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Aussiesuede
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 Posted: Sun May 17, 2015 7:50 pm Post subject: Florida Parents Forget Child in Car |
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| Quote: | | A 16-month-old girl died after her father forgot to take her to day care and left her in a vehicle in the northern Florida sun. The girl’s mother has been identified as Wendy Timonera Kwon, an assistant state attorney; her father is Young Kwon, a public defender. |
Another Irresponsible Parent
How on earth can this keep happening? Parents treating their own children as nothing more than something else to tick off the daily schedule. Someone needs to start producing proximity alarms and attach them to a kids wrist to remind their numbskull parents when they are out of range. Some folks pay more attention to their dang cell phones than they pay to their own flesh & blood. I can sort of understand the father who engages his daily routine and boards the train forgetting little Ricky is still strapped into his containment seat, but at least he immediately realises his stupidity and calls for help. But All Day? C'mon. That's straight up neglect of the highest order.
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cojones
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| Posted: Sun May 17, 2015 8:41 pm Post subject: |
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| Maybe you forget your kid for like a few min but anything beyond that is really puzzling to me. |
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rwongega
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mhan00
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| Posted: Sun May 17, 2015 9:07 pm Post subject: |
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There's a great article talking about this I will look for later, but for now let me just say It's not neglect or stupidity or parents treating their kids as items in a checklist. It's just the way our brains are wired to handle day to day mundane tasks that are our routine. Our brains are amazing tools that let us do tasks we have gotten accustomed to with very little actual thought or attention. When something breaks that routine or something distracts someone for a moment, sometimes our brains short circuit the process. It's actually a pretty amazing tool that is incredibly helpful 99 percent of the time as it allows us to handle pretty complex tasks (commuting to and from work, manual labor, riding a bike, etc) while thinking about other things, it's just it can occasionally screw us up.
So when a father needs to take his son to daycare because the mom is sick and someone calls him while driving, his brain can sometimes glitch back into his normal routine and he drives straight to work, convinced his son is at daycare. Or, if a mom needs to stop for gas or pick up milk when she normally doesn't, the brain can glitch and make her think that the milk stop was actually her dropping off her child and she goes to work, happily convinced her child is safe at daycare. The vast majority of the times this happens, something catches the parents' attention and breaks them out of their routine (kid makes a sound, they see the child's head in the rear view mirror, something else distracts them or catches their attention and they glitch back, the weather was mild so their kids were okay) and nothing worse happens than a parent sheepishly thinking what an idiot they were. But every so often things break just wrong and tragedy strikes.
People don't realize how unreliable our memories really can be, or how much our brains just kind of fill in for us. It's why eye witnesses are extremely unreliable, and why everyone has a family member who remembers an event completely wrong. Our brains are very good at filling in gaps for us. So parents aren't worrying about having forgotten their kids in their cars out of neglect, but because their brains absolutely know they're safe at daycare so why should they be worrying about that when they've got fifty other things that need attention now?
The things suggested by Carr in the article are great: leave something you know you'll need for work next to your child in the backseat (purse, briefcase, call phone, wallet, whatever). There were companies trying to sell things like motion sensors in the car or pressure sensors in child seats, but there was no market for them because people are convinced it can't happen to them. It's something that seems so ludicrously obvious that people don't want to give it a second thought and just blame the parents for being stupid or neglectful. And it's easy to do so because when a child dies we all want someone to blame and an easy reason for why it happened so we can say to ourselves that We could never do something that dumb. Fortunately, this doesn't occur very often because the chances of everything breaking exactly the wrong way are extremely, extremely low. |
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mhan00
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| Posted: Sun May 17, 2015 9:15 pm Post subject: |
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http://www.parents.com/baby/safety/car/danger-of-hot-car-for-children/
Not the article I was thinking of, but it covers a lot of the same info.
| Quote: | Understanding what they did, he says, requires grasping how two very different parts of the brain work. There are the basal ganglia -- the "background system" that controls our habits. "It allows us to do things without thinking about them," Dr. Diamond says. When you're training in sports, for example, you repeat an action over and over to fine-tune your skills. Once it's time to compete, the action is automatic. "Your basal ganglia take over and you don't have to think about how to bounce or shoot the ball."
Then there are the parts of the brain that control new information: the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. The basal ganglia and prefrontal cortex essentially compete with each other, Dr. Diamond says. When you change up your routine and do something different, then the new details have to be processed by the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex to override the basal ganglia's strong desire to perform actions out of habit.
The basal ganglia play a big part in driving. "Once you've driven from Point A to Point B enough times, you can do it without thinking," Dr. Diamond says. "You might not even remember the trip." If new information enters the picture (say, your partner calls to ask you to stop at the store and buy milk), your prefrontal cortex and hippocampus have to kick into gear to incorporate it. "But it's common to drive right past the store and come home. When your partner says, 'Where's the milk?' you feel flustered because you remember the conversation, but for some reason you came home instead." Why? Because you were on autopilot. "The basal ganglia actually suppress the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus from bringing that memory to your consciousness," explains Dr. Diamond. |
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mhan00
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| Posted: Sun May 17, 2015 9:19 pm Post subject: |
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From the same article:
| Quote: | Nicolle Holmes-Gulick, a 33-year-old mother in Shoreline, Washington, was just as safety-conscious: "the kind of parent people relax around because I'm the one watching their kids like a hawk," as she puts it. But one afternoon in August 2013, her house was more chaotic than usual. Her mother was there and her sister, with her two young children, had just arrived from out of town for a visit. Holmes-Gulick had to get her 13-year-old daughter to her first cheerleading practice of the season, and the clock was ticking. She'd been planning to leave her 21-month-old daughter, Presley, with her mother, but the toddler was fussy, so she wound up taking her too. "Two minutes after we started down the road, Presley fell asleep," Holmes-Gulick recalls. "And when we got there my oldest said, 'You have to come with me. It's my first day.'"
So she got out of the car and walked to the park with her older daughter. "I talked to the coach and the other mothers," she recalls. "Then one of my girlfriends asked me, 'Where's Presley?'" Horrified, Holmes-Gulick shouted, "Oh my God, I forgot my baby!" She ran to the car to find Presley sweaty and screaming. The little girl was fine -- but Holmes-Gulick wasn't. "I cried about 20 times that day," she says. Presley was in the car for eight minutes on an 85°F day, and Holmes-Gulick knows what could have happened if her friend hadn't said something. Being as cautious as she was, she never dreamed that could happen to her.
She's also amazed by how many other parents have told her they've done something similar. "When I talk with my friends about it, everybody opens up," she says. "People are insecure about their parenting and they aren't going to say 'I did that' until someone else does. This happens to a lot more people than we think." |
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mhan00
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| Posted: Sun May 17, 2015 9:43 pm Post subject: |
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/fatal-distraction-forgetting-a-child-in-thebackseat-of-a-car-is-a-horrifying-mistake-is-it-a-crime/2014/06/16/8ae0fe3a-f580-11e3-a3a5-42be35962a52_story.html
This is the article I was thinking of.
| Quote: | Death by hyperthermia” is the official designation. When it happens to young children, the facts are often the same: An otherwise loving and attentive parent one day gets busy, or distracted, or upset, or confused by a change in his or her daily routine, and just... forgets a child is in the car. It happens that way somewhere in the United States 15 to 25 times a year, parceled out through the spring, summer and early fall. The season is almost upon us.
Two decades ago, this was relatively rare. But in the early 1990s, car-safety experts declared that passenger-side front airbags could kill children, and they recommended that child seats be moved to the back of the car; then, for even more safety for the very young, that the baby seats be pivoted to face the rear. If few foresaw the tragic consequence of the lessened visibility of the child . . . well, who can blame them? What kind of person forgets a baby?
The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist. |
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kikanga
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| Posted: Sun May 17, 2015 10:14 pm Post subject: |
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| rwongega wrote: | Lawyers.  |
 I thought the same thing when I read the excerpt.
My buddy is a PD and sometimes he'd lose his head if it wasn't attached to his body.
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LarryCoon
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| Posted: Mon May 18, 2015 7:51 am Post subject: |
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| Same thing happened to someone at UCI a few years ago. Mother strapped the kid in the car seat in the back for the father to take to day care; father didn't realize she had done so (kid was asleep), went to work, and never saw the kid. |
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angrypuppy
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| Posted: Mon May 18, 2015 7:56 am Post subject: |
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| I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason was sleep-deprivation. It's tough with both parents working as professionals, then coming home for some heavy-duty parenting. |
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ContagiousInspiration
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| Posted: Mon May 18, 2015 8:38 am Post subject: |
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| Thank you for posting the articles mhan00 |
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ringfinger
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| Posted: Mon May 18, 2015 9:19 am Post subject: |
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| Yeah this is a tough one. I don't know that this is a case of negligence, malice, but an honest, and very, very unfortunate mistake. |
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C M B
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| Posted: Mon May 18, 2015 2:43 pm Post subject: |
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Last edited by C M B on Mon May 18, 2015 2:53 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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non-player zealot
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| Posted: Mon May 18, 2015 2:46 pm Post subject: |
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| mhan00 wrote: | There's a great article talking about this
So when a father needs to take his son to daycare because the mom is sick and someone calls him while driving, his brain can sometimes glitch back into his normal routine and he drives straight to work, convinced his son is at daycare. Or, if a mom needs to stop for gas or pick up milk when she normally doesn't, the brain can glitch and make her think that the milk stop was actually her dropping off her child and she goes to work, happily convinced her child is safe at daycare. |
There's a movie about it called Home Alone. "KEVIN!!!!"
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Laker_Town
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| Posted: Mon May 18, 2015 2:52 pm Post subject: |
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glad the title changed. not one of those tree huggers, but the cooked part made me cringe in the morning.
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rwongega
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