IIRC about ten years ago, when JFK Jr. crashed his plane, there was a call to add safety equipment to small aircraft. It later turned out that he never should have attempted the flight in the first place, since he didn’t have enough experience. I get nutty when people think we can add more idiot-proofing because it takes the blame off the individual and tries to incriminate the design. The blame game is too common in modern U.S. society.
It’s sad that they think people would never forget a briefcase, but they’d forget a freakin’ baby. And they’re probably right. :mad:
Even if they are stupid, why should their children have to suffer for that?
Besides, from what I’ve read, a lot of times it’s due to people breaking habit (i.e., they don’t always take the baby out), or just because they’re on autopilot–not really stupidity.
Exactly, it happened to a man at my mother’s office a few years ago. He wasn’t stupid or uncaring he just had never before had to drop the baby off on his way to work.
It could happen to just about anyone. You could be distracted by a near accident on the road and it wouldn’t be too hard to forget you had the baby especially when most parents of infants are seriously sleep deprived.
For simple I like putting a purse or briefcase in a spot where you’ll have to see the baby to get it. Or the parent who usually drives the kid to wherever could call the other parent to check up on things.
Actually they’ve had a safety device out for over 100 years. It’s called string and you attach it to the child seat and your key ring with a quick release clip. A version of that would be a retractable key ring reel.
It wouldn’t be hard for car makers to wire a relay through all the seat belts so if any of them were buckled when the ignition was shut off it would buzz. They could make the buzz sound like a crying baby to drive home the point. Would probably cost $5. maybe they could make the sound downloadable. “hey youse up there in the front, I’m swetin my bawwls off back hear”.
Some of you may think this harsh, some of you may think this funny…
People that leave their kids strapped into solar ovens (ie, cars in hot parking lots) are just Darwin Award winners by proxy…
FML
Yeah, it remiinds me of an article I read a couple years back, about some consumer groups wanting some sort of anti-fire device on cars which would save maybe 100 lives a year, and automakers saying “buckling your belt would save tens of thousands and they’re already in place.”
“We love you more becasue we chose to cook you!”
KneadToKnow, I don’t think your jokes are appropriate to a thread about children that have died painful and unnecessary deaths. If you don’t have an idea or an opinion to contribute, please start your own joke thread in MPSIMS to poke all the fun at the deaths of children at the hands of their parents as you wish.
Laugh of the day:
I am all for the leaving-the-purse-in-the-back strategy. I’m not a parent, but when I’m sleep deprived or distracted I’ve found myself walking into traffic or nearly creamed by a subway because I leaned out to see if the train is coming and I was looking the wrong way. If I had been killed I would have been called stupid too, and rightly so I suppose, but we all do stupid, even life-threatening things on occasion.
Not that this is any excuse for leaving your kid in a car fer chrissakes, but the decades-ingrained habit of picking up your purse out of the car before you exit (provided you don’t routinely forget your purse like my mom does) can help keep people from forgetting their newer habits, such as parenting.
think of it as a sad example of evolution in action…
it is doubtful that parents who do this will have any genetic advantage over those who are wise enough to refrain from cooking their kids alive in a car…
regards
FML
Here’s one solution:
That figure of 50 children dying in hot cars – was that just for children that were ‘forgotten’, or does that include children deliberately left in cars because a parent was ‘just running into the store for a minute’? (Not to mention those who have gone to have their hair done, or gone gambling in a casino, etc.)
Because no kind of ‘don’t forget the baby’ alarm is going to work if the parent isn’t actually forgetting the baby. 
My apologies to Nawth Chucka and the thread.
FWIW, both remarks I have made have been at the expense of the parents who committed these crimes, not at the children victimized (one was intended to say that people who can’t properly take care of children shouldn’t have them, the other was an admittedly much too Robot-Chickenesque take on something an adopted friend of mine grew up hearing which just made her parents sound stupid).
Nevertheless, assholishness is in the perception, not the intent. My sincere apologies.
That’s so true. The only answer this lady had for the judge in her trial was “I was too stupid to know it would kill them.” She was smart enough to come up with a story, though. IIRC, she was also pregnant at the time. It sticks out in my mind as one of my housecleaning clients had just given up on fertility treatments (after years of operations and shots and miscarriages) and we saw this story on the news at the same time in her kitchen. She almost threw up. Eventually, Tara Maynor got 12 1/2 to 60 years in prison.
I found an article about how mothers are convicted more and do more time than fathers in these instances.
Re: the concept of tying a heartbeat or CO2 monitor to the theft alarm… that only works if the parent is in hearing range. Most people ignore car alarms that aren’t theirs, so it’s unlikely a passing stranger would notice anything out of the ordinary. A buzzer if the key is removed when seatbelts are still buckled might be more effective; it’d also make it more difficult to “accidentally-on-purpose” leave a kid in the car.
That’s gracious of you, thank you. Apology accepted.
Child seats are a total pain to buckle in. The carseat or the base of the baby-haulin’ bucket system get buckled in once and stay there if at all possible until it is time to move up to the next size of carseat. The buzzer indicating a buckled belt would become an ignored nuisance pretty fast.
It would be trivial to install solar powered ventilators in cars to keep the air inside from exceeding the outside temperature. Not only would this be a good safety feature, but it would be a considerable convenience to anyone who parks in the sun during the summer months.
You can buy some underpowered solar ventilators to slip in the windows, but a built-in system with a decent solar panel would be far more effective.
The idea of an alarm going off if the seatbelt is still fastened won’t actually work. A carseat is buckled into the car all the time, whether or not there’s a child in it. The child is buckled into the carseat with belts that are separate from the car’s belts. And for newer cars, the LATCH system allows carseats to be attached to the car without the seatbelt being used at all. The alarm would have to be incorporated into the carseat itself.
I’m inclined to think the heartbeat thing would be the best bet, as some people don’t bother with carseats at all.