Note to Self: Don’t Forget the Baby
September 2nd, 2010 | by Theodore | Published in Health and (Un) Safety | 1 Comment
Via Strollerderby today I learned that 41 American children died this summer because their parents forgot them in the car on a hot day. That’s a lot of absent-minded parents!
It reminded me of a story an older woman I used to work with told me about her first child. During her pregnancy, she and her husband used to enjoy taking walks together in the early evening. A turn or two around the block in Manhattan in late summer, what could be better, right? Eventually, the baby came, and in those first few blissful weeks of parenthood, the couple decided to take one of their walks. They got on their shoes, readied the infant’s pram (this was a while ago), took a few extra bibs, a bottle, whatever they thought they might need. Then they headed out.
Without the baby.
So I can see how this sort of thing might happen, I guess. The solution at Strollerderby was to require parents to install “forgotten children alarms” in cars, which could work, although it seems a bit draconian. It won’t completely solve the problem, of course, as the article noted that a full 18 percent of those 41 children were intentionally left in the car.
God bless America.
September 2nd, 2010at 2:04 pm(#)
We were just talking about this last week when we heard the news of the death of a Toronto toddler whose family was visiting in Houston. When the parents stopped the car in the driveway, an older child had an seizure. Everyone rushed to bring the child into the house, but forgot about the baby.
It’s so shocking to us that anyone can forget a baby in a car, but we’re urbanites. We rarely spend time in cars at all. Is it different for people who drive in cars all the time? Do they drive alone so often that they get in the habit of turning off the car and just going into the house?
Do these tragedies happen just from living on auto-pilot so often? No pun intended.