How is it possible?
Aug 30th, 2007 by justsimplyholly
Over at Glass City Jungle we’ve been talking about how it is possible for a parent to forget and leave a young child in a car for a long enough period of time that it causes the death of the child. As a parent myself, I find it unfathomable to think that I could forget that I have my child in the vehicle with me. Some people in the thread at Glass City Jungle have stated that they as parents, and even their own parents, have forgotten to pick up their child from different activities or to take them to activities, which I can relate to because I have forgotten to take my own children to things that they were supposed to go to.
Being the research type of person that I am, I had to find out just how often a child is forgotten in a vehicle, which lead me to THIS Google search. At that link you will find story after story about children who have died after being left in a vehicle. The stories are all heart wrenching and they all have the same ending, that of an innocent life being lost. It’s heart breaking and sickening at the same time. But the fact of the matter is we, as parents, have less and less time for the thing that is most important in our lives, our children.
The statistics are astonishing, more children are dieing every year because they have been left or forgotten in a hot vehicle. A CNN news article talks about the differences in how people are punished for this crime.
Mothers are treated much more harshly than fathers. While mothers and fathers are charged and convicted at about the same rates, moms are 26 percent more likely to do time. And their median sentence is two years longer than the terms received by dads.
Day care workers and other paid baby sitters are more likely than parents to be charged and convicted. But they are jailed less frequently than parents, and for less than half the time.
They also talk in this article about how dramatically these deaths have risen with changes that required children in car seats to be put in the back seats of vehicles as well as the requirements of backward facing child seats.
The correlation between the rise in these deaths and the 1990s move to put children in the back seat is striking.
“Up to that time, the average number of children dying of hyperthermia in the United States was about 11 a year,” says Jan Null, an adjunct professor of meteorology at San Francisco State University who has studied this trend. “Then we put them in the back, turned the car seats around. And from ‘98 to 2006, that number is 36 a year.”
The CNN news article is an amazing article that I highly recommend reading! In it they talk about several different cases and even have quotes from the parents that were involved in the deaths of their children.
Another website I visited was KidsAndCars.org. To quote their website “KIDS AND CARS’ mission is to assure no child dies or is injured in a non-traffic, motor vehicle related event.” Their site is a wealth of information, including statistics, current legislation, educational materials, and technology available to help prevent the needless deaths of innocent children, as well as news and links to all kinds of information.
As a parent I implore everyone who reads this to start taking a moment when you park your car and look at the cars around you. Although we cannot do anything to keep another parent from leaving or forgetting their child in a car, we might be able to prevent an innocent life from being lost. This is a heartbreaking epidemic that we need to do all we can to keep from happening.
