Child left in car in 35 degree heat

So upsetting.
Heatstroke causes confusion so that might be why she didn’t get out. Probably she’d been told not to leave the car. Poor little girl. Family circumstances must have been very bad if she had to be in the car all day, rather than left at home alone which although far from ideal would be better than in a car. She was left at 6am, it isn’t clear whether she was checked on at all.

The 9yo is really surprising. I'd have thought she'd have tried to get out the car.

God only knows how her poor mum must feel. Because yes it would have been safer to have left her at home. But maybe home wasn't ideal either, abusive partner etc.

I presume she could have just gotten out through the front door of the car but probably been told not to leave under any circumstances. She wouldn't have realised how much danger she was in, she d have just gone unconscious at some point

Agree with this.
We have also evolved to live in a very different way to this. In small communities with multiple people watching children. Humans have only had a few decades of both parents having cars, and both parents working. When I was little we all walked to school. Mums didn’t generally work outside the home, that was just starting to be more common . Babies didn’t go to nurseries, children started infants school at three or four. So these car trips, dropping off babies with other people, driving them there in a car, it’s really, really new.

Hopefully with more awareness of just how easy it is to drive on autopilot and forget a baby, checks will become more automatic .

I'm surprised a 9 year old wasn't able to alert anyone, beeping the horn etc. Obviously should never have been left there in the first place

Now the current case in the media in the Texas (one of 3 children to die in hot cars over the weekend I'm Texas I think) of a 9yr old left in the car while her mom worked an 8 hour shift seems to be different to the norm in that mom seems to have intentionally left her there. Yes you can be v under pressure re childcare and losing your job but tbh the child would probably have been safer left at home on their own

Do read it. You will not need to read it more than once. It is harrowing but it should be compulsory reading IMHO.

I wonder if the increase in air con in cars has had an effect. You used to get out of a car in heat hot and sticky but now you arrive cool because of AC.

We do so much on automatic pilot. Everyone has gone up/down stairs or into another room and thought, "What did I come in here for?"

I would occasionally give a friend a lift home after doing something together, shopping or coff, it doesn't matter.

I have lost count of the number of times he said, "are you kidnapping me?" as I took the turning to my place rather than his.

A grown adult, in the passenger seat who I was talking to.

You might think "It will never happen to me", well so what? You wear a seat belt, your car has air bags, ABS lots of things to help in a crash even though you never intend to crash.

If you start putting your bag next to the baby, or do the 'WTF?' someone highlighted earlier in the thread and you never forget your child, fine, well done you, but if you start doing it and one day you forget you will have that sinking feeling as you realise your child is in the car, and that has got to be a million times better than a dead child.

Ah America. They've given people twenty plus year sentences over stuff like that...

My car (Japanese) flashes a seatbelt sign if I put something heavy on the passenger seat, so I imagine it's the same sort of thing. I don't have young children anymore.

There are different methods.

One sort goes on weight on the back seat (I assume you zero it after installing the car seat). This is like the unfastened seatbelt detectors in British cars.

You can get one that detects movement in the car.

Another type alerts if you opened the car rear door before setting off but not at your destination.

The above tend to be installed in a new car.

The Italian legislation apparently requires ones that have a pad in the car seat that detects weight and alerts a phone via Bluetooth if the phone goes a certain distance from the weighted pad. This can obviously be used in any vehicle and doesn’t need any sort of factory fitting.

This. And ‘not buying it’ makes it more likely this will happen because nobody takes precautions against the impossible.

It’s the Mark Twain quote - ‘it’s not what you don’t know that gets you in trouble, it’s what you do know that’s not so’.

Psychologically your refusal to 'buy it' is motivated by your need to protect yourself from fear - you don't want to admit that good people can make honest mistakes because if that were true this awful situation could happen to you.

But sadly the truth is that good people do make mistakes.

The best way to avoid this happening is to accept it could happen. One suggested way to make it less likely is to make a fixed habit of ALWAYS checking the car seat before walking from the car, or always putting your handbag on the back seat.

A couple of posters have mentioned alarms in Italian cars.
How do they work? I can't get my head round an alarm alerting to children in car seats when the seats are a separate thing to the car

Ahh Thank you, I’ve been avoiding the news recently
How tragic and so easily preventable

That piece won a pulitzer prize - it's an incredible article but as you say, very tough and heartbreaking reading. I read it years ago and some of the details are absolutely etched on my brain. I find it hard to imagine a scenario that must be harder for a parent to live with than this, I just don't know how you would ever even begin to get past it.

But that's data about one very specific instance of routine change processing failures.

My husband regularly forgets to brush our son's teeth in the morning, so much that I've had to teach my 20m old to ask for his teeth to be done.

My husband isn't a bad dad - he's just not always responsible for teeth brushing, and when he is, it's on slightly stressful mornings.

I forget too for similar reasons (though far less often because I had longer on mat leave).

You'd need to put together ALL instances of routine change based parenting lapses to know how often parents are susceptible to these errors (and pull in non-parenting too while while you're at it).

One of the reasons I come across as an anxious parent is because I fully recognise my ability to unintentionally do stupid things and it terrifies me that I might inadvertently injure someone in my care. Sometimes I wish I could go through life oblivious to it all.

If I remember that article correctly, (which I would again advise not reading) one parent drove to work, the baby was asleep or silent in the back seat and she forgot all about the baby, ran into work and her car alarm kept going off several times during the day and she kept knocking it off with her keys. At no point did it even register that the baby was setting it off. She honestly had no recollection of not dropping the baby off. I remember going from thinking ‘but how could your FORGET about your child, they are the main focus of your mind, but then after reading it thinking ‘if that can happen her, it could happen to me, it could happen anyone’

I myself have driven to and from work and not remembered the journey.

Consider also that the maternity leave in America is shite, they get about 15 minutes off after giving birth so these are very very tired parents and very tiny babies also.

It happened to a baby the same age as mine a few years ago very near where I live in Ireland and unfortunately was on one of the extremely rare very hot days here, the dad went into work and the baby died.

That article frightened me so much that from
then on, if I was travelling alone from with the baby I would put her in the front seat.
Which is not safe either but I weighed it up and decided to turn off the airbag and put her in the front.

It could happen to anyone.

I never have either - and I have two now-adult children - but I'd never say "serves them right" about the worst thing that could possibly happen to a person.

I’ve seen an article on this (which I can’t now find) which describes this as ‘the right stuff’ argument.

During WWII when pilots were dying every day, some would say that their friends and colleagues who were shot down died because they didn’t have ‘the right stuff’. Reassuring themselves that they did have ‘the right stuff’ let them push past the fear of being next and keep flying.

In this case, the argument is ‘only bad parents have children that die, I am a good parent so it will never happen to me’.

Sadly burying one’s head in the sand like this makes it more likely something will happen because no precautions are taken.

I think there’s a bit in that WaPo article that suggests the reason people react so strongly with the ‘I could never’ is because the alternative (true) narrative of ‘I can be the best parent in the world and something like this could still happen’ is terrifying and people don’t want to accept that you can do things right, be a good, present, safety-conscious parent and this can still happen, because it’s not in your conscious control. It’s terrifying to think that we are unwittingly capable of doing something that could kill our child, so it’s easier to go with the ‘bad parent’ narrative and tell ourselves that won’t happen to us because we aren’t like that. If it’s something that happens to other people, not us, then we don’t have to face the truth of it.

Ironically, there are ways to prevent this sort of event (the alarms that are apparently mandatory in Italy) but the arrogant ‘I would never do this’ types mean they aren’t fitted as standard in most countries because the people who don’t understand the science won’t buy those cars because they think they don’t need the alarm and object to being called a bad parent (as they see it).

I have never understood how people can just ignore all the science about how human brains work and insist that they would never do this and don’t need any outside help but looking at this thread, it’s clearly quite common.

Edited to say: I do wonder how many babies have died as a result…..

I know of two people who did this.

A man who worked with my BIL, had to bring his baby to nursery, it wasn't his usual day. He forgot she was there and drove to work. It wasn't until lunch time when he remembered, it was too late.

My ex boyfriend when he was circa 6 yrs old was left in his dad's car for hours but it was night time. The dad was supposed to be driving him to scouts before going on his night shift. Drove straight to work, and left ex in the car. Apparently ex assumed he would be back any time soon. It wasn't until mum went to collect him from scouts and he wasn't there that it was noticed!

You can judge rather than try to understand if you like... but it increases the likelihood of it happening to you because it increases your complacency.

If this only happens to bad parents, and you're not a bad parent, then you'll be feeling fairly sure it will never happen to you (so no need for extra precautions). And that's fine... until god forbid it does happen.

I'm sure all those parents had read news stories about this happening to other parents and children. And the more compassionate amongst them will have thought "there but by the grace of God go I". And then one day, it wasn't there for them.

I am not a negligent parent. I love my children, I care for them diligently and I would walk over hot coals before seeing them come to any harm. But I cannot put my hand on my heart and say that it is impossible that this would ever happen to me. We lead busy, sometimes stressful lives, and one of the ways the human brain deals with this is to do large parts of the daily routines on automatic. It's a coping response, and it happens subconsciously to us all without us really noticing.

After having read a story like this years ago, I was always so paranoid this could happen to me. So I have always found myself checking the kids are all in the car at multiple points throughout a journey (even though the youngest is now 13), always checking the back multiple times when getting out, even if I KNEW I didn’t have them with me - I figured that the habit might stop me from ever forgetting they are in there! I can completely see how it can happen and the science proves it isn’t intentional - as others have said, it’s recognising that it could happen that makes you more likely to check and take measures to stop it. Being so arrogant to think it would never happen to you is what could make it happen! The odds are on your side - it likely el t happen, so easy to act superior in that sense. But it just takes one occasion of all the wrong things at the same time (other parent taking them to nursery, kid falling asleep, rear facing car seat, you get a phone call just as you pull up, you’re running late, etc) and suddenly the perfect parent is facing a tragedy.

Also, I think this happens more to men than women (or at least it did when I read about it previously). This forum is mostly women and where women are the primary caregivers, it’s harder to see it from the other parents perspective because we know that our children are always front of mind. We know that men’s brains work differently and if they aren’t the one to be taking the kid to nursery normally of course it’s more likely to happen to them.