The day I left my son in the car
salon.com
salon.com
I was not in there more than 5 mins. When I got out, started to pull away, and was stopped by a cop who then called animal services.
This level of nanny-state-ism drives me slightly crazy. But the real issue for me was the person who decided s/he needed to call the police (the police for this). If it were me, I would probably sit and wait on a bench nearby, keeping an eye out. It's true that the dog was barking like crazy but he's a dog (a beagle at that), and dogs bark. I'd watch and if he showed signs of distress, I'd act. Or, if it turned into 20, 30 mins, then probably I would also react. But the person who comes across a situation and instantly goes to "call the police" is not something I understand.
I think maybe we all know the type who just likes to report things. Who likes that power trip. I can't help but feel we'd maybe be better off if those types learned to be more circumspect in their actions.
(In the end i paid my $35 fee and told the cop and animal control that I thought what they were doing was a total farce.)
When I got through to animal control, I was told that the dog was not in distress. A dog in distress would retreat to a cooler spot of the car (near the passenger side floor) and not jump around barking.
That your dog was barking and moving around, it was not in distress.
Once they arrive, and hopefully the owner arrives, explain yourself (you were acting in good faith, etc.) and try and make sure the police don't go overboard.
Sounds like your police department sucks more so than the worried passerby engaging in "nanny-statism." The police chose not to assess the situation correctly and just went for the easy fine.
So, everyone is assumed to have no common sense, only you have it and thus become the default enforcer despite, admitting, not knowing the situation?
If you see a lone dog tied to a tree in the forest, it could be that the owner is taking a leak somewhere, but it's also possible the dog was abandoned. Better safe than sorry is not a terrible principle.
Same thing with kids in locked cars. Kids do die in locked cars. Not very often, but it happens. When you see a kid in a locked car, it's good to make sure the kid is okay.
I'd rather see false alarms treated seriously than see serious situations ignored. And reducing the number of false alarms by not leaving kids in cars also helps people identify the serious situations.
Would you regret not being notified?
I can't fathom how one could begin to process and move on from such an incident.
So while I don't think it should be illegal to leave a child in the car, personally that's a line I'll not cross with my kids.
[1]http://www.khou.com/news/Baby-left-in-hot-truck-dies-in-Aust...
Parents can damage/kill their kids in uncountable ways. Most don't and really try to avoid that. Trying to watch over their shoulder isn't 'Good citizenship', it's crazy and a witch hunt. You start to be labeled as child abuser if your kid is crying like hell (toothing maybe, or really interested in strawberries that you don't like to hand out - but the people around you don't understand that, don't have the slightest bit of clue about the situation. More often than not, OTHER parents are worse than the rest).
Give it a rest. The scenario you describe sounds terrible. But it's not relevant to the situation at hand. The person in the article describes that she checked the temperature, knew how long it'd take (even had a deadline on multiple levels, not only 'Today I do not want to choke my kid in the car' - she even planned to take a flight before the kid could have taken any damage. More seriously, a parent decided something for her kid. Something she does gazillion times a day. People might object to a number of her decisions and this particular one got her in trouble? Someone 'snitched'? Sad. The system failed.
I understand:
- someone was worried, called the cops
- cops reacted (yay!)
But:
- before cops arrived, kid was gone and obviously safe with the parent
- charges were pressed, just because?
One word: Insane.
I'm a father of two, both younger than the kid in the car.
edit: One of the worst typos I made so far.
By the way, this is what I think of every time I hear someone use the phrase ”a good samaritan”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIVB3DdRgqU
The second half of your premise contains two completely unwarranted assumptions. How exactly were the police supposed to know the now-departed child was a) safe and b) with his parent? Recall that the Mom who wrote the piece was driving a vehicle that wasn't registered to her and so therefore didn't match the description on the registered owners' driving licenses. We know with hindsight that she had borrowed her parents' minivan for the trip, but the police would not have been justified in making that inference.
- Call about the kid
- (Optional) Visit owner (grandparents) in person and take an official statement
- Drop the case
And what is the danger we're protecting the child against here? People seem to like the 'baked in car' setup. You seem to fancy the 'kidnapped wholesale with car' idea? I mean - your neighbor is taking the kid to the car, and gets back in (probably forgot a thing). 30 sec later you look out of the window and the car is gone. What happend?
a) The car was stolen, kid inside
b) The owner of the car and responsible person for the kid inside moved it outside of the viable area from your position
Really?
Most likely the person who called the police was thinking about the risk of heat (even if the weather didn't seem to justify it, but the fact is it's very unusual for a parent to leave a kid in car in the US these days. From the police point of view, the confusion about the identity of the car owner and driver is enough to warrant further investigation. When the police hear from the grandparents that the child is inaccessible because the Mom got onto a plane and flew home, that's probably true but they don't know for sure - after all that's the sort of story people give out when they abduct children in custody battles during ugly divorces. It's the police's job to put the welfare of the child first in ambiguous situations like that.
Me, I wouldn't have prosecuted once the full facts came out, but on the other hand a statewide missing child alert uses up a bunch of police resources and that's not free, so the prosecutor may have that demanding some community service in return was justified. I can't tell what state the writer lives in or exactly when this happened, so it would be worth considering those contexts as well.
Read that again.
Why? Why would a random parent (taken from a hat that contains all the names of parents in the USA for this experiment) be less trustable than your neighbor? Because you don't know the person?
If that is the argument, you could probably call the police all the time, whenever there's a kid around that cries, is shouted at, throws itself to the ground and needs to be carried, etc. etc..
It's not my argument that is weak (my example might be crap, if you happen to really like your neighbor. But that also means that you missed the point of my post though, inserting real persons wasn't part of the thought experiment and is entirely irrelevant).
Why? Why would a random parent
Yet again, the assumption of parental status based on hindsight. The police who answered the 911 call at the shopping center had no way of knowing that the author was the parent of the child in the car, and given that that person did not match the description of the registered vehicle owner, such an assumption would have been entirely unjustified. In California, there are about 1900 cases of family child abduction and 50 cases of child abduction by a stranger every year. the chances that any given suspicious episode like this will be a child abduction are thus about 1 in 5000 - a remote probability, but of a sufficiently severe nature that it has to be followed up.
Downvote away, but every single argument you have posted in this thread is built upon hindsight bias.
> In California, there are about 1900 cases of family child abduction and 50 cases of child abduction by a stranger every year. the chances that any given suspicious episode like this will be a child abduction are thus about 1 in 5000 - a remote probability, but of a sufficiently severe nature that it has to be followed up.
Hmm, what "math" did you just do to come up with 1 in 5000?
Hmm, what "math" did you just do to come up with 1 in 5000?
Population of CA is ~38 million, of which ~24% are minors, or approximately 10 million children. 10m/~2000 abductions a year in the state = 5000.
http://www.childabductions.org/ Annual abduction rates http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html CA census data
Are you happy now?
The probability of a crime occurring is not the only factor that has to be taken into account here. There's also the severity of the possible criminal outcome. Kidnapping is actually relatively common in the US by international standards, and it is among the most aggressively prosecuted crimes. Until 1972, kidnapping was a capital crime, ie you could get the death sentence for it.
For it to make a difference you would have to leap to the conclusion that a woman stole the car, stole a kid (?), and then left the stolen car and the kid in the parking lot, which is now very conspicuous in the US (apparently). That could only make sense if you assumed average moms are child snatching car thieves.
I'm told only 2 in 10 mom's snatch kids and only 1 in 10 of those steal cars. So there's only a 2% chance of that happening at once!
Wow... because I know like at least 30 moms and none of them have snatched any kids. To cover the odds, there must be people out there that know a lot of baby snatchers. Those people should be calling the police. :)
I of course picked an absurdly high number because even with two absurdly high numbers it still only nets 2%.
Are you saying that if there's only a 2% chance of something odd being a criminal incident, they should just blow it off?
First, you have to arrive to the cops checking for that. Before that, you must imagine the "good" samaritan, who hasn't seen any driving license and knows nothing about the minivan, speculating about who was that woman leaving and then coming back to the minivan.
But it's not the reason he or she has called the police and the police, at the moment they reached the house of the parents of the woman, they knew the latter was none but the daughter of the owner of the minivan.
Case closed... Except for the charge of having contributed to the delinquency of a minor. By the way, the good samaritan can be charged of the same crime since the video proved that, since even if he could have "caught" the criminal mom in the instant he was starting her criminal act and thus he could have "saved" the child, he preferred keep filming... so, if there was an actual crime, it would have been too late.
http://www.parenting.com/article/tragedy-in-the-backseat-hot...
Having said that, This story is a really good example of how tough it is for some parents and how hostile society is to parenting.
On the other hand, for the person in the parking lot to film the child in the car and call police, but not make any contact with the child or wait by the car, borders on malice. Police and prosecutors should investigate but heavily discount such pseudo-testimony because it is deliberately presented without context.
If the mother (to stay with the original article) would've fallen unconscious or dead in the supermarket, nevermind that both options would have some consequences for the family, the kid would've been fine.
Calling the cops was fine. Creepy the way it was described, but okay.
Cops arriving was fine. That's their job.
"Huh? The "abandoned" kid is gone already? Let's trace the car and take out our frustration on .. the mother?" wasn't fine. That was just braindead. The correct movie quote variation would've been "Nothing happened, move along".
Theoretical "But here's how the kid could've died" arguments are .. weird. And countless.
The decision is not yours, not ours. It's the parent's. Like everything else about the daily life of the kid. That argument contains no value. Of course there are reasons that one might not do that. Loop/Recur to line 1.
there's a middle ground between the state as inflexible guardian and complete parental sovereignty.
The state has laws and agencies to interfere and check (Disclaimer: I've no clue about the US of A here, but I assume it's not too far off from what I know). But that's not related to the action(s) we discuss. Are we missing a part of the picture? Certainly. Is the partial picture scary? Yes.
The adversaries in the story didn't act to protect the kid. They acted in a completely crazy fashion. There's so many things wrong with this story, I cannot even begin to imagine how someone would defend the side of the cops here..
One (out of far too many) questions: If this mother is utterly incapable, if a lawyer actually can make the point that she might lose her kid if she's not complying: Why does it take 10 month to proceed? I'd say that someone with a little ambition can kill a kid in less time than that...
There's not One. Single. Point. in that article that makes sense, on the side of law enforcement. Zero. The only potential reason to discuss why this might not be so far removed from reality that everyone involved should be ordered to take a drug test is that the article might be lying. If that is not the case ... there is no case.
I've said repeatedly that I don't think there was any point in bringing a prosecution. since you don't live in the US maybe you don't appreciate that the police and the public prosecutor are completely separate entities. The police didn't do anything abnormal in this case.
I don't live in the US, but I often get the impression that in the US, they're less separate than in other countries.
Leaving a child in a locked car is a bad idea, even when it's totally safe, and even with a window cracked. (In fact, leaving a car window open when you're not there is also a bad idea, though a few minutes probably won't hurt.) Honestly, in that situation, it's better to leave the car door open, so the child can get out when necessary. If you don't trust the child to make that decision, don't leave it alone.
Also, the returning parent is unlikely to be grateful to the comments of "I was just making sure your left alone child was not dying".
One could say 'why not let the matter drop, the Mom came back and so everything was OK' but that's a classic example of hindsight bias. From the police POV, a child was left alone in a vehicle that was later driven off by someone else. When they followed up, it turned out that the person who drove off was not the owner of the vehicle (which belonged to the child's grandparents). They have to at least consider the possibility of malfeasance.
No "someone else", but the very same woman: leaving the car, returning back to the car. The same woman, not someone else. Unless the good samaritan has deceptively shown just the last part and told the police he (or she) saw a different person leaving the car with the child inside.
The issue here is not car theft, driving license not matching the car owner, or whatever. It was instead a good samaritan evaluating as criminal/dangerous the fact that a mom left his son alone in the car for few minutes. And decided (when she came back) to call the police to...? Check if the child was fine? Whatever.
It takes few minutes to check if the car was stolen and/or the owner knows that someone else is driving it.
I agree that people should report early and report often; and allow experts to make decisions. Sadly, reporting early and often just swamps people who are already far too busy dealing with children who are being abused, or it dumps reports with police who take action when they don't need to do anything more than have a chat.
Are we going to turn this into a 'You need to be careful about talking to a child' debate? If you cannot address/talk to a child, things are worse OUTSIDE of that car.
In a sensible world she would have been able to call out to some car-park lurker "hey I'm just going to grab something from the store, can you just wave at my kid through this window"; or she could just run in and grab something and people seeing her run in and then out would not call the police; or etc etc.
Society has decided that men wanting to work with children are creepy (try finding pre-schools with male workers and early years schools with male teachers), and this extends to the damaging concept of "stranger danger" where someone waiting by the car to check the child is safe is not going to be seen as a welcome bit of support for a busy harassed mother but will be seen as a creepy threat.
It's all part of the same weird system of protecting children without regard to what actual risk is.
Still, leaving the child alone leaves them open to more risk than taking them out of the car.
This parent was not buying anything important - just headphones for a child - and they took the wasy options by i) taking child to shops and ii) not taking child out of car.
I don't criticise other people's parenting because I am particularly lucky with my son but the idea of leaving my nearly-four-yo son unaccompanied (out of eyesight) fills me with cold fear.
Again, the problem here isn't that they left their son for a few minutes in a car, it is that society is pretty hostile to parents and parenting, simultaneously being quick to judge and slow to offer any real support.
So a child in an immobile tested-safe metal box with ventilation, locked and alarmed, is more at risk than being outside the car? I'd like to understand how you came to that reasoning.
The thing is:
1) You do. The post says "She was lazy"¹. That's criticizing.
2) Your pov is noted and fine. You're probably a good parent. But what works for you isn't transferable to other parents and kids. And those parents will make decisions that wouldn't work/make sense for you and your kid. I love that my not-yet-two son disappears and plays in hidden corners. He's probably longer out of my (and my wife's) sight than the boy in that car was, albeit in our apartment. Cold fear sounds nasty. I understand that to a point, but for this particular parent that wouldn't work/would be unhealthy.
We're different. Projecting one's idea about child care is different from laws about child care.
1: Blame reading comprehension skills on my English teacher
Basically, until you are 18, you belong to your parents and have zero rights, treated as a child by society. It's funny how we all forget this once we turn into adults.
Look at vaccinations. (Vaccinations are good; I had no hesitation having my child immunised; I'd like schools to require immunisations for pupils; etc). The early days of the vaccination scandal were not presented as a bit of scientific research, it was "you, as a parent, are harming your child by vaccinating them" (and that's still what the nutjobs are saying). Now that we know that Wakefield is a crook we tend not to say "you were duped by a crook who had financial interests in misleading you so let's help you get your child immunised", we say "you're a nutjob and a bad parent".
Look at HN where parents feel guilt about work life balance for one example of how hard it is to be a parent in a rich first world country.
Look at the number of people on HN who (ignoring law) say they would hesitate to employ women because of the risk of maternity leave.
The fact that "having a child" has to be written into legislation as a protected status shows that status of parents was seen as needing protection.
I'm all for letting kids play with little or no supervision. (Depending on the surroundings, of course; a place near my home where kids can build huts has the explicit rule that kids under 8 need adult supervision at all times, which makes total sense. A mother was upset that someone confiscated the hammer and saw her kids were using while she was away. That mother was wrong.)
But what's important is that if you trust your child to take care of itself, you give it the means to do so. Locking a kid in a car is not that. I'd rather let it play in the parking lot or a field next to it.
So I think the decision to leave the kid in the car is still a bad one. And not even just because of the danger, but because of teaching it about choice and consequences: The kid wanted to come along to the shop? Then it's coming inside. The kid thinks a game is more important than new earphones? Then it's not getting new earphones. Teach the kid consequences.
Superbly written, but the underlying story and outcome disturbs me. That someone is dissuaded from presenting a fair case because a court is considered to be bad at its job and taking a revenge-not-justice punishment is the best option serves as a serious indictment of 'justice' in whatever loony tunes jurisdiction she lives. Judicial systems are meant to apply laws contextually based on actual facts, not condemn anyone who falls into a gray area.
But that's hard, and maybe unfair, and it barely scales.
EDIT:
Somewhat more productively, one wonders if this is a side effect of there being simply so many ways to get pulled into court--parking citation, drug possession, etc. I could understand if we took a more bureaucratic approach simply to keep up with the "demand".
We've become a nation of "I'm Teelllllling..." suitable for nobody but a playground full of 5 year olds.
In my opinion, the actions of this "good samaritan" were not motivated from concern or helpfulness. Just like on the playground this action was malicious. A subtle kind of violence.
If anything, the bystander should be prosecuted for the same crime.
Soon you're probably being arrested for breathing from the wrong nostril.
Media drives government. Clicks drive the media. What we're left with is a hodgepodge of laws that attempt to prevent yesterday's headline.
Oooh, nice, I'm going to steal that line.
Relatedly, I think the person I'd be happiest to vote for in this day and age is someone who will introduce no new legislation, but just spend their time getting old pointless laws off the books.
Think of it as an extension of "The best code you will ever write is… code you never write."
I think more software engineers need to run for office.
This pdf has it broken down into age groups:
http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/10LCID_Unintentional_D...
This site was helpful and included an interesting little side bar:
http://www.cdc.gov/safechild/NAP/overviews/
- Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of injury death overall, and especially for teens. - For infants, suffocation is the biggest risk of injury death. - Drowning is the leading cause of injury death for children age 1-4.
Before you go off to pull out those "child cooks in car in Texas in July" anecdotes, consider that motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for children. So if we're collectively that worried about it, let's get up in arms about needlessly taking the child on a car trip before we worry about applying "justice" to someone who left their child in a car in 50F weather.
If it were truly a case of "good samaritan" I'd blow it off. But I'm going to guess it was more a case of "she's doing something I think is awful. Regardless of whether harm was done or not, I'm going to go tattle!"
When we lived in the US for 2 years (pre 9/11), my parents definitely experienced a few police-state-related cultural shocks.
One time, a kid started hitting me in the school bus. It turned out that the kid lived in the same apartment complex as we did. That evening, my dad saw him playing outside, went up to him, and gave him a few stern words. A few hours later, his mother had called the police, and my dad ended up spending a few hours at the local police station.
We still lived in the US for another year or so after that, but nowadays my parents heavily dislike this country, and tend to avoid visiting me as much they can. FTR I don't see myself staying in the US when I start having kids.
As `shintakezou pointed out, this is very much a cultural matter here. France (where my parents and I are from) tends to subscribe more to the "it takes a village to raise a child" mentality. Correcting the behavior of someone else's child at the park, supermarket, in the bus, etc. if they are out of the parent's sight is perfectly acceptable in French culture, and as a kid it happened to me many times, without traumatizing me (even when it was a scary old man yelling at me).
It is not perceived as assault, and it is certainly not "terrifying them verbally" (I find that phrasing a little bit excessive though, and am surprised that you extracted that from my "a few stern words").
In retrospect, the one thing my father did wrong was not considering that he was living in a different culture, and that something that seemed normal to him might be scandalous in the US. But that only makes my wish to leave the US when I have children even more valid in my eyes: I'd hate to find myself in those sort of cultural misunderstandings that can very easily escalate juridically.
I do find the US's approach to parenting very poor: France's approach to parenting is that kids are human beings in construction, and that they do not inherently know what is right or wrong, good or bad - and it is up to adults (parents or not) to let them know (that doesn't mean that their feelings or interests are invalid because they are "incomplete": it just means that they are lacking the knowledge of social mores, conventions, mental tools, etc. required to be productive citizens). The US's approach to parenting falls more in line with the belief that children are just "little adults" and that one should respect their wishes and desires no matter what, which I find preposterous.
scolding != assaulting, no?
But of course it might have been better if the kids’ parents took up the matter between them.
Once common sense would have been enough: do you scolded my child? Why? What's happened? ... Ha, ok, my son did something wrong... and so on...
Usually it's not that hard.
Instead, a society rambling towards paranoia and driven by fear (especially this), makes a citizen feel the urge to "look at" a greater power, the Great Protector, to "protect" him/her even from an unexistant menace - or to seek revenge.
In the story we are commenting, the first thing I have noticed and blamed was the following: the mother surrenders to the request of the son who wants to go with her to the store. There, she makes the first mistake: the son had to stay at home with the grandma.
Checking on your four-year old son every 15-30 minutes is generally sufficient (modulo the circumstances and the child's maturity).
[1] Which is not to say that helicopter parenting isn't on the rise in Germany, too. The difference is that the police and teachers ask that parents NOT drive their children to school or pick them up afterwards, and some parents do it anyway.
I've never seen anywhere else in the world that takes these issues as seriously (and insanely) as the US.
In Australia it's extremely common to see young kids walking to school without an adult, playing in the park after school, etc. etc. Many young kids will walk to the corner shop to buy candy or whatever without supervision. Adults think nothing of this, it's perfectly normal. It's unthinkable someone would call the Police for this.
EDIT: I should add, however, that it's highly illegal to leave a child in a car, due to the extreme heat. I've never seen it, but I expect people would call the Police or just break into a car if they saw this happening. It's taken so seriously, the punishment is actually the same for leaving an animal in the car as it is for leaving a child in the car.
Finland here. Some people would leave a child in a car when they conduct a short errand, and some people would not, and the latter might frown upon the former. But the law enforcement would never ever get involved. That Salon article is just absurd. A whole new level of American weirdness.
(Then again, we rarely have weather as hot as the more southern countries.)
But things would also escalate gradually, depending on the situation. People would gather and start looking at the clock, seeing how the baby is doing and how long he's been there.
I'm sure there are laws you eventually do break if you leave your baby in the car for a long period of time (half an hour and up?), or in a hot parking lot and windows too closed.
Somebody would call the authorities and the police/firemen would break the window and save the baby and stay waiting for the parent: this would certainly warrant at least hectic reporting. The social workers would probably be notified and there would be a couple of meetings to figure out what's the deal.
But somebody being away for a few minutes... No way it would ever be a criminal case or brought to the judge or courts. While Finland does love rules and regulations more than sanefully necessary, you still have to mess up pretty bad to actually get charged for anything.
I'm simply stunned that parents can be prosecuted for this. Another wtf America moment.
Instead, the prosecutor decided to charge her with "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" which is a broad catch-all category for doing things that might harm a child. She was not found guilty of this crime either. Instead, her lawyer advised her to agree to punishment for the crime because if it went to trial there was a CHANCE that she would lose custody of her children.
The problem here is not in the law nor in the outcome of a court case. The problem lies in the structure of the legal system. Prosecutors wield enormous power by virtue of their ability to decide whom to charge and for what. The penalties for losing are so great that nearly all (around 95%) cases are settled rather than contested before a judge or jury.
Many laws in the US are purposely vague and up to the interpretation of the police. The mother was charged with "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" (http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Contributing+t...), which can be used against anyone that does something that might possibly result in a child being adversely affected in some way.
The unfortunate part of life in the US is that the average person breaks a few dozen laws every day, and it's really important not to upset the police in some way that they'll take notice of you and start charging you with crimes.
I don't see any issue with people leaving their kids in the car, it just requires a little common sense.
Also, comparing events where someone forgot their kid was in the car and leaving them all day to events where the parents consciously leave their kids and are aware of the conditions they've left them in (especially if they actually do something to help ensure the comfort of the child, like cracking the window) it's completely wrong. One is neglect, one is giving your kids a little freedom.
Some people in the UK take an extreme view on age of baby sitters. See this BBC article (in my parenting SE answer) about a woman leaving her 14 year old son in charge of a 3 year old boy for 30 minutes and the trouble that caused. (She should not have accepted the caution. I am surprised that's what the solicitor suggested, and I'm not sure she actually got a solicitor.)
http://parenting.stackexchange.com/questions/12599/what-is-c...
However, the goal itself, namely protecting children is noble. I guess hitting the sweet spot between being neglective and overly protective is hard. Such is the nature of most social issues.
That said, anyone has a right to disagree whether leaving your kid in the car when you have to stop at the store is acceptable, but prosecuting a parent for it is downright insane.
The risk is someone can break your window and steal your kid. It's just something that's never done. It would be akin to leaving your child on the street corner while you go up to your apartment to grab the purse you forgot.
At 8, I would often walk for miles in the wilderness when out camping, or go swimming in a river without serious adult supervision.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Victoria_Climbi%C3%A9...
http://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2013/nov/11/b...
Does that result in "over reactions" - depends on your point of view.
While I understand that bad things can happen if you leave a child for a long time alone in a car, I can't understand the bystander was calling the police but couldn't open his mouth to actually say anything to the mom. And how come somebody is criminalized when there was no victim at all?
Also, while I understand children loves their electronics, please try to read a book to your kids once in a while.
See Also: Three felonies a day
EDIT: Spelling
2) I suspect that there are more valid reasons to leave a child in a car, compared to reasons to not flush.
That said, the consequences are greater in the case of potential child neglect.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/15/us-restaurant-baby...
Sigh..... It's such a tragic, fucked up thing that our society could do this to a child and his mother. We all really need to think more about the consequences of our actions. The bystander who called in should have done more than just call the police. The mother should have brought the kid in. The cop(s) shouldn't have let it get to court. The courts shouldn't be able to split apart families for a single, momentary, stupid, virtually riskless act. And the media needs to not villify and capitalize on the fear and hate of people who judge situations like this without context.
A large portion of people most likely would not have been able to round up the resources she did nor have the support and get screwed by this type of stuff.
It's good that she's bringing the subject to light but, being a seemingly local law, and one that you might not know about until it's being thrown at you, it seems more likely it will continue to harm parents just getting by.
It is illegal to leave a 6 years old or younger unattended in a motor vehicle when:
There are conditions that present a significant risk to the child's health or safety. Example: Leaving a child in a closed car on a very hot day.
The vehicle's engine is running, the keys are in the ignition, or both. Children can start or move the car causing injuries and/or deaths to themselves or others. An opportunist may (and many have) seize the moment to jump in and drive your car away, child still strapped in.[1]
So ... as long as there's nothing unsafe and the engine isn't running, you're "legal".
“I don’t get it,” I said to the lawyer. “Contributing to the delinquency of a minor? That makes no sense. It sounds like I was buying him beer.”
He laughed. He told me he understood my confusion about the charge, but that it wasn’t that unusual. A few years before, the state had tried to pass an ordinance that would make it a misdemeanor to leave a child under 6 alone in a vehicle if the conditions within the vehicle or in the immediate vicinity of the vehicle presented a risk to the health or safety of the child. The penalty for a first offense would be a $100 civil penalty, in other words, a ticket. But the legislation didn’t pass, and so instead, the act of leaving a kid in a car would continue to fall into a legal gray area. The lawyer explained that the crime of contributing to the delinquency of a minor included “rendering a minor in need of services.” So, for example, he said, “If you’d left him there and not come back, someone from social services would have needed to come, bring him in, make sure he was safe and such.”
It's my observation that anything that is "not illegal" in the US now means "We'll find a creative way to stop you doing it".
Leaving your child in a car for five minutes is definitely a lapse in judgment. Not because it's dangerous so much as because your peers are stupid. I remember a time where I was really tempted to leave my kid in the car. He was asleep. It was a nice cool day. I was going to be gone for much less than five minutes. I was going to be able to see the car the entire time. Nope. Better safe than sensible.
In any case - if you wanted to make the safe decision, why did you put your kid in the car in the first place? Don't you realize how dangerous it is to drive on the roads? Ask yourself - which is safer - Your child spending 5 minutes alone in a car with a window cracked open on a cool day - or 5 minutes driving to that place, with oncoming traffic that with the slightest lapse of attention by a driver could have their car crashing into yours in a second.
This is the madness of this whole situation - people have left common sense at the door.
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For the younger crowd who may not understand, I was born in '77:
- I rode in the back hatch (no seats) of my dad's corvette until I was 8, cops would wave to us.
- At 6 I could ride my bike around pretty much anywhere I wanted, but wasn't allowed to cross rt6 (which I didn't, though no one checked).
- Left in the car in parking lots for up to an hour.
- Arrived home from school with no one home starting in 1st grade.
Cars are what kills kids, even now in our hyper-safe society. So it's worth re-examining that stuff.
Which means the thing with the Corvette? Probably wasn't a good idea in hindsight.
But yeah, the total lack of independence in today's kids is a different story. There is no epidemic of kiddy diddlers, of kids wandering off and getting lost and somehow dying. So the obsessive "have your kids with you at all times" thing is probably a modern over-reaction.
But the stuff about cars? Yeah, respect and fear traffic.
My dad even thinks that now. Still the irony is that a corvette of that age isn't safe in an accident with any type of seat for any type of occupant. However, put a child seat in it any we all can pretend that it's somehow safe.
Just writing that makes me think there will be a law soon that kids can only ride in child-safe certified cars.
Not everything that used to be S.O.P. for parents was good judgement. Not every safety concern we've developed over the last 20 years is wrong. Some of them are very valid.
Please, have kids and raise them reasonably according to your own standards, not the nanny-state's. If we don't defend personal freedom, who will?
I too rode in the boot of the car, but presumably some other kids did that and died in an accident slamming in to back of their parent's heads and the windscreen when the car had to break suddenly. Or maybe they got crushed when a lorry rode in to the back of them.
I also used to take the ferry to Nantucket and MV as a kid. Thought that was safe too, but apparently those things sink and kill children. What, you let your kids take the ferry? Someone call child services!
Also known to kill children: Bee stings (don't let kids play outside), food allergies (or eat), influenza (be around other people), drowning (go swimming or take a bath).
I suppose to dismiss any of these as unlikely is an example of survivorship bias? I'm pretty sure it's not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_dog_attacks_in_the_United...
http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/06/world/asia/south-korea-ship-si...
The only proper way to let your kids leave the house:
http://smurk.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/bubble_boy_2-754379...
But, for example, to say "I used to jump in to rivers and swim around, never hurt me" as an argument for allowing kids to jump in to [untested] rivers would be. Sure most children would survive but we nonetheless have the bias in the lack of testimony from those that drowned, or possibly impaled themselves on detritus hidden below the surface , and died.
Just because there is a survivorship bias in testimonies concerning [sufficiently] safe activities for children doesn't of course mean that one is required to stop their children taking part in those activities.
All activities and inactivities have risks. The note of the bias is simply a reminder to take it in to account when weighing those risks.
Leaving a child in a locked car in the situation described is perfectly acceptable. The police getting involved is ridiculous, which makes it a great story. Hopefully the correct lesson is learned.
I had to deal with the police earlier this week because my dog accidentally bit someone who interfered with him, resulting in a (thankfully superficial) injury. I answered their questions forthrightly and we emailed some paperwork back and forth, which is why he's now confined to my yard for the next 7 days instead of being locked in a crate at the city pound.
Overzealous policing is a real problem. That doesn't mean that evasion or passive-aggressive confrontation is always an effective response.
> a bystander had noticed me leaving my son in the car, had recorded the incident using a phone’s camera, and had then contacted the police.
The last line of the article reads: "Kim Brooks' fiction has appeared in Five Chapters, Glimmer Train, One Story, Epoch, and other journals. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she teaches writing and is at work on a novel. You can follow her on Twitter @KA_Brooks."
My mother got pretty upset when she came back and found me in that state. She told me that's how people manage to die in the car, and when I realized how hot it was I should have popped the door open and come inside.
And, well, she was right! :)
Just this week a woman got media blasted for having her infant pulled down the church aisle on her wedding dress train. Now I find that a bit tacky as far as weddings go but I can't imagine that child was in any more danger than I was while speeding down a dirt road on an overturned hood.
Times have changed.
Sad answer is they can't. What a society we're building for ourselves.
I respect people with irrational fears, and understand that sometimes happen. For example fear or flying.
But we seem to accept that just because someone has that kind of fear is ok to act like that fear was a real danger. As the article said, driving is, comparatively, a huge risk compared with things like kid abductions or terrorist attacks. We seem not to give a dam to drive four hours a day, but be scared to death if we cross someone on a dark street...
We are simply terrible evaluating risks, and be more fearful each day...
Should people who leave their toddlers in cars be prosecuted criminally? That's a complicated question. In almost every reasonable case the answer is probably "no".
But this article doesn't really grapple with that question. Instead, it's a stew of rationalization and misdirection. It is literally an argument for leaving kids alone in cars. "I immunize my kids. I know pools are dangerous." Yeah, and you left a four year old alone in a parked car. You brought it up. BAD CALL. "This other parent let their nine-year-old ride the subway by themselves." Well, I think that's a bad call too, but who cares? Nine isn't four, the subway isn't a parked car.
"And then I left him in the car for about five minutes. He didn’t die. He wasn’t kidnapped or assaulted or forgotten or dragged across state lines by a carjacker. When I returned to the car, he was still playing his game, smiling."
Asshole. The risks to a four year old child left alone in a parked car aren't that the boogeyman might steal them.
If you want to read a piece that seriously grapples with this issue, read Gene Weingarten's "Fatal Distraction" from the Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02...
http://www.azfamily.com/news/Child-run-over-killed-in-parkin...
http://kansasfirstnews.com/2014/06/03/one-year-old-dies-in-p...
http://www.19actionnews.com/story/25111445/ontario-oh-father...
http://www.fox19.com/story/25669631/man-tries-to-run-over-gi...
http://www.newsnet5.com/news/local-news/oh-cuyahoga/3-year-o...
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/04/28/11443067-toddler-...
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/child-run-ov...
http://www.eptrail.com/ci_23754534/boulder-child-dies-after-...
"Sgt. Steve Martos said the child's mother was loading her purchases into her car when Jose darted between vehicles and into the driving lane. The driver did not see the child and ran him over."
If she had left the child in the car, this wouldn't have happened.
The point isn't that you should always leave your child in the car - the point is that our assessment of risk is terrible, and the risk of leaving a child in a car on a mild weather day has not been proven to be more risky than taking them into the store.
Meanwhile, a four year old escorted through a parking lot with their parent is at least somewhat visible. A four year old alone in a parking lot is invisible.
Let's make this simpler: would you leave your four year old alone in a parked car for 5 minutes while you ran into a store?
Yes. No, not really, but yes if I lived in a different time and day (a time and day I wish we did live in).
As another commenter pointed out, the biggest reason many of us don't do this these days is purely the fear of running into ridiculous situations as described in this article.
It really seems odd that you're avoiding the biggest data-driven argument that's raised in the article and has already been put directly to you. Namely, why do you assume that it's safer to take the child with you?
Parents make tradeoffs regarding safety, risk, convenience, happiness, cost, temperament, health, development, etc. ALL. THE. FREAKING. TIME. It's great that "society" cares about how parents do their jobs. It's not so great that society mandates in great detail how that job should be done.
Every parent, every child, every situation, every tradeoff is different. Until it's proven that they're no good at it, let's leave that work to the people who signed up for it.
If it weren't for that rule, then I absolutely would have left one of my kids in a car unattended for 5 minutes, but not the other.
The one I would not have got antsy fairly easily. Even they could probably have been trusted for less than 10 minutes, I wouldn't be willing to take that risk. The other, I have no doubt would have stayed in the car for a half-hour.
More recently I did leave one of them in the car, in the shade, with the windows cracked on a 65 degree day. She was 7 at the time. Someone did report me to the cops, but I said "She's 7, was in the shade and I was gone for less than 10 minutes" and never heard anything from then again.
4 is not borderline. There does not exist anywhere in the world a trustworthy 4 year old.
The author was right - the most irresponsible thing she did that day was to drive with her child in the car.
Whether that's a bad call depends on the child and the nature of the subway. When I was 12, I travelled by train through the country for 4 days, planning my own journeys, visiting musea and relatives. Not every 12 year old would be able to do that responsibly, but I was sure I could do that, and after checking that I knew my way around a train schedule, my parents agreed.
9 is younger than 12, obviously, but if it's a fairly safe subway, and it's just a single trip, dropped off at one end, picked up at the other, and the child is familiar with subways and comfortable traveling alone, I see no real problem.
However, if you arrest the parent, saddle them with months of legal fees, potentially take their child away and put them into a foster care system, that's not without risks to the child as well. It's not like having your parents impoverished and potentially put in jail does wonders for a child's future either. That has a far higher probability of happening than your so far completely hypothetical scenario of the child escaping from the car in five minutes and wandering around the parking lot until getting hit.
The whole article is full of misdirection like this; appeals to "helicopter parenting", or whole grafs about how enraged she was that another person called the police upon finding her child alone in a parked car.
It's simply a terrible article. It's meant to stir up outrage at the nanny-state and busybody bystanders and mythologized risks to children, but it repeatedly, reliably misses every mark it tries to hit. In that regard, it's at least valuable as a rorschach test to how carefully people think about what they read.
It's not impossible that in the space of five minutes the kid could get bored of the iPad, unbuckle the car seat, and figure out how to disable the child locks from inside the car. It's just very, very unlikely. If that's what had happened there would be a case for getting the police involved, but it didn't happen. If we're going start prosecuting people for every crime they could hypothetically commit at any given point, every single person would be in jail.
> I've flagged down a cop seeing a kid alone in a car, and would do it again.
The interesting and proper question isn't whether it's unsafe to leave a four year old alone in a parked car, it's whether leaving a four year old alone in a parked car warrants involvement from the State -- particularly, involvement kicked off by a fellow citizen.
It surprises and deeply concerns me that we live in a country/world of social content and community-driven projects, yet when one of our (real-life) community members might possibly be in trouble, a cellphone video and call to the cops is the default (and lauded) reaction. Look, had that 4-year-old been in real danger, a cellphone video wasn't going to help him. A call to the cops wasn't going to help him either (clearly, as they arrived after mom had left). Ok, maybe a coin flip on the cops at best.
What can the cops do that the nosy neighbor -- or you -- couldn't? Truly, if someone felt a child's life was in danger, everything else could wait while you supervised the situation and sent someone else to go fetch mom out of the store. Or use that cellphone to call the store, or whatever. In other words, you could actually do something. Unless this fictional example kid is literally dying before your eyes and you think medics/the coroner are going to have to be involved, what's the point of calling the cops? Two options: either a) to throw mom under the bus or b) to let yourself think you did all you could so you can get going to that next meeting.
I'm all for letting children roam free and find their own way. I'm not a fan of locking them up without supervision.
[1] http://www.parenting.com/article/tragedy-in-the-backseat-hot...
So which is the biggest sin? Which should be the crime?
I wish you'd have given it a go. It sounds like an argument about evaluating the risks of an action proportional to the frequency of that action being taken.
If that's the case, it seems the best conclusion you could hope to come to is "we don't have enough data". Because there's no way to know how often parents leave their kids in cars without incident, and no way to know how many parents would leave their kids in their cars were it socially acceptable.
Either way, it's obvious that more kids are driven in cars than are left in cars (since nearly all kids left in cars were also driven in them as part of that trip).
On one extreme, it would only be criminal if a child dies under your care, which would be criminally negligent homicide or something similar.
On the other, we can't run in to drop a movie off at RedBox without getting 3 kids out of the car.
I wish people in positions of authority were able to apply more common sense and wisdom than always involving the criminal justice system.
My wife knows a lady that does (unlicensed) day care, and she leaves kids in the car all the time. She just tells them to hide so no one sees them. As far as I know, none have been injured, but it's also pretty irresponsible and I wouldn't allow her to watch my child.
The same perverse incentives apply to the prosecutor as well. It's no skin off his back to charge the mother, and he can always say "it's for the children!" if queried about it. But should a child die, when both the police and prosecutor could have done something, is something our society won't allow.
1) CPS wasn't ever involved in this case
2) Everywhere I've ever lived CPS was already understaffed and overworked; they don't have time to go looking for children to take away, they're busy enough already.
That's where you failed. Clearly, there was a pattern of negligent parenting.
EDIT: Ah, it happened while I was replying, probably for the best.
Which is to say, I can see the GP making the general point that the mom didn't have a "temporary lapse in judgement" as much as a systemic failure to live up to her role as the adult in the parent->child relationship.
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing the mother is negligent for either this or leaving the kid in the car. I'm just saying when you can recognize that your child will throw a tantrum and your only recourse is to begin making concessions to them, you're already at a point where they are raising you more than you are raising them.