Number of child deaths from hot cars is on rise

[ck4829]

Deaths of infants and toddlers trapped inside hot automobiles have mounted in recent weeks, prompting warnings from the government and safety groups at the start of summer.

A researcher says 18 children have died of hyperthermia since the beginning of this year, eight of them reported since June 13. That's the largest number of fatalities through the first half of a year since the researcher, Jan Null, began tracking the data in the late 1990s.

The spike has government and safety experts urging parents to never leave their children in an unattended vehicle or allow kids to play in cars and trucks. Many of the recent cases have involved children who climbed inside an unlocked vehicle on a hot day and then couldn't get out.

"These really are good parents who love these kids who make a mistake that turns out to be fatal," said David Strickland, the administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The government's highway safety agency issued a consumer advisory this week that included a warning for parents not to leave children unattended in or near a vehicle.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100625/ap_on_go_ot/us_child_heat_deaths

[bluestateguy]

1. In related news, the number of moronic parents who shouldn't breed is also on the rise

Sterilization of incompetent parents (men and women) should be considered as a serious policy.

[elocs]

2. Well I'm sure if Republicans gained absolute power they would call for Liberals to be sterilized.

You shouldn't toss around the word "moronic" so casually.

[SunnySong]

6. I see the eugenics wing of the party is up early this morning... nt

[sixstrings75]

7. You can't have it both ways...

You can't be outraged by these incidents and then not come to the logical conclusion that some people shouldn't breed.


It was a long, hard, road but I have come to that conclusion recently. You need a license for a dog or cat, but any irresponsible meathead(s) can have a child(ren) they cannot take care of?

I don't support eugenics, but when you've seen some of the shit I've seen, you kind of get angry and can understand how someone can make that leap...

It's really sad when you can almost predict the outcome of a certain child's life, strictly by observing how their parents act.

[truth2power]

15. False dilemma. n/t

[theHandpuppet]

3. I don't get this....

"Some parents leave their cell phone or purse on the floor near the car seat to ensure they retrieve it along with the child. Others remind themselves by placing a stuffed animal in the car seat when the child isn't using the seat and putting the toy in the front seat when the child is tucked in the car seat."

If you have to be reminded that your kid is in the car, you have a serious problem. I wouldn't forget that my dogs are in the car, much less a child!

[AndyA]

4. I agree.

Your kid is in the car with you, and you forget?

If you're that busy, if you're that preoccupied, if you're that distracted...DON'T HAVE KIDS!

People have kids because they can. A good many of them really shouldn't.

[Maru Kitteh]

8. Exactly! You might forget your kid but you would *never* forget your cell phone? WTF?

Then you just plain don't need to have any children - or any other living things for that matter.

[Brickbat]

10. I say the same thing. You don't see people forgetting to go to work because they're at home playing

with the kid. They forget to drop the kid at day care as they're on their way to work.

[blondeatlast]

11. As a parent of a now 13 year old, I completely agree with you. I live in Phoenix

and I once in July needed to get milk (he was a few months old at the time) so stopped at a convenience store to get it. My son was already asleep in his car seat, the last thing I wanted to do was wake him up, so I didn't get the milk.

Simple as that--it was a very small price to pay for both or our peace of minds. Even for a few minutes, there was no way I was going to leave him alone in the car, even though the sun had already gone down

[truth2power]

14. You're talking about an entirely different situation...

If someone makes a conscious decision to leave a child alone in a car (hot or otherwise), that's one thing. You should be commended for putting your child's needs first.

What happens in these car seat deaths is that the parent FORGETS that the child is even in the car. Please see my other post in this thread.

[SunnySong]

5. Wow this is freaky just last december the number of children who froze to death also spiked sharply.

that said 18 children in a country of this size is a remarkably small number... well below bathtub drownings or falling from heights I would hasten to guess.


Why this is news or prompts the need for alerts is beyond me (How many cases did the parents leave the kids in the hot car on purpose)

[truth2power]

9. Just as I predicted, here, several years ago,...

after a similar tragedy in my own community.

People will continue to carp about "bad parents" instead of addressing the CHILD SAFETY ISSUE that this is. I wonder if people who blame the parents for these tragedies have considered how absurd it is to assert that ALL these parents do not value the lives of their children. Something else is operating here.

It's as if we expected to solve the recent drop-side crib issue by simply incarcerating parents for failing to properly latch the crib side. No, we saw this as a safety issue and moved to ban the sale of drop side cribs in the US. (I understand that there were other ways children could be injured by these cribs.)

The above is not an exact analogy, but it does speak to the idea of looking for solutions instead of blaming.

This is about how the brain functions. Several years ago I did considerable research on this. Among the findings, a researcher at a university in FL determined that, under certain kinds of stress, your brain makes no distinction as to the the VALUE of things you forget. You could forget your coffee cup or you could forget your child.

There ARE devices on the market to prevent these tragedies. One that I remember consists of sensors attached to both the car seat straps and the driver's key ring. When the driver moves more than 10 ft. from the car, an alarm is set off.

Why doesn't every parent of an infant carry one of these? I submit it's because no one wants to admit that even they could forget their child.

So the deaths will continue, as I predicted they would, after the child's death in my community. Eventually we'll stop blaming and get to work fixing this.

Flame away!

[CraftyGal]

12. Very well said!

:applause: We live in a high stressed society where we are expected to multi-task. When there is a two income family, sometimes the other parent thinks or believes the other has taken care of the child. :applause:

There was a case I heard about where a child died in a hot car, because mom's routine had changed. Due to routine change her brain actually did not grasp her daughter was in the car until she was contacted 6 or 7 hrs later when it was to late. why do we need to play the blame game?

I am glad that I don't drive, when my kids were small I took them everywhere by bus, unless we got a ride. I found the car rides way more stressful than the bus rides to be really honest. I had better control of the situation on the bus than in the car. I can't tell you the many times of having to pull over on the highway because my daughter would undo her seat belt and refuse to put it back on.

You should never judge someone because of what you perceive to be issues. S**t happens. Sometimes I wonder if the people who make the judgments have ever had kids.

CraftyGal

[truth2power]

13. Thank you, CraftyGal...I'm going to keep speaking out about this. ..

People need to wake up. Lives are being lost for no good reason.

[CraftyGal]

19. I agree, it needs to be talked about n/t

[Jennicut]

16. Is is a stressful society and when parents do forget and their child dies, they are

haunted the rest of their lives by it.
My girls fall asleep in the car all the time. I had them a year apart. When they were 6 months and a year and a half, I was very tired. I never forgot they were in the car but I could see how it could happen. Now they are 5 and 6 and it is much easier.

[CraftyGal]

20. Agreed...the mom I was talkiong about in my post?

Well this happened several years ago and she still had a haunted look about her. She still cried even as she said she wanted it out there as it could happen to anyone.

CraftyGal

[Jennicut]

23. Just a verry sad situation all the way around.

I can't imagine losing a child this way, and the guilt one would feel.

[CraftyGal]

24. Neither could I :( n/t

[RamboLiberal]

17. WPost did a heckuva good article on this last year - Pulitizer winner

I encourage everyone to read before you knee-jerk people as stupid parents who shouldn't have bred.

Issues of how this happens is perhaps parent is out of routine that day, i.e. not the parent that usually has the kid.

With the air bag issue the kids are now in car seats in back seat.

And we have the electronic distractions, ala cell phones & devices. Parents have been distracted by an issue at office they are discussing in car.

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


....."Death by hyperthermia" is the official designation. When it happens to young children, the facts are often the same: An otherwise loving and attentive parent one day gets busy, or distracted, or upset, or confused by a change in his or her daily routine, and just... forgets a child is in the car. It happens that way somewhere in the United States 15 to 25 times a year, parceled out through the spring, summer and early fall. The season is almost upon us.

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.

Last year it happened three times in one day, the worst day so far in the worst year so far in a phenomenon that gives no sign of abating.

The facts in each case differ a little, but always there is the terrible moment when the parent realizes what he or she has done, often through a phone call from a spouse or caregiver. This is followed by a frantic sprint to the car. What awaits there is the worst thing in the world.

Each instance has its own macabre signature. One father had parked his car next to the grounds of a county fair; as he discovered his son's body, a calliope tootled merrily beside him. Another man, wanting to end things quickly, tried to wrestle a gun from a police officer at the scene. Several people -- including Mary Parks of Blacksburg -- have driven from their workplace to the day-care center to pick up the child they'd thought they'd dropped off, never noticing the corpse in the back seat.

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

[truth2power]

18. Thank you, Rambo, for this excellent link...

I've bookmarked it for reading in it's entirety, later.

Also, I read the first few comments and they're very good. There are a couple of links to safety devices early on in the comments section, too.

[CraftyGal]

22. Yes it does happen and not due to bad parenting. n/t

[Berry Cool]

21. Sadly, there's a certain faction of DU that thinks itself superior to other kinds of people.

You know...and they use this as a way to keep emotional distance between themselves and other people who would be "stupid enough" or "selfish enough" to do something like forget a kid is in a car seat, or leave a child alone for a second near a body of water, etc. Therefore they can convince themselves "that would never happen to me."

The sad thing is, it does. All the time.

It's one thing to make a conscious and stupid choice. Like texting while driving, or riding your bike with no hands while drunk, or deciding to leave your kid in the car while you "run into the store for a few minutes." But accidents? Sheer forgetfulness? They are not only the province of the stupid and the selfish. They can happen to ANYONE.

And you know what? One of the reasons they DO happen to anyone is because so many anyones have managed to convince themselves that "I would NEVER do that." So they disregard the danger.

It is tragic.