Yes, you too could forget your child in a hot vehicle
No one thinks they could, but sad reality is parents do, Lorraine Sommerfeld writes.
Five-month-old twins in Virginia; a one-year-old in Tennessee; a three-year-old in Indiana; a nine-month-old in Texas; a three-year-old in Ontario; a ninemonth-old in Tennessee.
All dead, left behind in a blistering hot car within the past few weeks. I sorely doubt any of them were left intentionally, and there might be no more hotly debated topic than intent regarding these tragedies. A six-year-old saved from a hot car in Hamilton by a passersby had been left in the car on purpose. A medal to those who meddle. Thank you.
But how do you solve a problem nobody thinks they have?
In the U.S., 751 children have died of heatstroke in cars since 1998. The average is 37 per year; the Canadian average is four to six deaths annually. The headlines are gut-wrenching, the stories unbearable. Whether you have children or not, the death of our most vulnerable could only fail to resonate if you have a stone for a heart.
Two manufacturers — GM and Hyundai — have entered the ring with possible solutions, and there are hundreds (if not thousands) of aftermarket gadgets available. Middle school kids make it their science fair project. Some inventors approach it from a tech angle — an app on your phone, a sensor to light up your keyfob — and some from a more rudimentary one — a stuffed toy on the seat as a reminder, additional mirrors.
But this problem goes far deeper than a hunt for a solution. While there may be an overload of suggestions on the supply side of the equation, there is almost no appetite for a solution on the buying end. Simply put, nobody believes they would ever be capable of forgetting something as precious as their child in a car, and therefore they have no use for a device, upgrade, or stock feature that could prevent it.
I’ve written on the topic before, and I’ve locked myself in a hot car to show how excruciating it is even for an adult in controlled circumstances. And every time, without fail, commenters will predictably assert the parents of dead children are negligent, period.
No wonder few are interested in layering in some safety feature that may save some lives. To do so is to admit good parents can become trapped in the horror of being responsible for the death of their own child.
Those U.S. statistics at the comprehensive website noheatstroke.org reveal that incidents of loss can occur one of three main ways:
A child forgotten by a caregiver/parent
■ — 54 per cent
A child playing in an unattended ■ vehicle — 27 per cent
A child intentionally left in a
■ vehicle — 18 per cent
Go to a baby shower and give the expectant parents a baby monitor that will allow them to hear and see their child at all times while also tracking the baby’s breathing and vital signs. Give them a clip they can attach to a car seat to remind them if they’ve left a sleeping baby behind by accident (various aftermarket products are a version of this), and expect to be ushered out of the room by horrified attendees. That is the problem we’re facing in trying to eradicate that first category.
First, it can happen. To anyone. And it has. The best reporting on the subject was by Gene Weingarten a decade ago in the Washington Post, and it remains a brilliant depiction of what can happen to the human brain — for all of us. You are not an exception. Unfortunately, it seems the same hard wiring that can lead to unimaginable tragedy also makes it impossible for us to accept our own fallibility. Numbers peak in hotter summer months and southern states, but it happens all over and the numbers don’t get better. Whatever we’re doing isn’t working.
GM introduced a chime system on some of their models. If you’ve opened the rear doors within 10 minutes before turning on the engine, you will receive a chime and visual reminder to check the back seat. Hyundai is debuting a system featuring sensors that detect motion in the back seat. Both systems are laudable, but drivers tune chimes out very quickly, and children under age two — half the recorded deaths — don’t move around much if they’ve fallen asleep. By the time a distressed child could set off a sensor, the temperature in the car could have spiked to horrific highs. A car heats up like an oven.
I’m grateful for any manufacturer who is spending on R&D in this field, but I’d rather see stock sensors based on weight. No, I don’t know how to do that. But the fact that 27 per cent of deaths arise from children playing in vehicles they’ve gained access to, there’s another reason to make the tech we believe we need for entertaining and protecting us to be used to protect our kids. By the way: always lock your car in your driveway.
It’s a sad irony that deaths started rising when we started putting our tiniest children in the safest place — rear facing in the back seat. I don’t know any parent who wouldn’t do what’s best for their children; and that includes hundreds in North American who have suffered the most crushing loss of all.
We don’t refuse to buy smoke detectors because we would never burn our houses down. We buy them because it’s a cheap way to make sure we can protect our families in the event of a tragedy. We need to shift the thinking from “I would never do that” to “how can we prevent this?”