A 6-month-old boy died after being left for hours in a hot car in Louisiana, authorities said.
The baby was found dead in the backseat by his parent at about 5:46 p.m. Tuesday, according to the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office.
When the parent went to pick up the baby from day care after work, they realized they forgot to drop him off at day care that morning, the sheriff’s office said.
Every time this happens, I am reminded of this Pulitzer prize-winning article.
It can happen to anyone, but a large majority will never believe that. It’s a heart-rending situation.
Having gone through what is essentially sleep deprivation torture when raising twins, I believe this and the guilt would be unimaginable.
One of many great reasons to raise your kids car-free.
Ah yes! That way my kid can definitely die of hyperthermia in my arms walking 5 miles to the grocery in 100°F instead of almost certainly not dying in my car.
Lol this doesn’t happen.
Edit: just Google child heat stroke—the cases all involve kids trapped in vehicles. Heat stroke for young, healthy people in the outdoor environment is not difficult to avoid. It usually occurs when people are forced to do intense physical labor without rest. It’s not happening while you’re walking with your kid to school or daycare or whatever.
Cars are much more dangerous to children than walking is. There is a mountain of evidence to support this.
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Piggybacking your comment to say that this kinda shit would happen a lot less if we had mandatory maternity/paternity leave.
Or if we hadn’t built our entire society around personal automobiles.
One of these things can be changed. The other cannot.
When the parent went to pick up the baby from day care after work, they realized they forgot to drop him off at day care that morning
I do not buy it, but if it is true, that poor baby was going to die from neglect and soon even if it didn’t happen then.
When my daughter was a baby, I was constantly checking on her while we were driving (at stoplights, don’t get all het up) and I was very aware when she was in the car with me.
Some people should not be allowed to be parents.
I’m in the same boat as you. I was more understanding before I had a child. I thought, you can forget your phone, autopilot, all other excuses. But after having two, there’s no fucking way I’d ever forget them. They’re always on my mind and the first thing I think of whenever I’m doing anything. I check on my children while driving too
Edit: I understand how easy it is to get into autopilot, and having understood that I do everything I can to change my routine. We take different routes, we stop and do something on the way, etc. But I realize that I’m speaking from a place of privilege where I can do these things and not everyone can. I recognize that it can happen to me, and I pray it doesn’t. I truly am sorry for this families loss. No one should ever outlive their child.
Looks like a bunch of people (I’m guessing non-parents) disagree.
The whole idea of forgetting a baby is in the car is insane. Like I said, even if it is true, this person is not fit to take care of a baby and that baby had a good chance of dying some other way.
From the Pulitzer article (please read it):
Diamond is a professor of molecular physiology at the University of South Florida and a consultant to the veterans hospital in Tampa.[…]
“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.”
“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.”
You posted the article after I posed the above comment. I have read it.
Edit: to the downvoters: should I have not read it? Because I get you downvoting the previous comments but I’m not sure what your problem is with this one.
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.”
Yes, again, I read it. You showed I was wrong. I’m not sure what you or anyone else wants from me.
OMG… read the article. j/k
I probably wouldn’t be able to live if I caused this.
Yeah this is so incredibly sad, if I had come back to my car and realised that my own preventable negligence had caused my child not just to die, but to die so needlessly, so carelessly and so awfully I’m not sure how I would cope. How could you possibly go on with that on your shoulders? It would utterly crush me…and rightly so.
That parent/those parents are awful awful people. This should not be anywhere near possible.Edit: upon reading other comments, I’ve reflected on my own comment on the parents and have slightly changed my view; personally I think the gravity of the mistake outweighs everything else they have done in life no matter how good and so my statement on the balance of things is probably true, imo. However it is not something that needed to be said and nor is it a comment on the type of person/people they were up until, and after this.
