Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009)

Blaming the last failure in a chain of failures -- the drunk driver, the tired parent, the 737 pilot --- prevents prevention.

There Are No Accidents.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/There-Are-No-Accident...

I can’t even fathom the horror in that moment recognizing what has happened, when it really sets in before the brain kicks into trauma mode.

Hard for me to imagine prison doing any good in these cases, but also understand the risk of neglect or even malice disguised as forgetfulness being unpunished.

Tough one.

But most of the times these accidents happen, it's due to a change of routine - father taking the kid to daycare instead of mom, an emergency phone call on the way to work causing distraction, etc. It's times when people skip the routine, and make a mistake.

So in the end, criminal punishment ends up punishing people for being human.

A passerby called security who called a locksmith and the police. Both arrived quickly, the cop deciding that my daughter was in no danger so there was no need to break the window unless the locksmith couldn't get in. Sure enough, he was in quickly. He refused to take any money for the call.

That panicked feeling was indescribable, and such a small shadow of what the people in the article must have felt and continue to feel.

Their mistake is burned into their mind. They feel like they let everyone down. Of anyone, it seems they are now the least likely to ever be careless again.

I am lucky enough to not dependend on a car for my everyday activity, and only using my car a couple of times a week.

I can totally understand people being in the habit of getting in and out of their vehicle without checking the rear seat.

Any child death is a tragedy, and a loss for the whole community.

Caveats:

• Not saying parents have no responsibility

• Not saying auto makers have sole responsibility

• I understand the “slippery slope” argument that this will lead to parents leaving their children on cars

• This is just an extrapolation into the far future, like 100 years or so, when we have metals far stronger than steel protecting your car door and sentient robots.

Also, Gene Weingarten is a national treasure. His writing in general and this piece in particular make me want to be sure newspapers prosper enough that it's always someone's paying job to be a long-form journalist. Even if I frequently get my news other ways, that is an extremely valuable social function.

I work in the consumer electronics space, so I have a reasonable sense of how hard this would be, but it seems like an air temperature monitor that is on/around your baby would be pretty easy to build and probably sell millions.

On topic: No, not a crime. Not negligence unless you're taking some abnormal risk that makes it more likely to happen. It is an accident.

Other thing I find weird about cars is how they don’t come with monoxide interlock. Heck some generators do now, why not cars?

American society has developed a moral panic/obsession with policing/persecuting parents (especially mothers) in certain ways. While pretty much ignoring systematic dangers to children such as lead (in paint, water, etc.), and the crushing financial penalties (from the medical bills for childbirth right through college expenses) for having them.

At what point should I tell my [great-]granddaughters that I'll pay for them to get their tubes tied at age 18, and that is (sadly) the least-bad deal available in the U.S.?

But as an engineer of machines that test automotive safety systems, including the LATCH restraints that anchored the carseats in which those children sat, and also the window motors that sealed them in, I wonder if there's more we could do here on a systemic level.

We live in a society that uses a mode of transportation which has two characteristics: One, to be safe at speed, small children must be buckled in the back by adults known to be fallible, forgetful, imperfect humans, in such a way that the toddler cannot escape, and two, because the vehicle must be theft-proof and rain-proof, when parked in ordinary sunlight, it becomes a greenhouse which would kill a child in that seat. There are 1.4 billion vehicles in the world, it's only a matter of time before probability will cause these problems to align.

Knowing that this is a thing that could happen - no, poor choice of language, WILL happen again - how could we build a better car that will avoid these issues? Many new cars have infrared temperature sensors for automatic climate control, why not run the fan to keep the internal temperature survivable for the first 24 hours it's locked? It's already a pain dealing with automotive requirements that wiring and circuits be capable of a -40 to 105 C temperature range. Why not relax these for the cabin, and include vents or louvers (or crack the sunroof automatically) to allow air exchange when parked? Cars also have microphones inside the cabin for hands-free phone use, could the mic pick up the distress of a child and sound the horn/alarm or open the windows?

No, I don't want to encourage people to leave their kids in their cars, and I don't want anyone's battery to run dead, or their upholstery to get rained on, or their car to be cold in the snow, or a lowered window to result in thefts, or spurious alarms to annoy people...but those are all avoidable.

On average, once per week, a kid dies in a hot car in the US. Villifying the adults isn't working, therefore, we should try something different. And no, making the climate controls smart today won't prevent the three dozen deaths we're likely to see in the next summer months, but eventually those safer cars will trickle down to parents.

https://www.kidsandcars.org/resources/state-laws/