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The day I left my son in the car

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Re: The day I left my son in the car

#121

Post by tptacek »

SeanDav wrote: post #112
tptacek wrote: post #70

I've flagged down a cop seeing a kid alone in a car, and would do it again. 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 .…

Ask yourself: How many kids are killed annually by being left alone in a car, and how many kids are killed annually in car accidents? I have no doubt that the number killed in car accidents is vastly higher. So which is the biggest sin? Which should be the crime?

I have no idea what your point is here. More kids are killed annually in car accidents than are killed by alligator attacks, too.

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#122

Post by DanBC »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #87
DanBC wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent runs into store for few minutes, trips and knocks head becoming unconcious / has stroke / has heart attack / etc etc - child dies. 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.

I think like this, always able to consider the worst case scenario. So, whilst I've left my kid(s) in the car on occassions I've never left them without leaving the window open a bit ... of course that makes it easier to open the door and kidnap them ...

Well, the worse case scenario is that a parent takes the child out of the car and a truck plows into them both leaving them alive but severely brain damaged, requiring 24 hour care. The truck driver is poor and has no insurance, and the parent was inadaquately insured too.

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#123

Post by notdonspaulding »

SeanDav wrote: post #15
shasta wrote: post #11

> It was a temporary lapse in judgment. 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. Be…

Except it is not safe to remove your kid from the car - that carries risks of its own. There is no safe option - as the article clearly points out. 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 o…

I think you missed the parent commenter's point that the reason they took their kid with them had nothing to do with the actual risk to their child (which they determined to be low), but everything to do with the likelihood of having to deal with other parents in a highly-litigious society (which they determined to be much higher).

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#124

Post by tptacek »

Domenic_S wrote: post #111
imgabe wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article states that the car had child locks, which were used, so the doors could only be opened from the outside. Furthermore, the kid specifically wanted to go on the trip in the first place so he could sit in the car and play with the iPad, which he was happily doing. 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 t…

I don't agree with tptacek on this (at all), but front doors don't have child locks and it's trivial for a child to crawl up to the front seat.

You totally disagree that it's unsafe to leave a four year old alone in a parked car?

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#125

Post by anigbrowl »

DanBC wrote: post #56
anigbrowl wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but people would know the child was there. If someone fall down unconscious in the middle of the supermarket nobody knows which car they arrived in, or even for sure that they arrived in a car, and nobody knows about the unattended child. That's a different kind of risk. 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 w…

Approaching a young child who has been left alone in a car is foolish in today's paranoic society. 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".

The person was near enough to spot the child and take a photograph, so they could have remained at that distance and call the police if they feel it's necessary, not least to advise the returning parent/guardian that the police were called. In that case the police would probably have arrived and written a ticket or something. Although this would have involved a delay and frustration for the temporarily unattentive parent, it would have been better than the actual outcome involving the issuance of arrest warrants.

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.

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#126

Post by peterwwillis »

tptacek wrote: post #93
peterwwillis wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She wasn't "grappling", she was retelling what was probably the most emotionally trying experience of her entire life. Cut her some slack maybe?

She wrote an article that is in large part a defense of leaving toddlers alone in parked cars. That was her choice. It is reasonable to criticize an article on its own terms.

You called her an asshole. That isn't criticizing an article. You interpret it as a defense of leaving toddlers alone, but really it's just a story. There's a lot of important points to it, like the fucked up judicial and legislative process, and the fact that all parents make mistakes. It's not a whitewash. It's real life.

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#127

Post by pbhjpbhj »

IanDrake wrote: post #44

Seriously, this is my number one reason for not having kids. 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. - Arr…

Survivorship bias.

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.

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#128

Post by pbhjpbhj »

DanBC wrote: post #122
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think like this, always able to consider the worst case scenario. So, whilst I've left my kid(s) in the car on occassions I've never left them without leaving the window open a bit ... of course that makes it easier to open the door and kidnap them ...

Well, the worse case scenario is that a parent takes the child out of the car and a truck plows into them both leaving them alive but severely brain damaged, requiring 24 hour care. The truck driver is poor and has no insurance, and the parent was inadaquately insured too.

And the truck was driven by the other parent. Yes, my brain can play that game all day.

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#129

Post by tptacek »

peterwwillis wrote: post #126
tptacek wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She wrote an article that is in large part a defense of leaving toddlers alone in parked cars. That was her choice. It is reasonable to criticize an article on its own terms.

You called her an asshole. That isn't criticizing an article. You interpret it as a defense of leaving toddlers alone, but really it's just a story. There's a lot of important points to it, like the fucked up judicial and legislative process, and the fact that all parents make mistakes. It's not a whitewash. It's real life.

I called her an asshole for summing up the risks to a toddler left alone in a parked car as: "He wasn’t kidnapped or assaulted or forgotten or dragged across state lines by a carjacker." That's really how she summed the risks up! It's an excerpt of a paragraph, not the whole paragraph, but it's the only part of the paragraph that acknowledges risk. And those aren't the real risks. The real risks are (a) that you've underestimated how likely it is that the heat in the car will injure your child (she touches on this later and it wasn't a factor here) and (b) that your child will escape your parked car and wander around, practically invisible, in a parking lot full of moving vehicles.

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.

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#130

Post by imgabe »

tptacek wrote: post #93
peterwwillis wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She wasn't "grappling", she was retelling what was probably the most emotionally trying experience of her entire life. Cut her some slack maybe?

She wrote an article that is in large part a defense of leaving toddlers alone in parked cars. That was her choice. It is reasonable to criticize an article on its own terms.

I don't find that it advocates leaving toddlers alone in parked cars at all. She states in multiple places that it was a bad decision. What it does advocate is that this shouldn't require legal action. The response in terms of police manpower and court time is wildly out of proportion to the risk.
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