Children still dying in hot cars.

[shortylickens]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nat...-arrested-son-hot-car-death-article-1.2007375


I would have thought in the modern world we'd have microchips or something to constantly tell you the locations of your kids.

 

[Spungo]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nat...-arrested-son-hot-car-death-article-1.2007375


I would have thought in the modern world we'd have microchips or something to constantly tell you the locations of your kids.

And what would that do? Tell parents where their children are hiding so they can be murdered faster?

 

[Zaap]

I will never understand the idea of "forgetting" your infant is in the car. A normal, responsible parent simply *can't* just forget the presence of their own infant children when it's their turn to take care of them.

I'm willing to entertain the idea that in a perfect storm of mistakes it being an accident is possible...

...but it's just so damn far-fetched that it defies belief.

 

[Paratus]

I will never understand the idea of "forgetting" your infant is in the car. A normal, responsible parent simply *can't* just forget the presence of their own infant children when it's their turn to take care of them.

I'm willing to entertain the idea that in a perfect storm of mistakes it being an accident is possible...

...but it's just so damn far-fetched that it defies belief.

Well let me help you out. I did this as a safety topic for work this summer.

In most cases many things do go wrong but the number one cause is distraction of the parent.

Have you ever driven to work and couldn't remember the last 20 minutes of the drive? If you have, pretend you had a kid in your car and now you know how easy it is to have forgotten your kid. Your brain makes memory maps of routine procedures like driving to work. This saves energy and allows you to focus our attention elsewhere.

In a lot of cases the parent who normally doesn't take the child to day care ends up taking the kid but gets distracted along the way. The memory map kicks in and they go to work leaving the child.

The child who these days is in the back facing backwards in a car seat and can't be seen from the front.

Quite frankly this is one of my fears with my own kids.

 

[Spungo]

The child who these days is in the back facing backwards in a car seat and can't be seen from the front.

Was your car made in the soviet union?

My parents at least pretended to care about me, so I rode in the front seat.

I will never understand the idea of "forgetting" your infant is in the car. A normal, responsible parent simply *can't* just forget the presence of their own infant children when it's their turn to take care of them.

I once forgot that bullets contain gunpowder and I ended up shooting my friend in the face. Totally not my fault.

 

[pcgeek11]

Yes some parents are still stupid. If you forget about your kid in the car you ARE Stupid.

 

[manimal]

Well let me help you out. I did this as a safety topic for work this summer.

In most cases many things do go wrong but the number one cause is distraction of the parent.

Have you ever driven to work and couldn't remember the last 20 minutes of the drive? If you have, pretend you had a kid in your car and now you know how easy it is to have forgotten your kid. Your brain makes memory maps of routine procedures like driving to work. This saves energy and allows you to focus our attention elsewhere.

In a lot of cases the parent who normally doesn't take the child to day care ends up taking the kid but gets distracted along the way. The memory map kicks in and they go to work leaving the child.

The child who these days is in the back facing backwards in a car seat and can't be seen from the front.

Quite frankly this is one of my fears with my own kids.

Dont forget that most parents of young kids in car seats dont sleep much. Chronic sleep depravation is a real danger to parents. When my triplets were having colic I slept 2 hours a night for more than year. I started making mistakes at work and made stupid errors. Its something that we talk about alot in our multiples support group.


I fell asleep on the couch feeding kids and it terrified me. We were super careful and checked on each other alot to make sure nothing happened.

 

[manimal]

Yes some parents are still stupid. If you forget about your kid in the car you ARE Stupid.

Its not about being stupid. Its about making mistakes when your comprised by lack of sleep and stress. Your comments on the other hand are stupid.




There was a story of a mom who left her twins in the back seat of her car a few years ago. Both kids died and the mom was destroyed and ended up killing herself if I remember it correctly. She was a smart capable career woman who made a mistake on a day she was most compromised. Sometimes parents dont have help and a support group and accidents happen.


Yes it happens occasionally because some idiot got drunk and fell asleep and the kids stayed in the car or some babysitter was screwing her bf when it happened but most times its a tragedy like dropping a new born.

 

[Paratus]

Was your car made in the soviet union?

My parents at least pretended to care about me, so I rode in the front seat.


I once forgot that bullets contain gunpowder and I ended up shooting my friend in the face. Totally not my fault.

So you don't have any kids

Dude it's totally your fault if you forget your kid in the car. It's just that figuring out why it keeps happening to otherwise responsible parents means maybe preventing other kids from dying in hot cars.

Besides according to the current guidelines that kid in the picture should be rear facing until 30lbs or more. For my youngest she would have been rear facing until 3 and a half.

 

[waggy]

I don't get it myself. its a child not a bag of carrots.

 

[nageov3t]

I will never understand the idea of "forgetting" your infant is in the car. A normal, responsible parent simply *can't* just forget the presence of their own infant children when it's their turn to take care of them.

I'm willing to entertain the idea that in a perfect storm of mistakes it being an accident is possible...

...but it's just so damn far-fetched that it defies belief.

this is a long, but really great, read about the subject --

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifes...e0fe3a-f580-11e3-a3a5-42be35962a52_story.html

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.

“Memory is a machine,” he says, “and it is not flawless. Our conscious mind prioritizes things by importance, but on a cellular level, our memory does not. If you’re capable of forgetting your cellphone, you are potentially capable of forgetting your child.”

Diamond is a professor of molecular physiology at the University of South Florida and a consultant to the veterans hospital in Tampa. He’s here for a national science conference to give a speech about his research, which involves the intersection of emotion, stress and memory. What he’s found is that under some circumstances, the most sophisticated part of our thought-processing center can be held hostage to a competing memory system, a primitive portion of the brain that is -- by a design as old as the dinosaur’s -- inattentive, pigheaded, nonanalytical, stupid...

When our prefrontal cortex and hippocampus are planning our day on the way to work, the ignorant but efficient basal ganglia is operating the car; that’s why you’ll sometimes find yourself having driven from point A to point B without a clear recollection of the route you took, the turns you made or the scenery you saw.

Ordinarily, says Diamond, this delegation of duty “works beautifully, like a symphony. But sometimes, it turns into the ‘1812 Overture.’ The cannons take over and overwhelm.”

By experimentally exposing rats to the presence of cats, and then recording electrochemical changes in the rodents’ brains, Diamond has found that stress -- either sudden or chronic -- can weaken the brain’s higher-functioning centers, making them more susceptible to bullying from the basal ganglia. He’s seen the same sort of thing play out in cases he’s followed involving infant deaths in cars.

“The quality of prior parental care seems to be irrelevant,” he said. “The important factors that keep showing up involve a combination of stress, emotion, lack of sleep and change in routine, where the basal ganglia is trying to do what it’s supposed to do, and the conscious mind is too weakened to resist. What happens is that the memory circuits in a vulnerable hippocampus literally get overwritten, like with a computer program. Unless the memory circuit is rebooted -- such as if the child cries, or, you know, if the wife mentions the child in the back -- it can entirely disappear.”

 

[manimal]

I don't get it myself. its a child not a bag of carrots.

Most of the research I have read said extreme exhaustion plays a big part into these things. The human body isnt infallible. Your tired as fark and your brain fails you. These tragedies are bad enough for the parents. A little empathy goes a long way.



edit

great link Loki

 

[Paratus]

I don't get it myself. its a child not a bag of carrots.

http://www.parents.com/baby/safety/car/danger-of-hot-car-for-children/

 

[Jaskalas]

My parents at least pretended to care about me, so I rode in the front seat.

I imagine that is illegal today.

 

[manimal]

http://www.parents.com/baby/safety/car/danger-of-hot-car-for-children/

horrible >< so sad

 

[nageov3t]

I imagine that is illegal today.

yup, at least in CA, it's illegal for kids under 8 to ride in the front seat unless the car only has front row seating.

 

[Paratus]

Most of the research I have read said extreme exhaustion plays a big part into these things. The human body isnt infallible. Your tired as fark and your brain fails you. These tragedies are bad enough for the parents. A little empathy goes a long way.



edit

great link Loki

These are horrific things and most people, me included, don't want to think about. And if we assume those parents it happens to are awful irresponsible people we don't have to worry about because it could never ever happen to us because we aren't irresponsible.

 

[Jaskalas]

These are horrific things and most people, me included, don't want to think about. And if we assume those parents it happens to are awful irresponsible people we don't have to worry about because it could never ever happen to us because we aren't irresponsible.

First step towards being a better person is to admit that we are human. To acknowledge our mortal limits. Perhaps then we'll also find some compassion.

 

[moonbogg]

http://www.parents.com/baby/safety/car/danger-of-hot-car-for-children/

Jesus Christ. I can easily imagine this happening, and that's what's so scary. If your memory fails, then it fails. Its not like you have a choice.

 

[nageov3t]

unless there's some kind of mitigating factor (eg: drugs/alcohol were at play), I can't imagine criminal charges for this kind of accidental death.

I can't believe there's anything the justice system can do to these parents that's worse than the anguish they're going through already.

 

[Belegost]

So when the human fails I think it's a good place for technology to pickup. I'm thinking a low power bluetooth transmitter attached to a strain sensor on the child seat and an app for smartphones.

When the strain sensor detects a weight in the seat it pairs with the parents phone, for as long as the weight remains in the seat it sends a handshake with the phone every couple minutes. When the weight is removed the seat sends out a disconnect signal to the phone. On the phone the app is monitoring for the regular signals, if it misses more than one signal it queries the seat to see if there is still something there. If it fails to get a reply it sets off an alarm on the phone to notify the parent that they potentially left their child in the seat and moved out of range.

 

[theeedude]

Technology can easily solve this problem. Occupancy sensor + temp sensor => auto open windows and sound alarm.
But there will probably need to be either a government mandate or IIHS requirement for top safety pick for industry to do so.

 

[moonbogg]

So when the human fails I think it's a good place for technology to pickup. I'm thinking a low power bluetooth transmitter attached to a strain sensor on the child seat and an app for smartphones.

When the strain sensor detects a weight in the seat it pairs with the parents phone, for as long as the weight remains in the seat it sends a handshake with the phone every couple minutes. When the weight is removed the seat sends out a disconnect signal to the phone. On the phone the app is monitoring for the regular signals, if it misses more than one signal it queries the seat to see if there is still something there. If it fails to get a reply it sets off an alarm on the phone to notify the parent that they potentially left their child in the seat and moved out of range.

Funny, I had the same exact idea, and I'm sure about 10,000 others had it years ago. Problem is, people don't have this technology. This has to be done by parents. The tips at the end of the article are very good, especially training yourself to check the back seat before locking. If you check every time, no matter what car you are in, whether it has car seats or not, then that might save your kid.
This has happened to me, except I didn't have the kids in the car. I would be driving and suddenly became startled and thought "are the kids in the back?" So I would have to look to check, then I remembered that they were with the wife. That's the same memory glitch that kills kids and by pretending it can't happen to you, that only makes it more likely to happen to you. People need to sack up, admit they are human and then take measures to prevent it.
I, for one, will do nothing, because the odds are in my favor and this won't happen to me.

 

[piasabird]

We must outlaw all cars.

 

[nageov3t]

I'm surprised they don't have child seats with a weight sensor and a randomly flashing light/alarm sound just to remind parents that the seat is occupied.