toddler forgot in car for 2 daytime hours (she's ok). how do parents forget a kid for that long?

[Liberal_in_LA]

this isn't a case of driving to work and forgetting to drop the kid off at daycare. How long can a parent be inside and forget a kid is in the car? not sure if the mom was at home


Monsey dad accused of leaving 2-year-old in hot, parked car for 2 hours

The girl was taken to Nyack Hospital about 2 p.m. after one of her parents called Hatzolah Ambulance to report the girl had been left in the vehicle as it was parked in their driveway, Ramapo police Detective Sgt. Brian Corbett said. The toddler was not seriously harmed during the incident.

-------------
Corbett said Stein's alleged actions appear to have been inadvertent .

"He had been running errands, got back to the house and forgot that he had left his daughter in the car," Corbett said.
--------------

Stein was charged with endangering the welfare of a child and second-degree reckless endangerment, misdemeanors.

http://www.lohud.com/article/20110723/NEWS03/107230340/Monsey-dad-accused-leaving-2-year-old-hot-parked-car-2-hours?odyssey=mod%7Cnewswell%7Ctext%7CNews%7Cs

[Obamanaut]

1. New York. yup.

Not Florida. Not Texas. There are no geographic boundaries to dumb acts by humans.

[LisaL]

13. Well if it were in TX the kid would be toast after 2 hours in a car.

[Obamanaut]

14. My point is/was this - when there is an OP re weird, bizarre,

horrendous, etc. actions by anyone in Florida or Texas, there will often be a one word response in the thread - "Florida" or "Texas" - suggesting that's where all the weird stuff happens.

Turn about is fair play.

There is no geographic boundary to weird. It is everywhere

[baldguy]

31. LisaL is right:If it had been TX the kid would be dead.

If it had been FL, the "child welfare" agency would've been the people forgetting about the kid in the car.

[Major Hogwash]

41. It was 103º in Boise yesterday, so that kid would have been dead here in less than 2 hours.

At 140º, the inside temperature that a car can reach with the windows rolled up, it only takes 90 minutes for a small child to completely dehydrate, by sweating it all out of their body, and then pass out and start to suffer brain damage.

If the car were left in direct sunlight, it would take less time than that!!

[Electric Monk]

18. Not Florida. Not Texas.

Funny you chose those two for it to be "not" from :rofl:

Not a coincidence :)

[Obamanaut]

23. Funny that you don't read all of the responses. Here's #14 for you

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=439&topic_id=1566177&mesg_id=1566478


14. My point is/was this - when there is an OP re weird, bizarre,

horrendous, etc. actions by anyone in Florida or Texas, there will often be a one word response in the thread - "Florida" or "Texas" - suggesting that's where all the weird stuff happens.

Turn about is fair play.

There is no geographic boundary to weird. It is everywhere


And here's a :rofl: back atcha.

:rofl:

[Electric Monk]

26. Self referencing for the... what?

[Obamanaut]

38. For you to read this ->

When there is an OP re weird, bizarre, horrendous, etc. actions by anyone in Florida or Texas, there will often be a one word response in the thread - "Florida" or "Texas" - suggesting that's where all the weird stuff happens.

Turn about is fair play.

There is no geographic boundary to weird. It is everywhere

[Electric Monk]

39. Both are "Bush States" because they've already been thoroughly corrupted

at all levels.

[Obamanaut]

47. Give it up. There are people who display weird behavior all across the

country, and elsewhere.

There are no geographic limits.

[Electric Monk]

54. Jeb and George, nuff said?

[Horse with no Name]

2. I was getting my 2-year old granddaughter out of the car yesterday

in this extreme heat and I thought about how ANYONE can forget a child. My FIRST thought is to get that baby out of the heat...not my cell phone or my purse.

[MissDeeds]

10. Yep

Wouldn't that be your first concern? How could anyone forget a child or a pet in the car in this extreme heat? It boggles the mind.

[eyesroll]

3. Some research suggests your brain doesn't know the difference between forgetting a cell phone

and a child, especially if you're out of your routine.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022701549.html

(Warning: This is not an easy story to read. But it's eye-opening and well reported.)

[Liberal_in_LA]

4. there is a difference between the story I posted & the "forgot to drop kid off at daycare"

I can understand going into work and forgetting kids is in car. But driving your kid home from story -how long does it take to realize the house is too quiet or some other trigger? At minimum - a toddler requires a snack or diaper change.

[surrealAmerican]

20. It was only two hours.

Many toddlers nap for longer than that on a daily basis. The "too quiet" or "shouldn't we check on the kid" flags could easily not have kicked in yet.

[MrMickeysMom]

27. Well, yes, but they nap in a neutral thermal environment...

not a fucking heat-sweltering closed car, which reaches unlivable conditions within 10 minutes.

Nap through that...

[surrealAmerican]

53. I certainly didn't mean to imply ...

... that this was a safe thing for the child. It wasn't.

The post I was responding to asked why the parents weren't immediately alarmed when the child wasn't obviously making noise in the house. They may not have expected her to be making noise at that time of day because, under normal circumstances, that would be when she would have been napping.

[MrMickeysMom]

58. Okay...

I agree

[Xithras]

55. The problem is change in routine, not specifically daycare.

Many years ago, when my teenage son was still an infant, I worked out of a home office all day. My wife, back then, used to take my son to a daycare run by my mother-in-law, so I was home alone all day.

One day, my MiL got sick and I had to watch him. Then, in the middle of the day, I had a conference call with a client and had to run to their site for a meeting. My son had been sleeping in his crib upstairs for more than an hour, and without thinking I walked out to the car and left. I was halfway to the clients site, several miles from home, before the realization slammed me that I'd just left my 10 month old son alone.

He was still asleep when I got back to the house, but that changed my view of the whole kids in cars thing. When you get into a regular daily routine, it's VERY easy to become oblivious to changes in that routine, even when those changes involve your own children. My kids were usually in daycare during the day, so I didn't think about them. It sounds terrible, but that's the way the mind works.

[Odin2005]

34. That makes no sense to me.

A child is not an inanimate object like a cell phone, a child is a little person who you love and care for! Just simply the emotional connection should make the memory connections in the brain thick enough to prevent that, unless the person didn't REALLY care about their own child.

[pipi_k]

5. If people are busy and distracted enough...

I guess it could happen.

One thing I would not want to do is tempt fate by saying, "How could ANYONE forget their kid in the car????"

There but for the grace of God and all that...


Anyway, one helpful thing I read some time ago was that parents should put something they absolutely NEED in the back seat with the kid.

Briefcase...house keys...purse...

That way if that item is forgotten, the person has to go back to get it and thereby discover the child along with the item.

[Chemisse]

22. That's a good idea. It happens; people forget occasionally.

I raised 5 kids and forgot my baby was in the car one time. My other kids were older and often babysat for him, so I was accustomed to going out without him quite a bit.

My husband and I went to a parent-teacher conference at my daughter's high school, and simply left the baby in the car, totally forgotten until we came back out, and realized - with great horror - our mistake.

It was at night, and in the winter, but thankfully not too cold out. He was still asleep when we came back out to the car. He never knew the difference, but I will never forget it. I think of it every time people rail against a parent who makes this kind of mistake, and realize it could have been me - and my child.

[MrMickeysMom]

29. Nuh-uh... nope...

It could happen .... in brain-dead land, but this is normal IQ land... So, they must have been fucking brain dead.

[pipi_k]

42. IQ has nothing to do with it...

Even ducks can keep track of their young.

Ducks, however, don't have their heads filled with the thoughts of the 50 different things they have to do in the space of one day and limited time to do it in.

Nobody knows what this guy had on his mind. Maybe he's on the brink of foreclosure...maybe about to lose his job...maybe a close relative is very ill.

Thank your lucky stars if you've never been so stressed out that you could lose all sense of the immediate.

[MrMickeysMom]

43. Be honest...

You don't know what level ducks function on. Certainly, there is an underlying function, whether duck or homo sapient.... And, you've got to be pretty damaged to not be aware of your progeny... no matter where you are. Letting go of a hand in a store or crowd might be an exception, but literally walking away from the car.... NO FUCKING WAY.

I've been pretty stressed out, okay. No need to exclude stress means testing with my experience, alright.

But, you're right... IQ and EQ are at question. One may have to be emotionally detached for such a thing to happen.

[pipi_k]

46. Hahahahaha

OK I've never known any ducks personally, but I did have a couple of geese who raised a fine family of six goslings.

They were excellent parents.

But I can guarantee without a doubt that they were NOT spending their days thinking about losing their jobs, the rising costs of healthcare, terror attacks, paying the mortgage, where their next meal would come from, what antics our government might be up to, and whether the family vehicle would make it another year without having to spend hundreds on repairs.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that this whole "forgetting your kids" thing started around the same time our lives became more harried, rushed, and stressed.

[MrMickeysMom]

59. Then, we're really falling apart, aren't we?

That's tragic... More to think about.

[smokey nj]

49. Please read this Washington Post article. It's long, but eyeopening.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022701549.html

It can happen to anybody.

"The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist." <snip>

[Tatiana]

48. Yep! My purse sits in the back with the baby.

And I agree with you about not throwing stones if one lives in a glass house.

These types of stories are tragic, and I hope with more awareness people will be more conscientious towards making sure their children are not left in vehicles.

[pipi_k]

50. When my children were babies...

there were no laws about putting the car seat in the back, and there weren't any laws about what type of seat they had to have. So for me, it was easy to remember the kid was there because s/he was in the passenger's seat right next to me. Kind of scary when I think of it now, what could have happened in a crash, but it's just what a lot of people I knew did at the time.

As far as throwing stones...for me, it's not so much about glass houses, but tempting fate, you know?

Bringing bad luck upon oneself by being arrogant. Hubris, I think.


Many years ago when I was young and agile I used to get soooo annoyed when I got in back of an older person in a store or whatever. "Why can't they move faster????", I would fume to myself in irritation.

Well, guess what.

Now I'm older. I have VERY bad knees and feet. It hurts me to walk.

I don't know for sure that I brought it upon myself by my own arrogance, but had I known then what I know now, I would have been a little more understanding toward people who couldn't move quite as fast as I could.

And that's what I think people might want to remember as they sit in judgement of someone else who might have been dealing with things they can't imagine and ended up forgetting his kid in the car...

[Ezlivin]

6. My parents are STILL trying to forget me

At least that's my Mom tells me once a week.

:)

[pitohui]

7. human brain is badly designed

as the saying goes, god was a hell of an artist but he's a piss poor engineer

people can and DO forget absolutely anything, i'm glad you've never experienced this, although i'm a bit puzzled that anyone can live for very long w.out having forgotten something terribly important at least once that you can't believe you could ever forget

the brain is badly designed, there are plenty of studies, books, tricks out there to help you deal with it...or you can just feel superior to everybody else because you're lucky that whatever you forgot didn't make a difference

[Politicalboi]

8. I'm sure newer cars will have a device

To let someone know a living thing is in the car still. I'm surprised no one has thought of it yet. A motion sensor of some sort that blows the horn, and turns the lights off and on when windows are rolled up all the way when vehicle is parked. Or something that rolls the windows to allow air in.

[valerief]

12. Man, I just want something to repel tailgaters. nt

[strategery blunder]

36. Someone HAS thought of it

It's in the (very long) article; NASA engineered a backseat motion detector with a keychain alarm after a similar incident happened in their parking lot.

It was never commercially produced because no manufacturer wanted liability (what happens if the device malfunctions and a child died?) and marketing studies showed it wouldn't sell anyway because people are in such deep denial that this could ever happen to them. :(

Personally, I wonder if aviation-style checklists for shutting off a car would help--but then again, for experienced drivers the act of driving can be so mindless and mental autopilot that even such checklists would probably be forgotten.

[seabeyond]

9. i am a stay at home. i had my babies with me every second of every day. there was not a

chance i could forget them. THEY were the norm.

the few unusual times my husband had them, i could see it. i could see it if it was totally out of my routine... mind elsewhere. i think it would be easy.

i understand it. and i am as protective/overprotective as a parent can be

[valerief]

11. You would think the adult would MAKE A CONSCIOUS EFFORT to remember the kid.

String on the finger. Talking to the kid to remember it's there. Saying over and over, "Don't forget the kid." It's not hard at all, if you make the effort.

[RB TexLa]

15. It happens often, that's why they have billboards saying to put your laptop, purse or soemthing like

that beside the child so you won't forget them.

[undeterred]

16. Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Back of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime?

By Gene Weingarten
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 8, 2009

The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table. In the first pew of spectators sat his wife, looking stricken, absently twisting her wedding band. The room was a sepulcher. Witnesses spoke softly of events so painful that many lost their composure. When a hospital emergency room nurse described how the defendant had behaved after the police first brought him in, she wept. He was virtually catatonic, she remembered, his eyes shut tight, rocking back and forth, locked away in some unfathomable private torment. He would not speak at all for the longest time, not until the nurse sank down beside him and held his hand. It was only then that the patient began to open up, and what he said was that he didn't want any sedation, that he didn't deserve a respite from pain, that he wanted to feel it all, and then to die.

The charge in the courtroom was manslaughter, brought by the Commonwealth of Virginia. No significant facts were in dispute. Miles Harrison, 49, was an amiable person, a diligent businessman and a doting, conscientious father until the day last summer -- beset by problems at work, making call after call on his cellphone -- he forgot to drop his son, Chase, at day care. The toddler slowly sweltered to death, strapped into a car seat for nearly nine hours in an office parking lot in Herndon in the blistering heat of July.

It was an inexplicable, inexcusable mistake, but was it a crime? That was the question for a judge to decide. At one point, during a recess, Harrison rose unsteadily to his feet, turned to leave the courtroom and saw, as if for the first time, that there were people witnessing his disgrace. The big man's eyes lowered. He swayed a little until someone steadied him, and then he gasped out in a keening falsetto: "My poor baby!"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022701549.html

This article won a Pulitzer Prize - its a good read on this phenomenon of forgetting, which does happen to good people who love their children.

[FirstLight]

32. amazing article

(no wonder it won a pulitzer, great writing)

the end really got me, too... :(

[undeterred]

44. There was a woman in my city that it happened to..

and it was just an all around tragedy. I found it impossible to judge her. The family was going through enormous stress with another child at the time and she left a newborn in the back seat and forgot to drop him off at day care on the way to work. The family was devastated.

Reading the article made sense of it. Its even scarier when you see that it can happen to anyone.

[Xithras]

56. This passage really says it all...

Everyone likes to think, "I could never do that!"

Two decades ago, this was relatively rare. But in the early 1990s, car-safety experts declared that passenger-side front airbags could kill children, and they recommended that child seats be moved to the back of the car; then, for even more safety for the very young, that the baby seats be pivoted to face the rear. If few foresaw the tragic consequence of the lessened visibility of the child . . . well, who can blame them? What kind of person forgets a baby?

The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist.

Yes, anyone can do it. It simply requires the right amount of distraction, a little disruption of routine, and a warm day.

[undeterred]

57. The only common factor is having a brain.

The human brain, it turns out, is fallible.

[Danmel]

17. Happened to my neighbor

One night we were at parent teacher conferences. I saw one of my neighbors- he told me his wife was at work and the older kids were at activities. I asked where their youngest child was and he freaked, said oh my god , and ran to get her out of her carseat in the back!
Good thing I saw him. He certainly is a loving father- just distracted. Thankfully nothing happened.

[kentuck]

19. Sometimes I think life becomes so hectic...

and so hyper and fast-paced and stressful, that people could forget to put their clothes on before they get in the car. Heart attacks waiting to happen. They are not equipped to take care of children. Just my opinion.

[JI7]

21. i don't have any kids yet but i always think if i did, especially a baby

it would be on my mind most of the times that i couldn't go long without even thinking of the baby.

but i don't have kids so maybe it might be different.

[joshcryer]

30. Some parents are really neglectful / busy types. I went to 4th of July fireworks...

...with my nephews and their parents and the parents pretty much ignored both of them. Stupid cell phones. I couldn't take my eyes off of them and it's gotten increasingly worse with the older boy who is extremely disruptive (hit a kid 3-4 years younger than him several times with a plastic light saber, the parents didn't even notice it).

[mysuzuki2]

24. my folks were always forgetting me places

at least they always claimed they had forgotten me. I believed them too until that last time when they moved and changed their name.

[lynne]

25. Dead toddler in my area recently -

- mother left him in car for over 8 hours. She went to work and didn't find child until after she returned home.

This was the SECOND time she had done this. The first time the daycare called to ask why the child hadn't been dropped off. Luckily, the first time it was winter and the child had been in the car only several hours. As there was no injury to the child, the first incident wasn't reported to the authorities.

Accidental = Yes. Criminal = Yes. Child neglect is criminal and leaving your child to fry in your car is neglect even if not intentional. There are now methods and devices to help prevent these tragedies.

[joshcryer]

28. I can see it. My nephew pretty much spent his first year in a carseat.

They'd take the carseat out of the car and leave it on the living room floor for hours. If he was sleeping they'd just leave him on the table in front of the door and go about their business.

Never understood it myself, the car seat attracted their cats and they'd sit on it and leave cat hair everywhere.

[seabeyond]

40. i had a brother and SOL that did that. their baby was always in a car seat

we had babies a couple months apart. i couldnt stand the carseat or strollers. i would feel claustrophobic, restrained FOR the baby, so first chance i always took out adn never used strollers. freedom to walk and explore as they got older.

[Odin2005]

33. How THE FUCK could you forget YOUR DAUGHTER in the car?

Anyone who would "forget about" their kid is unfit to be a parent.

[Fumesucker]

35. I'm a parent and grandparent and I don't think it's that simple..

http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet/feature/2009/03/09/fatal_distraction

"I was that guy, before. I'd read the stories, and I'd go, 'What were those parents thinking?'" says Mikey Terry, whose 6-month-old daughter, Mika, died of hyperthermia after he left her in a car while he went to work driving a truck, only to realize what he'd done when he was 40 long miles away. For those of us who haven't experienced such a tragedy, perhaps the most disturbing element of Weingarten's article is how he indicts us for our knee-jerk judgments of these parents, our insistence that we would never be so careless. He quotes psychologist Ed Hickling, who's studied the effects of fatal car accidents on the surviving drivers: "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." Weingarten follows that up with an example of one of the comments on a Charlottesville News Web site article about Lyn Balfour, who left her son, Bryce, to perish in her car: "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."

In the context of the article -- specifically, following Weingarten's description of listening to Balfour's interrogation by the police ("her answers are immeasurably sad, almost unintelligible, half sob, half whisper") and "unendurable" 911 call, in which she's heard screaming frantically while performing CPR on her dead son -- the heartlessness of such a comment is amplified. And yet, it's also echoed in numerous comments on this very article. (Judging from sad experience, it will likely again be echoed in comments here.) "The Terry family didn't 'lose' their six-month-old (a new low in euphemism, WaPo). They KILLED their six-month-old." "Think spraying or neutering... then they will be free to indulge their distractions." Some of the nastiest commenters are obviously stirring the pot for their own sick thrills, but others are doing exactly what Ed Hickling describes: comforting themselves by trying to make these people into something other than loving parents who made the worst mistake imaginable. "I thought about it and then jumped to what seems the most obvious conclusion: narcissism. If, of all things in your life, you put your child in danger in such a circumstance, it's because you don't give the child your fullest attention." Other commenters point out that most of the parents mentioned talking on cell phone calls while driving -- dangerous! (which, yeah it is, but let he who is without sin...) -- and several others rant about working mothers and/or parents who "place career above family," as though working to support your children means you're only marginally interested in their welfare. Not surprisingly, although most of the parents Weingarten interviewed are fathers, Lyn Balfour bears the brunt of the specifically directed condemnation. What kind of mother could forget about her own child?

[upi402]

37. I always end up finding there was a reason

It's not always daddy was at the bar or mommy at the dealers...

This country is to quick to jump on ANYTHING a parent does that's not 100% perfect. Other countries are much looser.

[kick-ass-bob]

45. It's always like that... until you yourself do something dumb as shit.

I never did anything like that, but I have never been that overwhelmed with thoughts of other things. But I can definitely see how people could get so wrapped up in other pressures that things, even their own child, gets dropped off the list of things to remember.

Calling them dumbfucks or brain dead like others in this thread have is not going to help anyone.


As for the technology about having some warning being available, how is the liability different from that of the warning of drifting or coming too close to a car in front of you? If it fails, it is not anymore the car's fault than in this case.

[woo me with science]

51. I fear that I am capable of this.

Many routines in our lives are carried out on autopilot. And the routine structure of your day can make one alteration in the routine catastrophic. When it is a routine, your brain is not necessarily rehearsing or checking or remembering the steps you went through. It's not that you don't think of your child during that time; you do, but the assumption is that everything went as it has hundreds of times before. Because I know how glitchy and auto-pilot-controlled my own brain is, I have no problem at all believing and knowing in my gut that loving and completely well-meaning parents can do this.

These stories always make me catch my breath and become sick inside with the "what if's."

Gene Weingarten wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning column on parents who have done this. It is hard reading and doesn't try to take a side...just lets the stories and the parents speak for themselves. You can tell it is an honest piece, because the reactions on it range from yours to mine.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022701549.html

Peace, Odin.

[TwilightGardener]

52. I'm not sure why people can't accept that even decent parents can

have massive brain farts. All it takes is a disruption from routine, being lost in thought, etc. I have forgotten to pick up my kids at school/daycare when I was busy and didn't notice the clock. The mind is capable of amazing stunts and tricks.