Everybody is talking about this Washington Post article that profiles the 15-25 kids who die every year, when their parents forget about them in hot cars. I read it last night. Well, I read as much as I could handle. It's an excellent piece and worth reading if you have the stomach for it.
26 thoughts on “Forgetting the Kid”
Comments are closed.
Apt. 11d 
Did you read the entire article? I really had to steel myself to start – and finish – but it had a great payoff. Not least was the awareness it raised.
This topic is discussed a lot here in Texas, because of the heat – it doesn’t take very long at all for small bodies, human or canine or otherwise, to heat up in closed cars, so we hear admonitions frequently. Which, I’m now thinking, is a good thing.
LikeLike
There were an awful lot of fathers interviewed in the WaPo story. In that long report, they say that the forgetters are a diverse bunch, but they don’t present the stats, so I wonder. Day care drop-offs were also very prominent, as I saw somebody else point out.
The WaPo article lauds a device that triggers an alarm when the carseat is occupied and the ignition is turned off and thinks that it ought to be standard equipment. If that is truly the way it works, I think it won’t save a lot of lives. It’s much more likely to get turned off after the 100th time it goes off when the driver and baby are parked and waiting for someone.
LikeLike
There were an awful lot of fathers interviewed in the WaPo story. In that long report, they say that the forgetters are a diverse bunch, but they don’t present the stats, so I wonder.
What do you wonder? Are you implying that fathers are more likely to forget?
LikeLike
There were several options:
1. Fathers forget more (perhaps because they are more focused and single-minded and on average less capable of keeping several windows running in their brains at the same time).
2. Fathers do more daycare shuttling.
3. Fathers are more willing to talk to the press about this issue.
LikeLike
Wow. Thanks for the article. Always good to be mindful of this sort of thing.
LikeLike
I’ll go with #3. What do you think?
LikeLike
I read the headline to the article, and knew that it was something I did not want to read.
Are you staring at deformed thumbs, Laura? Meloncholy=>focusing on negatives?
The comment is an allusion to DoctorMama: http://doctormama.blogspot.com/2006/11/beam-me-up.html
bj
LikeLike
You didn’t read a key point in the article, Amy. Men and women forget in pretty much equal numbers. So there’s no ambiguity here: if there are more men in the article, it’s just because more men talked to the reporter.
Over at Obsidian Wings, Hilzoy notes that one of the key take-aways from the article is the extent to which people are willing to cast unbelievably harsh judgments on total strangers and then to offer those comments online–whereas the article itself suggests that this is very very much a “there but for the grace of god go I” phenomenon, that there are literally no social or psychological predispositions save being distracted or busy that make someone more likely to accidentally leave a baby in a car.
LikeLike
“Men and women forget in pretty much equal numbers.”
I read that in the article and actually mentioned it in my comment. They don’t give any numbers, though, so I don’t take that statement at face value.
It may be true that mothers are just as likely to forget, but it’s just very striking how many of the forgetters quoted in the article were men. Will may be correct that social taboos on mothers may inhibit women from speaking to reporters.
LikeLike
heh, bj. I read three posts related to this article before I posted it. After last week’s run of depressing posts, I didn’t want to give the impression that I was ready to slit my wrists. Actually I could only read every third sentence in this article, because I couldn’t take it. I could easily see myself doing something stupid like that. Thank God, my kids are old enough so I think it would be tough to accidentally kill them. I would have to put a bullet in my head if I did something like that.
LikeLike
Maybe I am too sensitive, but, Amy, I read into your comments that mothers are better parents than fathers. That was the subtle inference that I got.
LikeLike
“Thank God, my kids are old enough so I think it would be tough to accidentally kill them.”
Indeed, I celebrate this fact every day.
My personal fear was the story of the person who put their infant seat on top of the car and drove off. Having lost numerous Big Gulps, tennis rackets, and other paraphernalia that way, that fear would go through my mind every single time I entered the car with my infant. I think it was one of the motivating factors behind having a difficult to move infant car seat, so that we always took the babe out of the car seat when we left the car.
LikeLike
Oh, well, Amy, the article only says the numbers are equal. I guess you’d need the exact numbers to run your own test of statistical significance. Actually, that wouldn’t be enough, I assume you’d want to collect the data yourself without relying on intermediaries for information. In the meantime, why not speculate? Maybe it’s way disproportionately men who do this! Or Catholics! or left-handers! Because we don’t have the numbers.
LikeLike
Oh, well, Amy, the article only says the numbers are equal.
Are you referring to the “mothers are as likely to do it as fathers” line?
LikeLike
Yes. “as likely to do it” is “equal”. If you doubt that about the article, then doubt everything. Which is fine, but then running off in some speculative direction (“maybe men do it more often!”) doesn’t fit. That kind of skepticism has to limit itself to saying, “Until I read the data myself, I don’t accept *anything* this article says”. Which means that if you find the issue sufficiently interesting to warrant further investigation, you go investigate. If you don’t, end of discussion. The people who read it and think that sounds like it’s likely to be a reasonable represention by the author of what the data shows can pass Go, collect $200.00, and proceed to ask, “So what does this mean?”
LikeLike
TB,
Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. All I know is that when dealing with the press, you have to read critically, looking carefully for odd lacunae. This was a long, long, long article, and the fact that it was stated baldly that gender doesn’t matter, without any substantiating evidence provided, was not a good sign. It’s not like there wasn’t plenty of room available.
I’ve had it in for the Washington Post ever since the housing bubble started to deflate. If I had listened to the WaPo, we’d be living (if that is the word) in a $200,000 shack in suburban Maryland with a $400,000 mortgage in an iffy neighborhood with iffy schools. No, I do not trust the WaPo further than I could throw one of their newspaper vending machines.
LikeLike
Amy P.,
I’m confused. How did a link on parents making critical mistakes with their kids lives turn into an assault on the financial advice dolled out by a newspaper?
LikeLike
Regarding the men v. women issue, my husband is a prosecutor in a county that recently had a high-profile death from a kid left in a car and the stats on this kind of thing are equal. What is not equal are the punishments given by the courts–women who forget their children in the car are punished more harshly overall than men who do the same thing.
LikeLike
Thanks for posting the link, Laura.
Reading the article, cell phones were a main distraction for many of the parents. One more excellent reason not to use them while driving.
LikeLike
Yes. “as likely to do it” is “equal”.
Sure, but that’s just the prosecutor’s fallacy, due to standard journalist innumeracy. The reporter can’t possibly know whether men and women are “as likely” or “equal” to do this without massive amounts of data one can’t possibly access (exactly of the sort that Amy P hinted at in her option 2). What the reporter means is “Incidents are as likely to be caused by women as men”, which is a vastly different statement, although the reporter probably doesn’t understand the difference.
LikeLike
And the relationship between people’s inability to grasp that important distinction and laura’s post on the relevance of political science is left as an exercise for the reader.
LikeLike
What is not equal are the punishments given by the courts–women who forget their children in the car are punished more harshly overall than men who do the same thing.
I would have to see the statistics to believe that.
In my experience, men tend to get punished more harshly than women. But, I dont have any hard stats on that, just 17 years of practice.
LikeLike
Plus, I am still curious as to why Amy P thinks men are more likely to do this act.
We tend to believe the stories that confirm with our world view and are suspicious of those that do not.
So, why Amy P?
LikeLike
Will–I believe the relevant study is done by a Wake Forest professor named Jennifer Collins. She found that
“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.” (cited in AP article by Allen Breed 7/28/08)
Babysitters and caregivers are also punished more harshly, as are people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
LikeLike
“So, why Amy P?”
I explained further up in my option #1. Men are (on average, with lots of exceptions) often not natural multi-taskers. My husband, for instance, is an excellent father. However, he frequently gets so carried away by whatever task he is occupied with that he forgets to have either breakfast or lunch a couple times a week. The problem is, he has room for only one task at a time in his head. It’s not a moral failing.
LikeLike
Thanks Miranda.
LikeLike