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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

#201

Post by mcv »

IanDrake wrote: post #176
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, if I'm a passerby and I see a dog with the window cracked open, I have no idea how long he's been there. Calling the cops makes sense, they're the ones paid to made the judgement call and animal control should have the training to diagnose whether the dog is in distress or not. Whoever made the call chose to err on the side of caution out of humanitarian concern, not to get your goat or ruin your day. Sou…

>I have no idea how long he's been there. Calling the cops makes sense... So, everyone is assumed to have no common sense, only you have it and thus become the default enforcer despite, admitting, not knowing the situation?

There are people who do terrible things to animals. When you see someone taking good care of an animal, there's no reason to suspect he's one of the few people who do terrible things, but when you see an animal in a situation that looks like it could be something terrible, the situation is a lot different.

If you see a lone dog tied to a tree in the forest, it could be that the owner is taking a leak somewhere, but it's also possible the dog was abandoned. Better safe than sorry is not a terrible principle.

Same thing with kids in locked cars. Kids do die in locked cars. Not very often, but it happens. When you see a kid in a locked car, it's good to make sure the kid is okay.

I'd rather see false alarms treated seriously than see serious situations ignored. And reducing the number of false alarms by not leaving kids in cars also helps people identify the serious situations.

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#202

Post by mcv »

darklajid wrote: post #92
DanBC wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the police reaction is sub-optimal, but there are reasons not to tie a child to a seat and lock them into a car and then leave them unsupervised, even if that is for a few minutes.

Reasons not to .. and reasons to to exactly that. The decision is not yours, not ours. It's the parent's. Like everything else about the daily life of the kid. That argument contains no value. Of course there are reasons that one might not do that. Loop/Recur to line 1.

There are parents who neglect or abuse their children. It's fortunately rare, but it does mean that children also deserve protection from their parents, when necessary.

Leaving a child in a locked car is a bad idea, even when it's totally safe, and even with a window cracked. (In fact, leaving a car window open when you're not there is also a bad idea, though a few minutes probably won't hurt.) Honestly, in that situation, it's better to leave the car door open, so the child can get out when necessary. If you don't trust the child to make that decision, don't leave it alone.

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#203

Post by mcv »

anigbrowl wrote: post #173
darklajid wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine. Abused kids need help. There, I said it. It's nothing new and not related to the example at hand, but yeah, we found some common ground. The state has laws and agencies to interfere and check (Disclaimer: I've no clue about the US of A here, but I assume it's not too far off from what I know). But that's not related to the action(s) we discuss. Are we missing a part of the picture? Certainly. Is the partial pic…

The police didn't act in a crazy fashion at all. They responded to a complaint, collected evidence, checked it against vehicle owner records. Then they visited the owner of the vehicle, gathered some more information. When an arrest warrant was issued (by the court, not by the police) months later, the police telephoned the author of the article to advise her about it and make arrangements for her to come to court. I…

> since you don't live in the US maybe you don't appreciate that the police and the public prosecutor are completely separate entities.

I don't live in the US, but I often get the impression that in the US, they're less separate than in other countries.

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#204

Post by mcv »

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 .…

> "This other parent let their nine-year-old ride the subway by themselves." Well, I think that's a bad call too, but who cares?

Whether that's a bad call depends on the child and the nature of the subway. When I was 12, I travelled by train through the country for 4 days, planning my own journeys, visiting musea and relatives. Not every 12 year old would be able to do that responsibly, but I was sure I could do that, and after checking that I knew my way around a train schedule, my parents agreed.

9 is younger than 12, obviously, but if it's a fairly safe subway, and it's just a single trip, dropped off at one end, picked up at the other, and the child is familiar with subways and comfortable traveling alone, I see no real problem.

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#205

Post by mcv »

imgabe wrote: post #100
tptacek wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts immediately go to "that they will get hit by a car when they figure out how to get out".

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 disagree that the child locks make it safer. By locking it up, the child is unable to take care of itself. If anything happens, it's stuck. If I can't trust the child to make its own judgments about how to behave in and around the car (which is indeed unlikely with a 4 year old), then I shouldn't leave it alone in the car at all.

I'm all for letting children roam free and find their own way. I'm not a fan of locking them up without supervision.

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#206

Post by pbhjpbhj »

IanDrake wrote: post #156
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I knew kids that had dogs growing up. We all think it's safe, but alas, family dogs kill children. I guess we all suffer from that survivorship bias. The lesson here is anyone with a family dog should have their children taken away. I also used to take the ferry to Nantucket and MV as a kid. Thought that was safe too, but apparently those things sink and kill children. What, you let your kids take the ferry? So…

To dismiss them as unlikely is not survivorship bias, no. That's not how it works - you knew that and knew that we did too.

But, for example, to say "I used to jump in to rivers and swim around, never hurt me" as an argument for allowing kids to jump in to [untested] rivers would be. Sure most children would survive but we nonetheless have the bias in the lack of testimony from those that drowned, or possibly impaled themselves on detritus hidden below the surface , and died.

Just because there is a survivorship bias in testimonies concerning [sufficiently] safe activities for children doesn't of course mean that one is required to stop their children taking part in those activities.

All activities and inactivities have risks. The note of the bias is simply a reminder to take it in to account when weighing those risks.

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#207

Post by shasta »

anigbrowl wrote: post #185
shasta wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that darklajid can be the one downvoting -- at least not your post replying to him. I suspect you're being downvoted (and not by me) for suggesting that a statewide missing child alert is warranted in response to a kid being spotted alone in a parking lot for a few minutes, which is the kind of thing that people are mad about in this thread. > In California, there are about 1900 cases of family child ab…

I'm not suggesting that, and you're being disingenuous for ignoring the fact of the person driving the car not matching the id of the vehicle owner, which I have repeatedly pointed out as the suspicious circumstance. Hmm, what "math" did you just do to come up with 1 in 5000? Population of CA is ~38 million, of which ~24% are minors, or approximately 10 million children. 10m/~2000 abductions a year in the state = 500…

Your math is broken. It doesn't even have the right units to be a probability (children/(abudctions/year)).

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#208

Post by tptacek »

aidenn0 wrote: post #192
tptacek wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I am not advocating for a parenting strategy that demands total attention to your children 60 minutes out of 24 hours a day. I'm simply saying that one time you can't let a child out of your sight is when they're in a parking lot. Let's make this simpler: would you leave your four year old alone in a parked car for 5 minutes while you ran into a store?

I'm a parent of 4 kids, 2 of whom have passed the age of four. I don't recall if it's a law or just a regulation I have to follow as a certified foster parent, but either way I'm not allowed to leave any child under 6 unattended in a car. If it weren't for that rule, then I absolutely would have left one of my kids in a car unattended for 5 minutes, but not the other. The one I would not have got antsy fairly easily.…

7 is borderline. I wouldn't do it, but you know your 7 year old better than I do, and you know where you parked and I don't.

4 is not borderline. There does not exist anywhere in the world a trustworthy 4 year old.

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#209

Post by tptacek »

mcv wrote: post #204
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 .…

> "This other parent let their nine-year-old ride the subway by themselves." Well, I think that's a bad call too, but who cares? Whether that's a bad call depends on the child and the nature of the subway. When I was 12, I travelled by train through the country for 4 days, planning my own journeys, visiting musea and relatives. Not every 12 year old would be able to do that responsibly, but I was sure I could do that…

The parent we're talking about here famously let their 9 year old ride the MTA anywhere in NYC, kicking it off by dropping her kid off at Bloomingdales and then assuming he'd eventually make it home (which involved a bus transfer).

Re: The day I left my son in the car

#210

Post by tptacek »

GuiA wrote: post #7
nkurz wrote: post #2

I'd be interested in hearing non-US perspectives on this. Is it acceptable elsewhere to leave your small child alone in the car for 5 minutes while you get something from a store? Would you fear for the child's safety, of legal action, or neither? Is the US leading the way criminalizing parents who do such things, or are there other countries that have been doing this for years?

Grew up in France in the 90s, in a small upper middle class town. My mother definitely left me alone in the car while she was running errands many, many times (which I liked because it meant I could just read my book, which is all I cared about as a kid). My parents also let me walk back and forth to the library (half a mile or so away) on my own fairly early on. When we lived in the US for 2 years (pre 9/11), my par…

One of your stated reasons for leaving the US when you have kids is that the US is hostile to adults assaulting children? Because that's the circumstance you described with your father and the kid from school.
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