Posting here as I don't want to vitriol of AIBU as I'm pretty upset.
I responded to a post on a Facebook AP site yesterday in which someone had said "you're crazy to ever leave your children in a car on their own". This was in response to the issue of children over-heating, which clearly is enormously important. But I tried to point out that it's not helpful to talk in terms of tabloid absolutes as you lose people along the way in terms of getting across very serious messages.
I said, that on cool days, there might be very limited occasions on which you might leave your child in the car for short periods. My daughter was a very very poor sleeper and when she was about 18 months old we lived on a farm. There were a handful of occasions on which she was asleep and I'd drive up so that the car was adjacent to the kitchen window, open doors / windows and stand and do the chopping for dinner / washing up while I watched her sleep.
I was told that I was "crazy" "a bad mother" "putting my daughter in a life threatening situation" because my daughter was not in the same room as me. That "rabid dogs" or "birds" might attack her or a "stranger snatch her". She was always in my line of sight, about 1.5 metres away from me and it would have taken me approximately 5 seconds to remove her from the car (which was parked surrounded by several hundred acres of privately owned land).
When I highlighted that this wasn't much different to parking your child in a buggy where you could see your child, in the garden for some fresh air sleep I was again told I was "utterly mad an irresponsible" because "anything could have happened to her".
Am I utterly odd in thinking that this situation is OK? It probably happened half a dozen times, at 17 degree C temperatures, when I was suffering severe post-natal depression because my daughter woke every 20 minutes through the night still for feeds. I like to think the world is generally a safe place, but maybe I'm being naive?