Since 1998, the number of children who died of heatstroke in vehicles has been around 30 to 50 a year [1]. Before that, the number was a bit lower (10 or less) [1]. Around that time, the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) mandate on new vehicles having passenger side airbags as standard equipment came into effect.
To address the issue of children dying due to airbag deployments (which were designed to protect an unbelted 50th percentile size male in a frontal crash), the NHTSA recommended that children in car seats be placed in the rear seats in the vehicle.
Due to the fact that it's much easier to not notice a child in a rear facing car seat in the rear of the car, as opposed to one in the front passenger seat, the number of children who died of heat stroke each year increased from 10 per year to 40 per year.
We have keyless entry, lane departure warning, cruise control, and even autopilot. Can't we have a stupidly simple system that if a human is detected in the car and the temperature is over 37 degrees C:
- 0. Call the car owner's phone or alert them through any communication app they use
- 1. After 5 minutes, call the police
Ether or both would save lives. It doesn't seem like a very difficult technical task to me.
A car that calls the police on its owner seems like a non starter.
I would be worried that it would erroneously call the cops on me and not purchase it.
If you mandated it I would do my best to see the people that voted for it out of office as soon as possible.
What you are discussing seems complicated, error prone, and expensive. My kid is an adult. I don't want your half assed system calling the cops to save my packages that I'm carrying home.
What if people are transporting their animal in the car and the the line is long when they go inside to pay. Shall we call the cops on them after 5 minutes?
I am content and capable of reasoning about the real world and intelligently avoiding negative consequences by not doing stupid things.
I do not want to have to think about what conditions erroneous or real will cause my car to rat me out.
Not everything in life has a technical or legislative solution lots of things in life can only be avoided by rational people taking the time to do reasonable things every day like not leaving their babies in oven like cars and by and large do well at this. Out of 300 million Americans 30 manage to off their kids which is safer than bathtubs let alone the real risk of violent death in an accident.
If you imagine a unit cost of 500 usd and we have 263 million passenger vehicles outfitting them all would cost 130 billion usd to save 30 lives annually. If you imagine a time frame of 10 years you can imagine savings of 300 lives at a unit cost of 433 million per life saved.
I'd face a big fine any day over the death of another person that I caused inadvertently. The former sucks, but I'd get over it. The latter would wreck my life forever if it happened.
In any case, my suggestion was to call the owner first. They would have several minutes to respond. Or the product could only do that, and forget about the police part, which would also save lots of lives.
Or instead of calling the police, start the air conditioner and continue notifying the owner every few minutes if they do not respond to the first notification.
Its still an expensive feature that would get more expensive the smaller the number of units involved. Nobody would voluntarily pay for it especially those stupid enough to leave their kids in hot cars. Especially since in at least a portion of those cases the parents meant to leave the kid in the car they just didn't intend to do it for such a long time or didn't realize they would die from it.
I have a 3rd gen Toyota Prius which had the option of a 40W solar panel on the roof which runs a ventilator when it's parked. That and the white paint job really help it feel a lot cooler than previous cars I've owned, after leaving it parked for a few hours in the sun.
I'm not sure how much it would help here (no idea what the climate is like in this place), but I've sat inside when its 35c/95F outside, and it's just as comfortable as sitting under a tree - maybe more so as you can feel the wind.
It seems like such a simple feature (the solar system is completely isolated from the 12V and HV battery), I'm surprised more cars don't have it. Here is a picture - right is the (slightly opened) moon roof, and left is the solar panel: https://blogmedia.dealerfire.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/19...
I wouldn't trivialize the reliable detection of people, especially small children. I think we are just now getting at the point where that technology could be reliable, and from an automaker's perspective, it could be a similar level of investment as autopilot, and a much smaller benefit (more people would be saved by reliable autopilot, and it's also much more desirable to consumers). Even if they had such a technology, the automaker would certainly be afraid of the legal consequences of their system failing a real scenario, opening itself up for liability lawsuits and bureaucratic investigations.
> I wouldn't trivialize the reliable detection of people, especially small children.
A fairly simple weight sensor as used for passenger seat belt alarms would seem likely to work (it's a little more complicated because you need to zero it for the weight of the child seat.) You'll get false positives if you carry goods on that seat, but if you have an installed child seat you are unlikely to do that.
The notification aspect is probably harder to get right than the sensor. Though an internally audible alarm and warning light for a short period when turning off the car with a detected child would probably itself be a big help to prevent the initial problem rather than reacting to it the way “call the owner and then the police” mechanisms do, plus be far simpler to implement.
Agreed, a reasonably designed 2W 2.4GHz radar in your car can detect both breathing and heartbeat. It couldn't tell the difference between a large dog and baby, but maybe you should be dealing with it either way...
Now I can see the car manufacturers don't want the liability for the a monitor failing to go off (false negative) due to any malfunction, when the number of false positives will be much higher. Thermometers and radars do fail, but humans will become dependent on them, and blame them and the manufacturers for anything that goes happens.
No, because what you're describing isn't stupidly simple, but incredibly complex. Even just the 'call the police' bit - How? Which police? How do you communicate with them? What language do you use? How do you convey the problem? How do you detect and respond to emergency numbers that prefilter (where I am, call emergency and a human asks you for police/fire/ambulance, and then puts you through)? Do you use the standard voice channel, or an API? If API, whose API? What about areas that don't have an API (or much of a tech stack)? If voice, how do you make it not sound like a prank call? How do you provide extra data if the dispatcher needs more? Do you use a radio band instead? If so, which one? How do you ensure you're not spamming the channel? What if the police in the area don't work off GPS co-ordinates? I'm sure there are plenty more issues with just this part of the hypothetical system, but these are the ones off the top of my head.
Besides, while it sounds nasty, 30 deaths/year is but a drop in the bucket compared to other transport-related deaths. The amount of effort required to make a robust, reliable system to prevent those 30 deaths would be much more effective when applied to other transport problems resulting in death.
EDIT: Oops, I didn't initially notice that the chart in the grandparent post actually lists both airbag and heat fatalities...
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Good question. As of 1996, it was only 21 total, according to the NY Times[1], but more than half of those were killed in the first 9 months of that year.
In 1999, Car and Driver magazine reported a total of 99 child fatalities. So, low "first-few-google-hits" data quality aside, that seems to show a rapidly rising trend[2].
Next, I got to this horrifying article about a University of Georgia study concluding that the government statistics on airbags are wildly wrong and airbags are actually killing us all[3]. (I gave up my research at this point and will sleep better if the next HN reader that comes along with a little time on their hands debunks that as publicity-seeking bad science that's now been discredited...)
> Next, I got to this horrifying article about a University of Georgia study concluding that the government statistics on airbags are wildly wrong and airbags are actually killing us all
The hyperbole isn't really necessary. Before "depowered" airbags were allowed by the NHTSA, the standard described in FMVSS (Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard) 208 stated that airbags must be able to protect an unbelted 50th percentile sized male in a frontal crash. This required that the airbag deploy at lower collision speeds and with more force than would be necessary with a belted occupant of smaller stature.
This lead to injuries and deaths due to airbag deployments in low speed collisions as mentioned in the study. My guess is that the study period was at a time when depowered airbags weren't as common as they are today.
This is a great way to analyze the purposes of the criminal justice system. Typically, there are three: punishment, deterrence, and rehabilitation. Prosecuting someone who forgot their kid in the car can't have deterrent effect--to the extent the event was avoidable, the possibility of prosecution couldn't possibly match the deterrent effect created by the risk of harm to the child. Likewise, there is no rehabilitative purpose. You think someone who did that is likely to do it again? The only possible purpose is punishment, which doesn't seem valid here either. In my view, the purpose of punishment is to create and reinforce social norms. It makes people not do something not because they fear the punishment, but because they feel shame for violating the norm. Do we need to create such a norm for not endangering your kid?
I disagree about deterrence. There are a lot of shitty parents out there who fear prison more than they fear losing their child. There are even parents who want to kill their children. If it becomes common knowledge that you can get away with murdering your kid as long as you use this technique... I don't really want to think about that.
People are also really bad about evaluating potential consequences. A person might not be able to imagine themselves killing their own child, so they might ignore the possibility since they think it can't happen to them. They might be able to imagine getting arrested and put in prison, though, and thus making it a crime could make them think twice.
This seems to me like an obvious case of criminal negligence, which merits punishment for all the same reasons that any such negligence would.
I would also say that it should be criminal merely to leave a child in a car like this, even if the child survives. That would go a long way to deterring people who think they're somehow immune. If the child does die, you should still prosecute the act of leaving them, even if you aren't necessarily prosecuting the death. It would be crazy if the punishment were lower if the crime resulted in death.
"There are a lot of shitty parents out there who fear prison more than they fear losing their child. There are even parents who want to kill their children. If it becomes common knowledge that you can get away with murdering your kid as long as you use this technique... I don't really want to think about that."
I believe we're going to need a citation on that. What exactly does "a lot" mean? 1% of the population of parents? 0.01%? (There are 810 such deaths in the last 20-odd years in the kidsandcars.org database[1]. (Early P.S.: Check out the "frontover" row for a trend.))
"Criminal Negligence" is something like, "The failure to use reasonable care to avoid consequences that threaten or harm the safety of the public and that are the foreseeable outcome of acting in a particular manner."[2] Where exactly is the failure to use reasonable care in these cases that doesn't apply to essentially every parent?
Based on the definition you provided, it seems fairly obvious to me based on how I interpret that definition. "acting in a particular manner" = leaving the child in the car, that is the act. "foreseeable outcome" = death. "reasonable care to avoid consequences" = anything that the parent could easily do which would prevent the foreseeable outcome. There are a few things parents can do, and could even combine them. And let's be honest, all are very, very simple. A quick look where you actually lean back and physically see inside the car seat to verify it's empty is enough. That literally takes 2 seconds and about as minimal of an effort as I can think of and it's 100% accurate in prevention, so long as you work it into your routine when exiting a vehicle. For example, I have a system of making sure I never forget any important item that I regularly carry with me anywhere (key, wallet, phone, etc.) The details aren't important and could be considered specific to me, maybe. But it works 100% of the time and I never forget to mentally check for it. I also have never forgotten/lost any of the items I check for in about 12-15 years (since I started using it). And make no mistake - I'm not doing this because I'm naturally organized. I do because I an not. I'm scatterbrained and forget things all the time. My system is designed to ensure that I don't forget anything critically important like, oh I dunno, my kid in a car in the blazing heat.
Same for the front/backovers. I've had my kid do both of these. The rule on my side is simple. The car doesn't move if I don't have eyes on my child. If I can't visually confirm my kid's location, I assume they are in one of these spots and the car stays in park and then I mildly panic until I can locate them again. Only then does the car move. How is any of this hard for people to make into a habit?
This is entirely avoidable in every single case, but it requires creating unbreakable habits for yourself.
Clone your self by 300 million and tell me you won't forget the keys over a period of 20 years one time.
I'm not sure all 300 million us adults subscribe to your newsletter.
'forget things all the time' - so you admit there is a chance 100 percent can drop to 99.9999?
A friend of a friend had their child eat a battery that was left lying around in the house, I'm pretty sure there are a million other potential killer forgetful actions that parents face.
Eating a battery is not a reasonably foreseeable event that would occur with a high probability. It's something that can happen, sure. But doesn't happen that often even when they are left around. So I don't think anyone should be charged in that case. You can't protect against everything. But it's really easy to protect against leaving your kid in the car. And since that carries an extremely high probability of serious injury or death, people should be mindful about it and try to do whatever they need to in order for it to never happen. It boils down to risk and statistics. There are 100 ways your kid can kill themselves in your house every day. They could stick something metallic into an outlet and electrocute themselves or knock into something and a heavy object falls on them. You can't know that any of those things will happen at the moment they do, but you do know what is likely to happen if you forget your child in the car on a hot day. The cause and effect are proximate and immediate. That's why there should be culpability. It should be no different than how we prosecute the most serious errors on the road such as drunk driving that leads to a serious, possibly fatal accident or whether it's just someone who wasn't paying attention or was very tired and accidentally hit someone. We generally, but not always, charge those individuals. The prosecutors look at the evidence and if a driver made a serious/negligent mistake, they charge them. If the circumstances were one of happenstance and not a clear fault, then charges are usually not levied. Same logic should apply here.
Yeah I said I forget things all the time but the things I forget are NOT part of the system I have in place. That's the point. The habits I have are to make sure I don't forget the things I really care about or absolutely need. So no, it will not be 99.9999% for those items - it will be 100%. In fact, my habits have caught me forgetting the things on the list literally hundreds of times over the past decade. It works and it always catches it.
> it's 100% accurate in prevention, so long as you work it into your routine when exiting a vehicle
Your fallacy, because you are apparently a person who is good at teaching themselves new routines based on safety statistics, is assuming that is a general skill that everyone has and that everyone could be expected to have.
If you're actually interested in preventing child deaths, and not just moralizing, the proper thing to do is treat this as a public health issue, and understand that not every parent has the same emotional and cognitive facilities as you do.
If the proportion of abuse victims which are subject to physical parental abuse is approximately the same, then about 13,000 of those victims are under one year old.
If you're going for an argument that really bad parents are too rare to take into account, it seems to me that argument works both ways: the number of good parents who would be victimized by prosecuting hot car deaths would be really small. At an average of ~40 such deaths per year, at most 80 good parents would be improperly prosecuted per year.
This page gives examples of criminal negligence which to me seem to be pretty similar to leaving a child in a car like this:
In particular, I don't see a fundamental difference between a nurse forgetting to feed a patient and a parent forgetting to take their child out of the car.
The fact that there are only ~40 such deaths per year in the US suggests to me that this is not, in fact, something that would apply to essentially every parent.
> Approximately 100,000 American children suffer physical abuse
> If you're going for an argument that really bad parents are too rare to take into account
You're moving the goalposts. The assertion wasn't that there are lots of bad parents out there, the assertion was that there are parents out there who are more afraid of jail than of killing their child.
I don't have a number backed by some statistics, but there is this news in Sydney _today_ that a father pointed a gun at 4yo daughter and pulling the trigger. It was caught on camera.
> There are a lot of shitty parents out there who fear prison more than they fear losing their child. There are even parents who want to kill their children.
This raises a question I've wondered about. Can a parent who doesn't want their child "give up" the child to the state without any strings attached? I.e., without doing something bad that would cause the state to take away the child and without being on the hook to the state for future child care.
Before you tell me that enormous crowds are waiting to adopt cute healthy babies, imagine for example a dangerous delinquent adolescent with a serious genetic disorder. Can you voluntarily ask the government to take such an unwanted child with no further contact and no financial obligation?
You would think that this situation comes up frequently, and that there should be a process: Fill in form 54F, signed and notarized by both parents. But it's surprisingly difficult to google a clear-cut answer for any country or jurisdiction.
Nebraska had an accidental experiment by omitting an age limit on their Safe Haven law. Parents drove thousands of miles to abandon their older children until the loophole was closed.
Good article. The most relevant quote: "Mr. Landry, the state director of children and family services, said parents and guardians were mistaken if they thought they could walk away from their responsibilities. The courts might even order them to pay child support." Furthermore, Nebraska has since changed the law, as you already noted; they permit only babies up to 30 days old.
That's for babies, under 30 days old, which the parents could have readily put up for adoption even without this law. Moreover, the government treats it as a criminal act (abandonment) in some states.
Like I said above, it surprisingly difficult to get a straightforward answer to this.
I find the callousness in this post extremely distressing.
You don't understand what having a child under the age of six months is like. You are incredibly sleep deprived, making errors at work and are a danger on the road. My wife and I piled up a barricade of boxes to the door of our balcony because we were terrified that one of us would hallucinate at 4am and drop our newborn off the fourth floor.
So when I read about a mother who thought she had dropped her infant off at daycare with her four-year-old, and instead found her dead in the backseat when she got off work that night, my first thought was, "That could have been me." When I read about a parent who backed her car over her infant, I immediately remembered the morning I backed over my lunch because I had been up all night with a screaming newborn and my morning routine got off a beat when my neighbor interrupted it to ask a question.
The real tragedy here is that we could probably greatly reduce these incidents by giving new parents extended maternity leave or providing them some other form of social support. Unfortunately, the same mindset in this country that considers these tragedies "criminal" are also the same people who think giving a new mother time off is some kind of free ride.
If you read stories about these tragedies and your gut reaction is "shitty parents" who "want to kill their children," then your ethical mindset is completely alien to me. I don't know how to teach you the importance of compassion and sympathy for your fellow human beings.
I'm a father and I know exactly what it's like, but good job assuming.
I think you misunderstood the point I'm making. I'm not saying every single parent who leaves a child in a car is a bad parent. I'm saying that some are, and making it a crime will deter them. I'm also saying that it can deter even good parents.
The fact that you are a parent makes your position even more incomprehensible. If you truly know "exactly what it's like" then you would have sympathy for the parents who experience these tragedies and would be offering preventative solutions instead of demonizing them and demanding punitive measures.
The entire point of my comment is that I believe treating it as a crime will prevent it from happening to some extent. You may disagree, but I'm not offering punitive measures instead of preventive solutions. I'm offering punitive measures as preventive solutions.
I think you're falling victim to the common fallacy where I advocate for A, you believe that A has consequence X, therefore you believe I'm advocating for X. But I believe A has consequence Y, and so I'm not in any way advocating for X.
I have great sympathy for parents who fall victim to this. But I'm more concerned with reducing the incidence of it. If treating it as a crime helps, which I believe it would, then it's well worth the tradeoff to me.
Coming at it from a personal perspective, if it ever happened to me, I can only imagine that I would be so distraught that I wouldn't care what the law did to me.
> I disagree about deterrence. There are a lot of shitty parents out there who fear prison more than they fear losing their child. There are even parents who want to kill their children. If it becomes common knowledge that you can get away with murdering your kid as long as you use this technique... I don't really want to think about that.
IMO, if there's any sign of general neglect, then it should certainly be punished harshly. I'm not quite comfortable with doing the same to a loving parent who has one brain fart with terrible consequences. Of course, drawing a clear distinction after the fact can be very difficult, but that's true of many serious crimes.
> I would also say that it should be criminal merely to leave a child in a car like this, even if the child survives.
I tentatively agree with this. Care needs to be taken to ensure you don't hurt the child(ren) even more by taking away an otherwise-excellent parent, but it is dangerous neglect, even if it only happens once and no one is hurt.
Intentionally leaving your child in the car, knowingly or wrecklessly putting them at risk of harm, is already criminal. People have gotten life sentences for it, even when their defense was absent mindedness. See, e.g., http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/14/us/justin-ross-harris-trial-ve...
But any criminal law that punished unintentionally leaving your child in the car would be unconstitutional in the U.S., and likely in most other developed nations. There's a mens rea component to criminal liability that requires a degree intention of the act plus knowledge of the possible consequences. That component is especially strong for felony offenses or anything that comes with serious punishment, which is presumably what we're talking about. (I doubt a misdemeanor fine is going deter a brazen sociopath, given the existing criminal liability risks.)
So I just don't see the point in trying to crack down. It would be superfluous for many reasons. That kind of logic is how the U.S. has accumulated so many criminal laws that prosecutors can bully people without fear of any sort of reprisal. Throw enough charges at someone and one of them is bound to stick, just because the justice system (any justice system) is imperfect and innocent people are always at risk of a false positive verdict.
I don't understand the last part of your comment. Good parents almost never (note: "almost"!) leave their children alone in a car. Cracking down on it would not noticeably increase the ability of the police to selectively prosecute people.
Looking at what gets treated as criminal negligence, one site mentioned that a nurse failing to feed a patient who can't feed themselves, and who subsequently starves to death, would be criminal negligence. You seem to indicate that this couldn't be criminal since it lacks intent. Is that example incorrect?
How do you tell the difference between someone who forgot their child in a car from someone who "forgot" their child in the car? Should we really be sending the message "you can always get away with killing your kid as long as you use this method. It's a get out of jail free card."
From my experience growing up parental child abuse is fairly common but very underreported so the case of malice can't exactly be discounted.
It's a difficult issue... Even if malice isn't intended there is certainly negligence.
That's true of many crimes, though. Leaving a pan on a hot stove could be insurance fraud, murder, or honest absentmindedness. It's already the court's job to look at the facts and make the best judgment they can.
I think thats potentially the most important purpose here. The definition being the reintroduction to society, a parent who unintentionally killed their child by locking them in a car needs to go through some sort of treatment, that much is evidenced by the thoughts of suicide the parent developed afterward.
I know HN likes trials and not pleas, but instead of wasting tax payer money on this trial, only for the parent to be found not guilty, they might have cut a plea deal to drop the case upon completion of court ordered therapy and if their are surviving sibilings some parenting classes.
Do a search for "plea deal" here on HN, read a few of the threads and see for yourself if you find a prevailing and common theme: anti-plea deals and pro-trial
I think you're confusing punishment with deterrence. Punishment has a vengeful nature, and comes from a more primitive time when victims got their retribution by seeing offenders suffer. Of course it's related to deterrence, but the way you talk about it deterrence is the purpose of punishment, which I don't think is correct. Punishment (and specifically, fulfilling or abating the desire for revenge of the wronged) is an end in itself.
If you replace the victim with a dog instead of his own child, I'd say, "Yes he'd probably do it again.".
That leads to an odd situation where the action that leads to a child's death would warrant a lesser sentence than the same act leading to a dog's death.
The difference is the perceived likelihood of malice or malicious indifference. It is fathomable that people let a dog die in the car because they don't care that much, or because they hate the dog.
People care about their children, and if someone did kill a child like this, with malice, they'd be vilified. Heck, they might even get lynched.
I'm not sure someone who suffers through a dead dog wouldn't learn anything from it. It still seems like a traumatic event, even if the dog isn't a person.
Aside from one localish case that was maybe-murder (and that also dropped off the news way before it got as far as a court case, so I don't know how that actually turned out) the news is usually of the occurrence, not the charges—the potential of which may be mentioned in the story, but are never the focus.
I can reliably inform you that this coverage of the occurrences, but not the charges/convictions, is quite enough to give parents yet another thing to stress the hell out about against all statistical reason.
You didn't offer anything concrete on why it doesn't have deterrent effect. Your entire argument seems to be based on the assumption that _all_ parents care about their children, sadly we all know this is not true.
I'd imagine the purpose here would fall under general deterrence. By bringing down a harsh sentence here, you'd hope that future parents would take extra care to prevent such things from happening in the future. There is doubt just how effective general deterrence is in reducing criminal behaviour (see Death Penalty), but I'll admit it does call into question the utility of destroying a man's life that in all likelihood has already been irreparably altered. One thing is for certain, this guy was criminally negligent to highest degree (causing death), and it's unlikely a functioning criminal justice system is going to let someone walk away from that.
That's a pragmatic theory, but in a reality there's also a little of irrational need for eye-for-an-eye revenge in an act of the punishment of a wrongdoer, people need that to feel that the justice was really met. It's an atavistic urge, lynch mob instinct to hate those who you see as a danger to your group. And yes it's not very rational or ethical, certainly not very civilized, and we can pretend we don't feel that way, but it's a part of a human nature. People who follow the rules expect to see those who break them punished as a proof that the system works; it makes them feel safe and content (and also reinforces social norms, as you've said).
You don't just need to consider whether they would do it again. You also need to consider whether, if he gets off scot free, some unhappy depressed parent will do it on purpose and then claim she "forgot". So in this regard a punishment would both serve as a deterrent and reinforce societal norms.
Doesn't that mean we should do away with involuntary manslaughter? After all, the perpetrator of a murder may claim it was an accident. Of course, you can try to prove that it was intentional - but the same applies here.
My understanding is that (1) is you deliberately did something that killed someone but your intent was not to harm them, say you’re working on a car you mean to scare them by faking dropping the engine on them, but actually do drop the engine, vs (2) you’re working with your friend on a car and drop the engine without knowing that they’re under it.
For (2) i believe that other things feed in to it - did you take sufficient caution, did you have reason to know there was someone there, were you following best practice, etc.
If you did literally nothing wrong (eg a completely freak accident) I don’t believe manslaughter would apply
IANAL though so don’t go dropping engines on people and blame me :)
I believe it's better that some guilty go free if it means that the innocent are not wrongly punished. Wrongly punishing the innocent is terrible and causes so many psychological problems. That's why we have innocent until proven guilty
The key phrase here is "some", and not "all". I mean why is it even an argument that killing your own kid through negligence should be a crime? The perp may or may not be convicted, but they _must_ go through a trial for something like that, and the jury of their peers must decide. Anything else would cause a spike in "negligence". Because let's face it, there are a lot of people out there who have no business having kids in the first place.
""This is a case of pure evil negligence of the worse kind . . . He deserves the death sentence."
""I wonder if this was his way of telling his wife that he didn't really want a kid."
""He was too busy chasing after real estate commissions. This shows how morally corrupt people in real estate-related professions are."
"These were readers' online comments to The Washington Post news article of July 10, 2008, reporting the circumstances of the death of Miles Harrison's son. These comments were typical of many others, and they are typical of what happens again and again, year after year in community after community, when these cases arise. A substantial proportion of the public reacts not merely with anger, but with frothing vitriol.
"Ed Hickling believes he knows why. Hickling is a clinical psychologist from Albany, N.Y., who has studied the effects of fatal auto accidents on the drivers who survive them. He says these people are often judged with disproportionate harshness by the public, even when it was clearly an accident, and even when it was indisputably not their fault.
"Humans, Hickling said, have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible.
"In hyperthermia cases, he believes, the parents are demonized for much the same reasons. "We are vulnerable, but we don't want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters."
"After Lyn Balfour's acquittal, this comment appeared on the Charlottesville News Web site:
""If she had too many things on her mind then she should have kept her legs closed and not had any kids. They should lock her in a car during a hot day and see what happens."
Terrible things do in fact happen at random, the universe is implacable and heartless, and it's not entirely possible to be sufficiently vigilant and responsible to avoid all catastrophes.
If we could openly admit that we send innocent people to jail, it would be much easier to argue for better prison services for inmates. Afterall, we are assuming some portion of it is innocent.
It's a tough situation. The parents are already wracked with grief over their mistake. Anybody can forget. For something truly accidental it's not right to punish harshly. Obviously in the case of intentional neglect or intended murder punishment is appropriate.
As others have said this is a problem that in 2017 should already be solved by technology.
But in the event you don't have access to a technological solution try this:
If you have an infant in your car get in the habit of taking your shoes off and putting them next to the baby when you drive.
When you reach your destination you might forget the infant...but you won't forget your shoes.
Edit: My dad (who was an absent-minded engineer way before I was) taught me this trick.
Edit 2: Just called my dad to remind him about this and he said "it was only one shoe...the one you don't use on the pedal". I've been doing it wrong all this time :). So the correct way is...put your non-pedal shoe next to your child. You'll remember it when you start walking :)
That's definitely an interesting method. I'm always surprised that I don't see more people relying on checklists in day to day tasks. I use checklists religiously at work and have incorporated them into my daily life as well. I have a number of friends who are constantly leaving things behind(cellphones, wallets, house/car keys), I don't think I'm any less of a naturally forgetful person than them, but because I use simple checklists I rarely forget things compared to them, even when I'm exhausted or stressed out.
Whenever I babysit my two young nieces I now just add an extra step to my checklists; don't forget kids in car.
When the Navy introduced the NATOPS[0] program, including pilot checklists, aircraft mishaps decreased significantly.
The introductory statement:
NATOPS is a positive approach toward improving combat readiness and achieving a substantial reduction in the aircraft accident rate. Standardization, based on professional knowledge and experience, provides the basis for development of an efficient and sound operational procedure. The standardization program is not planned to stifle individual initiative, but rather to aid the commanding officer in increasing the unit’s combat potential without reducing command prestige or responsibility.
There is significant research that when hospitals required surgeons to use checklists, surgical errors decreased significantly.[1]
Some friends who are NATOPS qualified pilots actually do have NATOPS-style checklists for parenting their kids, for both routine and non-routine/emergency tasks.
e.g Check that the kid is not in the car as they exit.
I have a bad habit of forgetting things at home when I leave in the morning. I developed a habit: “Wallet, keys, badge, smokes, phone” I pat the pocket each item should be in as I say it out loud.
Unfortunately, I now do this on auto-pilot. I pat the pocket, say the word, leave the house... and realize I don’t have my badge on me when I arrive at work.
I’m thinking about installing a card reader that locks me in the house if I don’t have my badge :)
I developed the habit of feeling each item instead of just patting the pocket. That way, if the item is missing you won't be able to complete the action.
On the other hand, I've found that I now have the problem that if there's an item that's supposed to be missing (for example if I've lent my keys to someone) I have a constant low-grade panic where I keep checking my pockets, realizing there's something missing, reminding myself that it's supposed to be, and then doing the whole thing over again a few minutes later.
You just need to mandate actual physical contact with the item in question. I won't let my apartment door close until I've jingled my keys in my pocket, has never failed me.
For those who tend not to forget their testicles, just patting the pockets where you store the wallet and keys works for me. I think of it in terms of a number - day to day, it's three: phone, wallet, keys.
Depending on the situation it's a combination of to-do list programs on my phone and computer, I personally use both Google Keep and Todoist, and physical checklists that I either type out and print or hand write.
For the most important checklists, especially at work, I will usually hand write them in addition to using a computer. I'm a stickler for good penmanship and I find that taking the time to make an outline of my checklist and then transposing it to a handwritten pad involves a kind of deliberateness that is both somewhat relaxing and helps insure that I've covered all my bases, while only adding a few minutes to my day.
Less important things may start off as a physical checklist but then once they become second nature enough I just rely on memory. But again, for things where mistakes would result in something more than a minor inconvenience I still use physical checklists. The beauty of these checklists for me is that instead of having to remember 5,10,20 or 50 individual things, I just need to remember one thing, that is to check the checklist.
As horrible as this form of death is, it seems statistically unlikely.
I'd wager that there are orders of magnitude between child deaths in cars due to heat and child deaths in cars due to crashes.
As such, I don't think an app for this makes sense. I don't think this ranks when looking at the numbers. That said, this must be amongst the worst ways of losing a child, and that is saying something.
> I'd wager that there are orders of magnitude between child deaths in cars due to heat and child deaths in cars due to crashes.
Don't just calculate the risks, also calculate the ratio of mitigated-risk-to-cost. Lowering the risk of death in traffic [1], after a certain extent of due diligence, can be very costly or impossible (don't go to work/preschool anymore). Lowering the risk of heat death, as GP describes, seems rather trivial - so there's no reason not to do it.
[1] which is quite high btw, I completely agree on that point. In an 80 year life in the US you're statistically going to die in a traffic accident with a probability of 0.85%. Almost 1 in 100 people die this way, so most people will know someone. For comparison, the same calculation for the UK (one of the lowest) comes out at 0.24%, so there's ways to go there for the US.
I think you're thinking of this from a purely "statistical scope of the problem" perspective and underestimating the value of "emotional commitment of a parent for their children".
If there was an app (would require hardware...some sortof linkup with the child seat) I'd imagine if it was marketed right and there were studies supporting it's effectiveness you could charge an awful lot for it and virtually every parent would buy one. That's gotta be a substantial market.
And it's a universal (global) problem.
Car seats are incredibly expensive (actually it's not just car seats...pretty much any 'technology' associated with infants).
Every parent wants peace of mind and I'd venture most would be willing to pay heavily for it.
Edit: On mobile and probably worded this poorly but TLDR: Parents aren't making rational decisions here w/ safety purchases for their kids. They'll spend a lot on something that eliminates a potential life-threatening issue...even if it's statistically rare.
All carseats undergo strict testing under stringent regulations. While there are some real fancy seats out there, base level models ($50-100) range are safe.
More expensive seats have easier adjustments, easy to clean fabric, front/rear-facing modes, and other bells and whistles for parents.
For any first time parents in the US, I recommend picking up the latest copy of Baby Bargins (http://www.babybargains.com/). Lots of information about all the items you'll need for Baby, as well as safety ratings, and price considerations.
> Every parent wants peace of mind and I'd venture most would be willing to pay heavily for it.
That is very true. That's what gives rise to so-called SIDS motion monitors. Things that are supposed to alert you to an infant in distress, but in reality has not proven to decrease the risk of SIDS.
For anyone worried about SIDS I'd suggest looking into [1][2]. The counterarguments summed up in [3] seem rather weak to me. If the claim is true that in 10 years no parent following Sprott's method have had a case of SIDS (which no-one seemed to follow up on, even though the study seems quite solid to me), then the counter would have to explain why one should wait instead of just adopting that method. It seems a similar story to Beri-Beri in the Japanese Navy pre-WW2 - one doctor just went and found a cure in the field and everyone else just ignored it because his methods were not proven in a clinical study and because the cure required a change of traditional warrior behaviour.
Looks super quacky. US cot deaths have also massively declined, and the trajectory of the decline matches up with the uptake of back sleeping for infants.
1.) SIDS still occurs at a rate of around 0.5 in 1000 in the Western world [1]. To compare, the probability of death in a traffic related accident over an 80 year lifespan is 0.85 in 1000 in the US. So it's still far from negligible.
2.) Sprott has at least a hypothesis to explain the correlation between back sleeping and decline in SIDS. His skeptics on the other hand have no explanation for why there is no confirmed case of SIDS for wrapped mattresses, other than it being a statistical fluke. That may be the case, but why is no-one investigating?
3.) Compare the SIDS rate of Japan and Asian Americans to Europe / European Americans. Why has it always been lower? Genetic prevalence? Bedding culture? It seems simple enough to do much more statistical studies on this, but when searching for it there seems to be a very low depth of knowledge.
To put it differently, what you're saying is quite close to "hey, we've figured out traffic related deaths, and it's all solved with safety belts and air bags, case closed, QED". Calling something quacky because of the journal is nothing more than an ad hominem fallacy. If someone's research stands on its own then it doesn't matter where it's published, it could as well be Arxiv - if not, then it should be easy enough to disprove based on facts.
Honest question re 2): are there current confirmed cases of SIDS for back sleeping babies with no foreign objects in their crib? The NPR article I linked mentions that the current 0.5 rate is considered to be due to ignorance/non-compliance with safe sleeping policy.
At least I'm not aware of one. I find the amount of information on this topic overall quite thin. I get the feeling that prevention based medical research, without a background of commercialisation (i.e. drugs or treatments), isn't getting too much attention/funding overall, at least compared to its potential benefits.
Every time I see a picture online or in-person of a baby laying in a crib with a blanket, stuffed animal and a crib bumper I want to smack them. For as much as the rate of SIDS has declined, there is still many more parents out there who are ill-informed or ignorant about safe sleep of their child.
I have seen people spend money on these Angelcare monitors while doing one or more of the above, it's insane!
Good points. All I'd like is for a second independent study to (a) confirm that SIDS is indeed solved in NZ (i.e. it's not just some statistical fluke e.g. due to counting methods) and (b) figure out why it works. Whether it's that particular fungus or not I don't care, as long as the wrapping method works. Supporting evidence, e.g. about mattress handling, IMO lines up well with Sprott / Richardson and is unexplained by the skeptics - all in all I just don't like how quickly the medical establishment seems to have closed the books on this.
So, on further research it seems pretty clear that the mattress wrapping stuff is junk. Here's a decent study refuting it [1].
One key quote is "SIDS mortality has declined 63% from 1994 to 2004. The prevalence of plastic wrapped cot mattresses has remained constant since 1997. The decline in SIDS cannot be explained by changes in the proportion of plastic-wrapped mattresses."
The promotion of "mattress wrapping" coincided with an education campaign promoting other methods known to help reduce SIDS (like having babies sleep on their backs).
[1] Mitchell, Edwin. (2008). Wrapping a cot mattress in plastic does not explain the continuing fall in SIDS mortality. European journal of pediatrics. 167. 251-2. 10.1007/s00431-007-0526-8.
I'm aware of that one and I don't think it explains everything if you pay closr
attention.
They don't go further than taking a general population statistic and try to to infer from correlation that mattress wrapping is disproven. What happens if you actually have two groups, one using wrapping and one from the same demographics who don't? Sprott hypothesises that laying infants on their back will reduce SIDS thanks to less exposure to toxic gases from funghi consuming plastics. That causal link is unproven as it seems, but it gives an explanation for the numbers you quote that agrees with the results reported by Sprott / Richardson.
Reference 2 of that paper [1] describes such a study:
"We conclude that not only is there no evidence from this study of any identifiable increase in the risk of SIDS associated with the use of mattresses with an integral PVC cover, but also that the use of such mattresses is associated with a lower risk..."
Thank you, good find. It appears to me that there's two different subjects here. Richardson found a potential link between toxic gases from fungal growth. Sprott developed a (low cost) method using plastic wrapping to counter it, and has data to back it up. Your linked study says that plastic covers reduces the risk of SIDS. Well, it seems to me that these findings all agree if the fungal growth (within the loose stuffing material [1]) hypothesis is correct. I expect a plastic cover to somewhat shield from such gases since it would make them vent more to the sides. In Sprott's solution there's holes at the bottom of the wrapping such that the vent is also happening around the mattress rather than at the top.
One maybe crucial finding in your study that would not agree with Sprott/Richardson is the null result concerning the use of older mattresses. That one seems curious to me.
So here's my next question: Blair et al., Richardson as well as Sprott have data that the bedding has significant influence on SIDS risk. Why is there no mention of this in any national health advisory I can find? Why are there no follow-up studies and the medical community just settled on advising for back sleeping, even though it seems obvious that the risk can be mitigated further?
[1] It's noteworthy that Blair et al. did not distinguish about the stuffing material, which was a rather crucial point made by Richardson AFAIK. Both Richardson and Sprott have specific advise for what material should be used (pure cotton, no wool and PVC in the stuffing). Was that left out your linked study intentionally?
The plastic covers used in Blair et al. are 90% PVC covers. Richardson suggested PVC being digested by the fungus as the cause. So it's exactly the situation that should cause SIDS and it results in lower incidence of SIDS.
The mattress wrapping suggested by Sprott is wrapping using polythene.
So the results are totally incompatible with the notion that PVC mattresses causes SIDS as suggested by Richardson and Sprott.
There are other reports too, such as that conducted by the British government in 1998...
I don't know the American market, but from a Western European perspective that sounds hard to market right. Everyone thinks of mistakes as something other people make (as opposed to accidents, the selling point of good car seats). Nobody is going to think "hopefully I don't forget my child in the car", or at least won't buy anything that gives away that thought.
"In 2000, Chris Edwards, Terry Mack and Edward Modlin began to work on just such a product after one of their colleagues, Kevin Shelton, accidentally left his 9-month-old son to die in the parking lot of NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. The inventors patented a device with weight sensors and a keychain alarm. Based on aerospace technology, it was easy to use; it was relatively cheap, and it worked.
"Janette Fennell had high hopes for this product: The dramatic narrative behind it, she felt, and the fact that it came from NASA, created a likelihood of widespread publicity and public acceptance.
"That was five years ago. The device still isn't on the shelves. The inventors could not find a commercial partner willing to manufacture it. One big problem was liability. If you made it, you could face enormous lawsuits if it malfunctioned and a child died. But another big problem was psychological: Marketing studies suggested it wouldn't sell well.
"The problem is this simple: People think this could never happen to them."
If there was an app, it might not require any integration at all - just a vibration or beep pattern with a notification every time I step out should be more than enough. If I have my child I'll ignore it the way I would any message, if I don't the distinctive pattern should be enough of a memory jog.
The problem is, many of these parents think that they have dropped their child off at day care. Parents will either be constantly running out to their cars to check for their child, or will start ignoring these texts. It's basic human neurophysiology that we learn to mute meaningless data.
I don't see why you can't just drive with bare feet? That's how I usually drive, since I wear flip flops everywhere, and driving with flip flops is a bad idea.
If I'm wearing boots, I'll often drive with bare feet too, depending on the vehicle.
I heard of a similar system (think it was from Mexico) of having a small teddy bear in the glove box, then put him up on the dash when you're driving with your infant in the back.
Why would you not correct your original statement instead of putting it in an edit footnote? Some people may not read that far and you are giving bad info.
I'm astonished to see many comments here on HN (albeit heavily downvoted) saying that if you're a "good parent" then it's easy—just don't forget your child in the car!
It's like saying that if you're a "good engineer" then it's easy not to drop your production database instead of the development one—just don't ssh to the wrong host!
I thought we were done with this way of thinking. Apparently not. Or maybe people think that there's this "parent magic" that kicks in and somehow makes you infallible whenever your kids are involved? This sounds so unbelievable I'm not even sure where to start.
My wife and I have a kid on the way and you can be sure we'll have at least a basic process in place to reduce the risk of this happening.
I agree with what you're saying but I think your last sentence is an important, and somewhat often overlooked, point. You've recognized that this is a mistake than you aren't immune from making and are going to take steps to lessen the risk of it occurring. I think often times this is the difference between good parenting and not so good parenting. It isn't so much that good parents don't make mistakes or forget things, but that they have a system in place to catch these mistakes before they become incredibly serious. This still won't eliminate all mistakes but it should certainly lessen the risk.
From a professional standpoint, while I'm not an engineer I am a technician working in aerospace, I think the same general rules apply. I consider myself pretty darn good at my job and yet I still constantly make mistakes. The trick is to have processes in place that allow you, or someone else, to catch those mistakes before they become irrecoverable. I'd much rather work with someone who makes frequent mistakes but is able to embrace a process meant to identify those mistakes than someone who makes much less frequent mistakes but refuses to adhere to procedures meant to correct mistakes, often out of a sense of arrogance or ego.
> good parents...have a system in place to catch these mistakes before they become incredibly serious.
I don't think it's possible to come up with all possible bad things that could happen and have a process in place before they happen. Some level of reactivity is necessary. In some cases, one mistake is too much. Not having foreseen that one mistake doesn't make someone a bad parent, because it's human to make mistakes.
I'm not surprised at all. Even though every rational person knows they're capable of making mistakes, acknowledging that you can easily make a major, major mistake - the kind that kills your child or your company - is a scary thing. I think some people just prefer to lie to themselves rather than than having to deal with it.
Reading this article was heartbreaking. Becoming a parent changes you, or at least it changed me. I can no longer imagine harm to a child---as conjured in a written article, on a television show, or in a discussion---in an abstract way as I once could. It is now intensely emotional, as if it were happening to my own child in front of my eyes.
This being HackerNews, I'm sure we're all thinking about fancy technological solutions to this problem. But there's a low-tech solution. I'm going to go out into my car right now and train myself to always visually scan the back seats before I leave the vehicle. If you do something enough, it becomes ingrained. I don't think about putting on my seat belt anymore; it just magically happens.
The memory expert interviewed in the article explains that this problem happens when the "low level" basal ganglia has the brain on autopilot, compensating for higher-level functionality that's compromised by stress, emotion, and distraction.
So teach the basal ganglia how to look in the back seat before stepping out of the car. Every time.
I think of myself as a very absent-minded person. I also can't imagine being in my car without knowing my daughter is in my car. After reading this, I'll probably check the back seat for her even when I'm very confident she's not there.
I don't mean to be critical. I've had a lot of advantages in life, and reading about this breaks my heart. I wish I could understand more about how I could help. None of these parents or kids deserve this situation, even if the parents could have done better.
I loved that that article about Japan's rail workers. I'm a huge fan of this stuff. Pre-flight checklists, rock-climbing belay call-and-response, operating room instrument counts (to make sure nothing was left in the patient!), etc. Protocols based on the premise that even experts are fallible, and that even easy things can go sideways.
> The memory expert interviewed in the article explains that this problem happens when the "low level" basal ganglia has the brain on autopilot, compensating for higher-level functionality that's compromised by stress, emotion, and distraction.
The thing I've noticed the times I've suffered through looking at more than the headlines of stories like these is that a combination of: (1) a break in routine (kid in car when they wouldn't ordinarily be) with (2) a totally routine 100% autopilot drive of the sort you sometimes realize you're near the end of and don't actually remember doing the earlier parts (morning commute, say) is deadly. It's so easy to see how it could happen. shivers
Thinking about it further, here's an easy protocol, if you happen to have a push-button ignition vehicle: Toss the key fob into the back seat as soon as you get in. The car will still start. Now, when you leave the car, you have to go retrieve the fob before you can lock it. So this forces you to look in the back as part of your car locking habit.
> Becoming a parent changes you, or at least it changed me. I can no longer imagine harm to a child---as conjured in a written article, on a television show, or in a discussion---in an abstract way as I once could.
Same here. As a result I know I am missing out on the excellent GoT.
Articles like this make me very glad the the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 1985 that it is unconstitutional to imprison someone for an "absolute liability" offense. Put another way, while someone can be thrown in jail over a mistake if they were reckless, there must be a "due diligence" defense available.
Absent extreme circumstances, it would be very hard for a case like this to come to trial in Canada.
You say it's not possible to imprison someone for an absolute liability offence. You also say it would be hard for a case like this to come to trial. Surely it would still come to trial but the punishment would be something other than prison?
No. An absolute liability offense is unconstitutional if the maximum penalty is incarceration; this can't be dodged by simply not asking for that penalty to be applied.
I'm not a lawyer, but I'd suspect that showing that the defendant normally took appropriate care and that it was only an unexpected event which provoked the mistake would be sufficient. My understanding is that due diligence only has to be prices on balance of probabilities.
There was a case of this happening in Ireland this summer.
Happened on the hottest day of the year, fathers first day dropping child at creche, took a call in the car, worked in a quiet part of a industrial estate.
Dozens of minor items aligned to cause the death.
It was discussed heavily in the office and among friends.
At least 30% of people had forgotten to drop a child at creche and noticed the child close to or at work.
I don't think I could judge anyone harshly, all it takes is the odds to go against you once.
To add to the tragedy, this resulted in death threats to the father and his eventual suicide. I don't think it would have been prosecuted here but now we won't know.
"The human brain, [David Diamond] says, is a magnificent but jury-rigged device in which newer and more sophisticated structures sit atop a junk heap of prototype brains still used by lower species. At the top of the device are the smartest and most nimble parts: the prefrontal cortex, which thinks and analyzes, and the hippocampus, which makes and holds on to our immediate memories. At the bottom is the basal ganglia, nearly identical to the brains of lizards, controlling voluntary but barely conscious actions."
That is a pretty decent description of the lump of goo in the human skull. Weird that many people attribute very impressive superpowers to it.
The possibility of doing this terrifies me more than almost anything—by nature I'm a forgetful person. "Out of sight, out of mind" describes me down to a T.
I don't have children, but my concern for children makes me not want to be in any position of responsibility for them.
I've considered becoming a teacher before, and one of the reasons that I didn't was that I just didn't want to be responsibility for the welfare of children. If something ever happened while they were under my care, I'd feel horrible if something happened, even if it wasn't my fault. Not to mention the liability in the eyes of parents, who can be less than reasonable when it comes to their children.
I've also refused to take care of children of friends and family, for similar reasons.
Finally, I've decided not to ever have children of my own, once again partly because I just don't want the responsibility, and partially out of a concern that I'd probably just screw it up somehow. Not to mention that the world is way overpopulated as it is, and it doesn't need me adding yet another person to the mix.
>I don't have children, but my concern for children makes me not want to be in any position of responsibility for them.
To be fair everyone feels this way before having kids. No one is a perfect parent and there is no particular point at which anyone is "ready" to take care of kids. But that being said I think just having that thought is far beyond the consideration that most people put into having children. It comes down (generally) to a selfish desire of simply getting something that you "want", rather than thinking through the consequences of creating another human being.
And yet 40% of kids in the US are born to parents who are irresponsible enough that they didn't intend to get pregnant. By and large they survive. Kids are sturdier than they look and designed to alert you to their survival needs. For example, you can forget to feed a dog, but it's almost impossible to forget to feed a kid.
Not only is there correlation but there is causation. And it applies not only to sexual abuse but to physical and emotional/mental abuse too.
So yes, having shitty parents is more likely to result in children turning into shitty adults. It's not a foregone conclusion but the odds are not in the child's favour.
I was responding to your point that "by and large they survive". I agree they survive but how they turn out is related to how they are brought up and so I dont think that we should be setting the bar as low as "they survive".
I don't see what you're trying to get at. Are you saying that people who get accidentally pregnant are more likely to be child abusers? My post was in response to someone who was worried he was too forgetful, etc, to take care of a kid. The fact that some people are "too child abuser" to raise a kid is a red herring.
It's amusing to me read this, because I think someone like you who truly understands the undertaking of taking responsibility for someone would make an amazing parent.
my wife used to joke all the time that one day I would end up coming home and when I came into the house she would say 'but..where is our daughter?' and it would turn out I forgot her on the train. Lucky enough never happened. Frankly her mind isn't too focused either.
I can sympathize. I always worry I'll forget my infant son at the grocery store, because I frequently let go of the stroller to get things where the stroller won't fit. It's happened before that I would wander off for 5-10 seconds before remembering my son was with me.
A chest child carrier totally solves that problem.
To all the people posting here who are thinking this certainly couldn't happen to them, please, read up on some psychology and neuroscience; you are just like all the people who thought only the Germans could have done what they did in WW2, until Milgram and co proved the world wrong (it could have been any of us). TLDR lesson here? Our brains are not built for multitasking. Safeguard yourself from human error, don't multitask! Laser focus is your friend.
General Motors has a rear seat alert available on some models - basically, if you open the rear door at the start of a trip, the car reminds you to retrieve whatever you put in the back seat.
It actually is a misdemeanor in my state to leave a child unattended in a car if it's in public and there's risk of "hyperthermia, hypothermia, or dehydration."
I looked it up after a stranger hung out at my car to nag me for leaving my son (who refused to leave the car) for five minutes in a locked car in a safe neighborhood in 75f weather.
It might not have been right, but it wasn't illegal either (in that state, sure it would be illegal in California).
All of you would probably flip out in Denmark, where kids are left sleeping outside the cafe wrapped up in bassinets while their moms drink coffee. Supposedly the cold outdoor air helps them sleep more soundly.
In England, my parents regularly left me in the car while they rushed into a shop.
Of course, being England in the 1990s the car didn't have air conditioning, so some windows would have been ajar. They were manual windows, so I could open them more if I wanted to.
Cars are ovens. The article cites a car reaching 110°F on a day in the 60's:
> The high temperature that day was only in the 60s, but the biometrics and thermodynamics of babies and cars combine mercilessly: Young children have lousy thermostats, and heat builds quickly in a closed vehicle in the sun. The temperature in Balfour's car that day topped 110 degrees.
So, a better way to say this is that 75F may not be safe. But it also may be. It's possible that the air in a car on a 75 degree day will in fact be 75 degrees.
I read somewhere that Tesla had an innovation to prevent this, but then couldn't Google it later. Did I dream that it can anyone else remember what I half-recall?
Rather than a car feature, what about one of those sensors that alert you if the object is too far? And force the user to explicitly acknowledge that it's intentional (for when you leave them with someone else).
How do you reduce false reports (e.g. dropped connections) enough that people won't shut it off in annoyance, though? For a technological solution to really work for the "break in routine makes someone forget a baby in the car" case, it has to be something that can be left in place forever once activated.
Good question. I wouldn't warn on a single broken connection, only after a couple of minutes without a signal, but I suppose even that could be annoying (e.g. kid sleeping on the next room).
I guess the population, climate, and car culture contribute to how frequently these sad events occur in the USA. Do they happen as frequently in other countries?
I think Australia matches at least the climate & car culture of the southern states, but a quick search shows me lots of events where parents deliberately leave kids in cars while they run fast errands, & the statistics on how many car windows get broken to retrieve kids left in cars is much easier to find than then number of children who have died from being accidentally left in a hot car.
As for the major question the articles raises, I think it's somewhat straightforward. There are a number of different legal types of negligence (criminal, gross, culpable, etc). I'm not a lawyer, but I believe these people should be charged with some type of negligence-related crime. Whether it's manslaughter or something else, I cannot say because I don't know enough. But to me, it's clear - these parents had a responsibility and they failed in a major way. Sure, it may have be unintentional, but it still happened. Drunk drivers don't intend to kill people. But I don't hear anyone coming to their defense. Everyone seems perfectly fine demonizing them and holding them to account for their negligent actions. Why should it be any different here? Hell, I might go so far as to argue it is worse here because statistically the odds are not all that likely that any one particular instance of drunk driving results in an accident or death. The odds are just increased. However, the odds are insanely high that if a parent makes this error that their child will die in each/any instance.
I do understand the desire to not prosecute because people feel they are already suffering and that it was not intentional and that these people aren't likely to ever make this mistake again. I get it. But like I said, it's an issue of a mistake so horrendously bad that someone died. They need to be charged. Let a jury decide on a case by case basis whether or not a person needs to be jailed for their actions. Also, let's consider the other side of this. What if by charging and jailing these individuals it actually helps them in the long run emotionally? What if these people feel that they are serving their time and paying their debt to society? What if that helps them feel like they can move on because society has deemed their punishment now satisfactory and complete? And wouldn't it make them less of a pariah in society because people would know they served their time and didn't just get off without punishment?
Lastly - I want to talk about that idiot juror Colin Rosse who said, "It may have been negligence, but it was an honest mistake." I'd really love to see if that sentiment held up if, for example, Colin Rosse's child was put in jail and was forgotten for 5 days and received no food or water (like what happened with Daniel Chong in 2012). I'm sure Rosse would be ok with everything because it was an honest error, right? And what if someone was daydreaming or just very tired while driving and ran their kid over and killed them? Rosse sees no issue with this, right? As long as there was no intent all is well, yeah? I'm sure that fool would be the first one on the news demanding legal action and that the person/people be held accountable.
If it's obvious that it should not be a crime, how is that a silly question if it's actually being treated as one? How do you change the situation if not by questioning it?
I generally agree with the idea of not criminalizing an honest mistake. I change my tune when it comes to mistakes that show a lack of fitness for the general task/required skills. In some cases I think a civil action like a fine or some type of legal mark that can identify serial 'mistake' makers.
If you 'forget' to wear your motorcycle helmet 7 times maybe you just don't get to operate a motorcycle anymore. Or if you 'forget' to wear your seat belt enough times the fines escalate and require mandatory safety classes. Especially in the case where the harm is generally only to the mistake maker, I think these are reasonable.
Where I completely change my tune is when the lives of other are in your care, including animals. If you forget to feed your pet or children to the point of harm, you're clearly not a suitable caretaker. If you cannot seek timely medical attention and your child dies, you should be held accountable. If you leave your child in the car and they die, you should absolutely be held accountable.
I've got three kids under five, I cannot imagine a world where I forget that they're there (partially because they make a ton of noise). I think there's an infinitesimally small percentage of people who actually forget, I think the likelihood is that: a) they thought it would be ok, but oops, and b) they just don't care- maybe even want the worst to happen. This goes back to my point of showing signs that you are unsuitable to care for others.
I want to draw a clear distinction, I'm not one of those people that believe children need to be bubble wrapped and monitored 24/7. I don't think people should be admonished if there's a couple of kids in the car and they ran in to the 7-11 and grabbed a (whatever) quickly while the kids were in plain view the whole time. I think kids that show the ability to go to the neighborhood park by themselves should be able to. I think we've taken a lot of the learning you get from free-roaming and seriously stunted our kids growth and resilience.
The distinction is, the kids don't get a say in their treatment or care. If you're ability to care for them is so diminished that they are harmed by a neglectful act, you should be punished harshly, if it's found that a reasonable person would have acted differently.
I'm willing to give that in all these negligent care cases we should look at the totality of the circumstances and make judgements based on that, as none of this can be black and white.
For example, say mom had a slip and fall a couple weeks ago and got a concussion. No one realized it, and she's got memory issues. She forgets the kiddo, and the kiddo dies. Now it's going to be a long, twisted, painful road, but I would think the right outcome is that the mother isn't punished anymore than she already will be for the rest of her life. The hard part would be getting that concussion post-diagnosed and recognized as an extenuating circumstance.
I'm still okay with negligent care cases defaulting to a presumption of guilt, because you HAVE to fuck up to get in to this position, now we just need to see if it was a reasonable mistake or not. A reasonable person does not forget their child(ren) in the car.
I've got three kids under five, I cannot imagine a world where I forget that they're there
Which is the whole problem. Our imagination and perception is flawed and limited. The idea that you can rely on it to accuse others of terrible crimes shows an unwarranted confidence in it.
People who actually studied memory are telling you (in the article): yes, it can happen to everyone, and you don't need any concussion.
Yet, you have an unshaken faith in memory, based on nothing but the fact that it never happened to you.
> I think there's an infinitesimally small percentage of people who actually forget
It happens more often than you believe, unfortunately. That's literally the entire point of the article.
> There's a dismayingly cartoonish expression for what happened to Lyn Balfour on March 30, 2007. British psychologist James Reason coined the term the "Swiss Cheese Model" in 1990 to explain through analogy why catastrophic failures can occur in organizations despite multiple layers of defense. Reason likens the layers to slices of Swiss cheese, piled upon each other, five or six deep. The holes represent small, potentially insignificant weaknesses. Things will totally collapse only rarely, he says, but when they do, it is by coincidence -- when all the holes happen to align so that there is a breach through the entire system.
> On the day Balfour forgot Bryce in the car, she had been up much of the night, first babysitting for a friend who had to take her dog to an emergency vet clinic, then caring for Bryce, who was cranky with a cold. Because the baby was also tired, he uncharacteristically dozed in the car, so he made no noise. Because Balfour was planning to bring Bryce's usual car seat to the fire station to be professionally installed, Bryce was positioned in a different car seat that day, not behind the passenger but behind the driver, and was thus not visible in the rear-view mirror. Because the family's second car was on loan to a relative, Balfour drove her husband to work that day, meaning the diaper bag was in the back, not on the passenger seat, as usual, where she could see it. Because of a phone conversation with a young relative in trouble, and another with her boss about a crisis at work, Balfour spent most of the trip on her cell, stressed, solving other people's problems. Because the babysitter had a new phone, it didn't yet contain Balfour's office phone number, only her cell number, meaning that when the sitter phoned to wonder why Balfour hadn't dropped Bryce off that morning, it rang unheard in Balfour's pocketbook.
> The holes, all of them, aligned.
> There is no consistent character profile of the parent who does this to his or her child. The 13 who were interviewed for this story include the introverted and extroverted; the sweet, the sullen, the stoic and the terribly fragile. None of those descriptions exactly fits Lyn Balfour, a 37-year-old Army reservist who has served in combat zones and who seems to remain -- at least on the subject of the death of her son -- in battle.
"I cannot imagine a world where I forget that they're there..."
What specific steps do you take to avoid it? What exactly is the reasonable standard of care in these cases? (Not causing a death is not a standard of care, it's an outcome.)
Yes, someone who can think like this is probably going g to be a better parent than say these two [0] who probably never intended to get pregnant and likely have never considered the well being of their child and are hoping that welfare payments will keep them in weed and cigarettes.
Well she is heavily pregnant and is holding a pack of cigarettes in her hand, so even if you ignore everything else in the picture, I can judge a prospective parent on that alone. If you cannot stop smoking for the 9 months that you are carrying a child inside you then you are already failing a child that has not even been born yet.
Do you have a photo of you with a pack of cigarettes that you could access now? Probably not because if you dont smoke you probably dont carry them often enough to be photographed doing so.
Also the guy has an iron cross tattoo on the colours of the Confederate flag and an SS tattoo right next to it. Sometimes you should judge people by how they present themselves because that is how they want you to see them.
If these two turned up at my house for a babysitting gig I would judge them as unsuitable to be around my children, so in this instance my point remains, shitty parents usually end up rasing shitty kids that turn into shitty adults and yes in this situation you can tell when you look at them that their child is probably not going to be a net benefit to society.
Do you have a photo of you with a pack of cigarettes that you could access now? Probably not because if you dont smoke you probably dont carry them often enough to be photographed doing so.
Clear survivorship bias. If she didn't have a pack, you probably wouldn't even have known about the picture. So the number of people who carry without getting photographed is irrelevant.
I'm not sure that is true re: me not knowing about the picture, the cigarettes are hardly the main point of this picture, perhaps a minor bullet point at best.
Its funny you say that, I am a tolerant person. That doesn't mean I cannot hold an opinion on these people. Do you think they are tolerant people? Is it the Confederate flag tattoo or the Nazi SS tattoo that conveys their tolerance to you?
Have you ever seen a child that is living with parents like these? It's not a happy life, it's not good for the child and the best you can hope is that the child is nothing like the parents. It is very sad to know that in many cases they will not be much different to their parents and will likely raise their children in a similar way. Being tolerant doesn't mean being blind to the reality of these situations.
Leaving a child in a car is similar to allow children to drown in a swimming pool. They're seen differently but they are very similar in terms of negligence and consequences.
In my opinion people doing this should be charged with child endangerment.
Of course it is. It's involuntary manslaughter (that's if you actually did forget, and didn't do it on purpose like some of those people). Punishable by up to 8 years in prison. Don't want to go to prison? Easy: don't leave your toddler alone in a locked car.
I'm a parent, I don't need to read an article to be able to tell you it is easy. If you are with a kid, just take her with you or if you can't do so, don't bring your kid along. Billions of people manage just fine.
Please read the article. It's not about people who leave the kid in the car purposefully while they go do something else.
It's about people who bring the kid in the car to drop them off somewhere, and they simply forget. Yes, it happens. Yes, to regular people.
And yes, billions of people manage to do even this just fine. But it's a reasoning flaw - a well-known human bias - to assume that the people to whom it happens must be different somehow.
Yes, I've read it. Just because you didn't mean to do it doesn't mean it's not a crime. That's why it's called manslaughter and not murder, and that's why it carries a lower penalty.
"In most states involuntary manslaughter results from an improper use of reasonable care or skill while performing a legal act, or [...].
"Many states do not define involuntary manslaughter, or define it vaguely in common-law terms. Some jurisdictions describe the amount of Negligence necessary to constitute manslaughter with terms such as criminal negligence, gross negligence, and culpable negligence. The only certainty that can be attached to these terms is that they require more than the ordinary negligence standard in a civil case. With this approach the state does not have to prove that the defendant was aware of the risk.
"Other jurisdictions apply more subjective tests, such as "reckless" or "wanton," to describe the amount of negligence needed to constitute involuntary manslaughter. In this approach the defendant must have personally appreciated a risk and then chosen to take it anyway.
What is the standard of reasonable care in these cases? What specific actions are necessary to demonstrate that reasonable care has been taken? What risk have the people in the article deliberately taken that is not also taken by the majority of parents?
Here's the pivotal and incorrect question asked: "What kind of person forgets a baby?" And the author proceeds to reassure us it certainly just could be anyone, as asked. The real question is "What kind of parent forgets a baby?" Answer: A shitty one.
To address the issue of children dying due to airbag deployments (which were designed to protect an unbelted 50th percentile size male in a frontal crash), the NHTSA recommended that children in car seats be placed in the rear seats in the vehicle.
Due to the fact that it's much easier to not notice a child in a rear facing car seat in the rear of the car, as opposed to one in the front passenger seat, the number of children who died of heat stroke each year increased from 10 per year to 40 per year.
[1] https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/76289000/gif/...