Hot Car Deaths Are Horrific Accidents, So Stop Being So Judgmental

baby-sleeping-car-seatEvery year as the weather gets warmer we start seeing stories about kids being accidentally left in the car. It’s a terrible and preventable death, and in most cases it’s a genuine accident. Parents don’t intend for it to happen and are left devastated when it does. With our hectic, over-scheduled lives, any one of us could go on auto-pilot and make a catastrophic mistake, so why do we come down so hard on the parents who do?

PopSugar recently posted about a team of engineering students at Rice University who are working on a life-saving invention called Infant SOS. It’s an accessory that fits any standard car seat and can send text alerts to a parent’s phone in the event that their child is left in the car. It lights up and makes noise in an attempt to alert passers-by, and it also has a cooling system that can help keep the child from suffering a heat stroke before help can arrive.

The students’ creation could potentially save a child’s life one day. Shocking statistics show, on average, 38 children die from heat-related car deaths each year. “It works out to about a child every two to three days.” said Audrey Clayton, one of the creators of Infant SOS. “Our hope is that our device can prevent this from happening.”

You’d think a device like this, or anything that makes an effort to keep these car deaths from happening would be met with a lot of praise. Instead, the discussion on PopSugar was littered with people who just wanted to berate parents for being “irresponsible” and even needing something like this in the first place.

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Given the number of likes on those comments and hundreds of others making similar statements, it’s pretty clear people think leaving a child in the car is something that could never happen to them. The unfortunate reality is, it could.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 619 children have died since 1998 from either being left in the car or climbing in a car without an adult present and having no way to get out. Of those, only 20% have been instances where the parent intentionally left the kid in the car, usually because they weren’t aware of the severity of the risk. It’s rare to have cases like the horrific one last summer where a father, Justin Ross Harris, left his child in the car with the intent to murder him.

In cases where children are forgotten, there’s usually a change in routine or some other distraction. The baby falls asleep or is turned around and so silent the parents think they already dropped them off at daycare. They go about their usual routine. Tragedy strikes. The president of the Pediatric Society of New Zealand, David Newman, calls it Forgotten Baby Syndrome. In January, he spoke to the New Zealand Herald after a senior medical staff member at a hospital lost her son by forgetting him in the car:

Dr Newman stressed that while it was not a clinically recognised condition, it described that “human beings make mistakes, they forget things that are not in their usual experience. This happens to good people, well-educated, competent people,” he said.

“This is not cases of people who are going into the casino and leaving kids locked up in vans. This is pure oversight, the brain does what it does, it goes into autopilot…”

These deaths are accidental and they are horrific tragedies. Instead of railing against parents who’ve already suffered the devastating loss of their child or who might benefit from something like Infant SOS that could prevent future deaths, we should be supportive. We should applaud efforts to save lives, we should be compassionate towards these parents who’ve suffered an incomprehensible loss and will blame themselves for the rest of their lives, we should be vigilant when we’re out and about on warm days, and we should put away our useless judgments and get to work on solving the problem.

(Photo:  / Shutterstock)

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