Child left in car in 35 degree heat

[Empress13]

Please tell me as I’m struggling to understand How the hell you could forget you have left a child in a car in such extreme heat. Unbelievable ! that poor child

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

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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

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.

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.