To the many plausible influences, let’s add this: overheating is more likely in daytime, and freezing is more likely at nighttime. Parents going out in the morning will often be spending the day at work, where the kid’s not supposed to be. But in the evening, parents are coming home, where the kid ought to be running around.
Climbers unable to get back to camp have survived overnight in storms on Everest in just their snow suits.
In cold environments the body has effective ways to preserve heat to stay alive. It can restrict bloodflow to the extremities so that the organs and brain stay viable. That may mean some limbs are lost to frostbite, but the essentials can stay warm for a while. It will also burn a lot more calories and cause you to shiver, which will create heat. As long as your fat stores can be burned, you can keep generating heat.
It hot environments your body can regulate temperature pretty much as long as it has enough water to cool off using sweat. Once there’s no more available water, the body can’t do much else to stay cool and body temperature rises to dangerous levels. One problem with being trapped in a hot car is that the humidity will rise from the evaporated sweat. As the car gets more humid, the less effective the sweat will be at cooling the person off. That’s not really an issue with being in a cold car. In fact, I wonder if raising the humidity in a cold car will act as insulation and help keep the person warmer longer.
but it’s not speculative to assume that kids get left in cars in the winter at the same exact rate year round?
why is the number of kids this happens to not able to fluctuate seasonally?
example using minnows -
I have far more minnows die in minnow buckets in the summer than in the winter.
using your reasoning the answer has to be because the hot temperatures are killing them and the cooler temps are keeping them alive.
that’s one possibility, sure.
but don’t be so closed minded to leave out the possibility that it could also be because I rarely use minnows in the winter time, so the opportunity for me to have as many die is greatly reduced.
Another thing about a child in the car is that they will likely be surrounded by the car seat and wearing clothes. All that adds extra insulation, which can be beneficial in the winter and deadly in the summer. Because the child has so few exposed surfaces, sweating won’t be very effective. So I would guess that even in the summer if the child has enough bodily water to keep sweating, the ineffectiveness of it means the child’s body temperature would probably begin to rise quickly. That wouldn’t happen in cold environments. In the cold the parents would likely have much longer to realize they left the child behind. So even if children are left behind at the same rate in summer or winter, I would guess the negative effects of summer heat would act quicker and create results that we would tend to hear about.
That’s a good point. All the stories I’ve read have been about parents dropping off their kid at daycare, only not doing it, and then going to work.
Vacations, and childcarers (nannies etc) going on vacations.
Honestly, there may well be more babies left in cars in winter. We have no way to know because babies left in cars doesn’t get reported on, summer or winter. Dead babies get reported, and absent extraordinary circumstances, leaving a baby in a car in the winter will not result in death–even in really cold weather, even for many hours. So there isn’t any evidence at all about changes in the rate of babies left in cars.
I thought about that possibility for a moment - but that’s not the sort of deviation that usually results in tragedy. Like you, most of the stories I’ve seen involve a parent who was supposed to drop the kid at daycare and didn’t. * And the deviation in nearly all of them was that the parent driving the kid to daycare that day didn’t normally do the dropoff - that parent’s normal routine was to drive directly to work and they did so. That wouldn’t apply to a family vacation ( no one is following the normal routine) and I can’t see why it would apply to a nanny’s vacation - I never used a nanny, but I can’t imagine a family that did would somehow get the kid into a daycare for a week or two while the nanny is on vacation.
- I’ve never heard of an accidental case involving a school age child or where the parent ended up anywhere other than at work or home. Older kids, and those who die when a parent was shopping were intentionally left in the car.
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Assuming the OP’s premise is true, and I’m too lazy to confirm, it occurs to me that the geographic footprint of places that get cold enough to kill a kid in a car is smaller than the places that get hot enough to kill a kid in a car, possibly considerably smaller. If so, the mortality and morbidity rate would be less, even if the occurrence was the same.