kid with them seems completely unfathomable to me.
On my second baby, (just a week old) I drove out of the driveway in my car (with the first in her baby-seat) and got many miles down the road before I realised ‘something’ was awry. Luckily he was still blissfully asleep in his cot when I got home to retrieve him.
I too read the article MsWhatsit referred to, and I wept for those parents. Fer’ fuck’s sake it COULD happen to anyone of us. Busy, distracted, out of routine…any single one of us could forget that we have a sleeping baby in the car, and we just hope that we are mindful enough to escape the tragedy.
Doggy Knees…get off’ve your self-constructed pedestal mate. Unless you’re a Klingon, you’re just like the rest of us and prone to the same human foibles. Forgetfulness is one of them…in cases like this, even with a baby. So sad. 
For all those that consider it couldn’t be them? you are fooling yourself. A quick wiki (Qwiki?) will provide you with reams of examples where brilliant people find themselves on the end of self-induced tragedy.
And why? myriad reasons. But prime amongst them is being a human and having the sort of reptilian brains that love sequences and don’t react well to small deviations and misdirections.
Ever been fooled by a magician? Ever been on autopilot when driving? ever “lost” something only to find you are holding it? If so, then of course it could be you, just be thankful that it hasn’t been and you’ve been given sufficient warning to put a more foolproof system in place.
The thing about the ‘it was just my routine!’ excuse is that it’s contrary to human evolution. The reason humans are at the top of the food chain is because we have a brain that observes and adapts to changing circumstances. Without our brains, we couldn’t out-compete a lemur. Turning off our brains to the extent that we don’t notice a change in our circumstances -will- get us killed.
Humans: we don’t have good reflexes, we’re not fast, we don’t have a lot of hitpoints, we don’t have built in armor. If anything, we’re sort of squishy. What keeps us going is a brain that is hardwired to notice danger and think about it ways to avoid it. So the humans in that article, who stop noticing things and just turn off their brains - they dind’t just fail they’re child, they fundamentally failed at being humans.
I’m not saying I don’t believe them, individually, when they say that they were too caught up in their routine. I’m saying, I don’t really believe that getting too caught up in a routine to the point where hours go by before they notice a difference, really isn’t something that could happen to everybody. If our brains let that sort of thing happen to us regularly, we’d still be tiny apes somewhere near the bottom of chain.
It is somewhat fascinating, in this thread, to see all of the logical hoops that people will jump through in order to definitively prove that something like this absolutely could not happen to them, and that parents who do have something wrong with them.
I mean, it’s completely understandable: Those people have something wrong with them. There’s nothing wrong with me. Therefore I will never do this. I am safe. My children are safe.
All of the people who left their kids in the car also thought that exact thing.
Also, becoming accustomed to a particular routine is very human and is not contrary to evolution. Anyone who has ever accidentally made the left turn to go to work even though this is Saturday and you’re going to the movie theater instead, knows this.
I want to be clear here that I’m not trying to convince anyone that they’re going to leave their kids in a hot car someday. I’m pretty sure that nobody in this thread will ever do that. I’m pretty sure I will never do that. (Especially since my kids are old enough now to get out of their own seatbelts.) But I recognize that the difference between me - very confident that I will never do this, and very loving and caring towards my children - and the parents who do leave their kids, is very small.
Throwing these people into jail isn’t a deterrent because nobody wants this to happen to themselves in the first place. Do you think that any of the parents in the news article linked up-thread would have remembered their kids in the car if only jail time was a deterrent for them? I don’t.
Monkeys who do that sort of thing regularly, without noticing that this time, say, there’s a python in that tree, or the bridge is out, or there’s oncoming traffic., etc., are monkeys who do not survive to pass on their evolutionary material. Ditto for monkeys who stop paying attention to what they’re doing - not for a momentary wrong turn, but for hours on end - and forget to look after their young. Protecting your young and being aware of a change in your environment are the two evolutionary skills any successful species needs most. The people who leave their kids in the car flunked both of those.
To err is human. To fail to notice that your child has been left in a unusually dangerous place deserves its own category of Darwin Award.
Who said anything about regularly? Evolution doesn’t require that each individual be perfect, only that they be reasonably likely to successfully pass on their genes. Nothing there in any way contradicts the idea that everybody has some small chance of making a fatal oversight.
The bottom line on this “don’t condemn parents for killing their kids because IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU” nonsense is that there must be a reason that people feel sympathetic for THESE criminals and not others. Everyone could potentially do anything. There may be people here who would kill a person for sexually assaulting a family member, or there may be people here who are just off-balance and would run someone off the road for a traffic offense. Maybe you would rob a store if you were deep in debt to the mob, or maybe you would shoplift a little if you were starving. Every day, there’s plenty of poor black kids who get sucked into a violent gang life through basically no fault of their own, but because of generations of poverty and abuse which are traceable back to the trauma of slavery.
And you know what? Those people, who commit crimes for perfectly understandable reasons that could affect anyone here, are still criminals, and we still punish them, and I don’t see any of the people whining about how awful it must be for the murderous parents in this scenario doing any caterwauling about the fates of all of those similar scenario-bound defendants.
Take it a step further. Right now, there are dozens of people, overwhelmingly black people, who are on death row because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and the prosecutorial apparatus needed a conviction to secure a headline. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people in jail for being caught with a politically incorrect plant. Unlike the child-killing parents or the poverty-driven gangbanger, these people are actually innocent of any real wrongdoing, but is the collective wisdom of head-up-its ass suburbia on the SDMB wringing its hands about them? No, it’s all about how terrible it is that we don’t empathize with the killers of infants.
The reason that this hits home with you is because the stories are about people dropping off their kids at day care and commuting to their office job and fretting over the proper rear-facing placement of their car seats. These are stereotypical middle class white people activities. You know what it’s like to do them; you don’t know what it’s like to have a cop burst into your bedroom in the middle of the night without announcing who he is, and then get arrested and sentenced to death for defending yourself against the intruder. You don’t know what it’s like to be beaten for sport, just for walking down the street while being the wrong color, by cops who know that they have total impunity in the American legal/media system. You may or may not know what it’s like to deal with the childhood abuse that is the real cause of crime, though if you do, you certainly have the money and the self-awareness to seek out therapy before you wind up in jail, unlike all the types of people I’ve mentioned.
The people who think that there is any measurable injustice in the U.S. today in putting people who kill their children in jail because “oopsie! I forgot! silly me!”, given all the actual injustice against actual innocent people or people with actual reasons for their crimes, are unable to see past their own unctuous social sphere, and, for that alone, deserve no sympathy if and when it does happen to them.
I feel bad for innocent people who suffer injustice, and I also feel bad for parents that inadvertently forget their children in their car. There is no reason that I can’t do both.
I don’t feel bad for people who sexually assault a family member or who run someone off the road for a traffic offense; nor would I feel bad for someone who deliberately and knowingly left their child in a car to die. Those things are different from the scenario being discussed in this thread.
What is it with you and race? Do you have a really, really large axe to grind?
ETA: Thought we were in the pit.
First, this kind of thing happens at LEAST once or twice a year it seems, which makes it common enough that everyone should be aware of it.
Second, unless you’re from down here, or somewhere similar, you may not really have a good idea of just how hot it can get, and how fast it can get that hot. I haven’t done any scientific studies, but I suspect that if you did leave your kid in the car, they could likely be in trouble inside of 15 minutes, especially if the child was a baby. It’s a totally different ball game than in say… Minneapolis, where their highs today were lower than our lows last night. (79 degree high vs. low of 80 in Dallas). Many days, if you don’t have a sun shield for your windshield, driving is like something out of “Kung Fu”, where you have to hang onto the burning hot object (steering wheel) and can’t drop it.
I’m not excusing the parents, but I do have a lot of sympathy, and a pretty big understanding of just how fast the consequences can add up in weather like ours.
If the parents did leave them in the car on purpose, then they ought to be left in a hot car all day as well; except in Death Valley, not anywhere in Texas.