Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009) • Hacker News Board

Re: Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009)

#201

Post by falsedan » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 10:50 AM UTC

I guess the population, climate, and car culture contribute to how frequently these sad events occur in the USA. Do they happen as frequently in other countries?

I think Australia matches at least the climate & car culture of the southern states, but a quick search shows me lots of events where parents deliberately leave kids in cars while they run fast errands, & the statistics on how many car windows get broken to retrieve kids left in cars is much easier to find than then number of children who have died from being accidentally left in a hot car.

Re: Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009)

#202

Post by comstock » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 10:54 AM UTC

m_mueller wrote: post #157

comstock wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, but it concerns me that the first two citations are not in a very reputable journal: Journal of Nutritional & Environmental Medicine In particular it's on this list: http://www.quackwatch.org/04ConsumerEducation/nonrecperiodic... It also seems that the author of the first article is selling products to prevent SIDS, which is worrying. Not saying it's without merit. But these things make me want to invest…

Good points. All I'd like is for a second independent study to (a) confirm that SIDS is indeed solved in NZ (i.e. it's not just some statistical fluke e.g. due to counting methods) and (b) figure out why it works. Whether it's that particular fungus or not I don't care, as long as the wrapping method works. Supporting evidence, e.g. about mattress handling, IMO lines up well with Sprott / Richardson and is unexplaine…

So, on further research it seems pretty clear that the mattress wrapping stuff is junk. Here's a decent study refuting it [1].

One key quote is "SIDS mortality has declined 63% from 1994 to 2004. The prevalence of plastic wrapped cot mattresses has remained constant since 1997. The decline in SIDS cannot be explained by changes in the proportion of plastic-wrapped mattresses."

The promotion of "mattress wrapping" coincided with an education campaign promoting other methods known to help reduce SIDS (like having babies sleep on their backs).

[1] Mitchell, Edwin. (2008). Wrapping a cot mattress in plastic does not explain the continuing fall in SIDS mortality. European journal of pediatrics. 167. 251-2. 10.1007/s00431-007-0526-8.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Edwin_Mitchell/publicat...

Re: Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009)

#203

Post by will_brown » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 11:54 AM UTC

mLuby wrote: post #160

will_brown wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Likewise, there is no rehabilitative purpose. I think thats potentially the most important purpose here. The definition being the reintroduction to society, a parent who unintentionally killed their child by locking them in a car needs to go through some sort of treatment, that much is evidenced by the thoughts of suicide the parent developed afterward. I know HN likes trials and not pleas, but instead of wasting ta…

HN likes trials and not pleas?

Do a search for "plea deal" here on HN, read a few of the threads and see for yourself if you find a prevailing and common theme: anti-plea deals and pro-trial

Re: Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009)

#204

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 11:54 AM UTC

mLuby wrote: post #160

will_brown wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Likewise, there is no rehabilitative purpose. I think thats potentially the most important purpose here. The definition being the reintroduction to society, a parent who unintentionally killed their child by locking them in a car needs to go through some sort of treatment, that much is evidenced by the thoughts of suicide the parent developed afterward. I know HN likes trials and not pleas, but instead of wasting ta…

HN likes trials and not pleas?

[deleted]

Re: Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009)

#205

Post by u801e » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 12:58 PM UTC

veidr wrote: post #159

rrdharan wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many children were dying as a result of the airbag deployments before the recommendation I wonder?

EDIT: Oops, I didn't initially notice that the chart in the grandparent post actually lists both airbag and heat fatalities... --- Good question. As of 1996, it was only 21 total, according to the NY Times[1], but more than half of those were killed in the first 9 months of that year. In 1999, Car and Driver magazine reported a total of 99 child fatalities. So, low "first-few-google-hits" data quality aside, that see…

> Next, I got to this horrifying article about a University of Georgia study concluding that the government statistics on airbags are wildly wrong and airbags are actually killing us all

The hyperbole isn't really necessary. Before "depowered" airbags were allowed by the NHTSA, the standard described in FMVSS (Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard) 208 stated that airbags must be able to protect an unbelted 50th percentile sized male in a frontal crash. This required that the airbag deploy at lower collision speeds and with more force than would be necessary with a belted occupant of smaller stature.

This lead to injuries and deaths due to airbag deployments in low speed collisions as mentioned in the study. My guess is that the study period was at a time when depowered airbags weren't as common as they are today.

Re: Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009)

#206

Post by turc1656 » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 1:28 PM UTC

coding123 wrote: post #195

turc1656 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the definition you provided, it seems fairly obvious to me based on how I interpret that definition. "acting in a particular manner" = leaving the child in the car, that is the act. "foreseeable outcome" = death. "reasonable care to avoid consequences" = anything that the parent could easily do which would prevent the foreseeable outcome. There are a few things parents can do, and could even combine them. An…

Clone your self by 300 million and tell me you won't forget the keys over a period of 20 years one time. I'm not sure all 300 million us adults subscribe to your newsletter. 'forget things all the time' - so you admit there is a chance 100 percent can drop to 99.9999? A friend of a friend had their child eat a battery that was left lying around in the house, I'm pretty sure there are a million other potential killer…

Eating a battery is not a reasonably foreseeable event that would occur with a high probability. It's something that can happen, sure. But doesn't happen that often even when they are left around. So I don't think anyone should be charged in that case. You can't protect against everything. But it's really easy to protect against leaving your kid in the car. And since that carries an extremely high probability of serious injury or death, people should be mindful about it and try to do whatever they need to in order for it to never happen. It boils down to risk and statistics. There are 100 ways your kid can kill themselves in your house every day. They could stick something metallic into an outlet and electrocute themselves or knock into something and a heavy object falls on them. You can't know that any of those things will happen at the moment they do, but you do know what is likely to happen if you forget your child in the car on a hot day. The cause and effect are proximate and immediate. That's why there should be culpability. It should be no different than how we prosecute the most serious errors on the road such as drunk driving that leads to a serious, possibly fatal accident or whether it's just someone who wasn't paying attention or was very tired and accidentally hit someone. We generally, but not always, charge those individuals. The prosecutors look at the evidence and if a driver made a serious/negligent mistake, they charge them. If the circumstances were one of happenstance and not a clear fault, then charges are usually not levied. Same logic should apply here.

Yeah I said I forget things all the time but the things I forget are NOT part of the system I have in place. That's the point. The habits I have are to make sure I don't forget the things I really care about or absolutely need. So no, it will not be 99.9999% for those items - it will be 100%. In fact, my habits have caught me forgetting the things on the list literally hundreds of times over the past decade. It works and it always catches it.

Re: Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009)

#207

Post by rlpb » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 1:33 PM UTC

Inconel wrote: post #82

peferron wrote: post #76

I'm astonished to see many comments here on HN (albeit heavily downvoted) saying that if you're a "good parent" then it's easy—just don't forget your child in the car! It's like saying that if you're a "good engineer" then it's easy not to drop your production database instead of the development one—just don't ssh to the wrong host! I thought we were done with this way of thinking. Apparently not. Or maybe people thi…

I agree with what you're saying but I think your last sentence is an important, and somewhat often overlooked, point. You've recognized that this is a mistake than you aren't immune from making and are going to take steps to lessen the risk of it occurring. I think often times this is the difference between good parenting and not so good parenting. It isn't so much that good parents don't make mistakes or forget thin…

> good parents...have a system in place to catch these mistakes before they become incredibly serious.

I don't think it's possible to come up with all possible bad things that could happen and have a process in place before they happen. Some level of reactivity is necessary. In some cases, one mistake is too much. Not having foreseen that one mistake doesn't make someone a bad parent, because it's human to make mistakes.

Re: Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009)

#208

Post by mikeash » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 2:03 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #134

mikeash wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree about deterrence. There are a lot of shitty parents out there who fear prison more than they fear losing their child. There are even parents who want to kill their children. If it becomes common knowledge that you can get away with murdering your kid as long as you use this technique... I don't really want to think about that. People are also really bad about evaluating potential consequences. A person mig…

"There are a lot of shitty parents out there who fear prison more than they fear losing their child. There are even parents who want to kill their children. If it becomes common knowledge that you can get away with murdering your kid as long as you use this technique... I don't really want to think about that." I believe we're going to need a citation on that. What exactly does "a lot" mean? 1% of the population of p…

Approximately 100,000 American children suffer physical abuse at the hands of a parent each year:

http://www.nationalchildrensalliance.org/media-room/media-ki...

If the proportion of abuse victims which are subject to physical parental abuse is approximately the same, then about 13,000 of those victims are under one year old.

If you're going for an argument that really bad parents are too rare to take into account, it seems to me that argument works both ways: the number of good parents who would be victimized by prosecuting hot car deaths would be really small. At an average of ~40 such deaths per year, at most 80 good parents would be improperly prosecuted per year.

This page gives examples of criminal negligence which to me seem to be pretty similar to leaving a child in a car like this:

http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-negligence.ht...

In particular, I don't see a fundamental difference between a nurse forgetting to feed a patient and a parent forgetting to take their child out of the car.

The fact that there are only ~40 such deaths per year in the US suggests to me that this is not, in fact, something that would apply to essentially every parent.

Re: Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009)

#209

Post by ideonexus » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 2:16 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #106

rayiner wrote: post #31

This is a great way to analyze the purposes of the criminal justice system. Typically, there are three: punishment, deterrence, and rehabilitation. Prosecuting someone who forgot their kid in the car can't have deterrent effect--to the extent the event was avoidable, the possibility of prosecution couldn't possibly match the deterrent effect created by the risk of harm to the child. Likewise, there is no rehabilitati…

I disagree about deterrence. There are a lot of shitty parents out there who fear prison more than they fear losing their child. There are even parents who want to kill their children. If it becomes common knowledge that you can get away with murdering your kid as long as you use this technique... I don't really want to think about that. People are also really bad about evaluating potential consequences. A person mig…

I find the callousness in this post extremely distressing.

You don't understand what having a child under the age of six months is like. You are incredibly sleep deprived, making errors at work and are a danger on the road. My wife and I piled up a barricade of boxes to the door of our balcony because we were terrified that one of us would hallucinate at 4am and drop our newborn off the fourth floor.

So when I read about a mother who thought she had dropped her infant off at daycare with her four-year-old, and instead found her dead in the backseat when she got off work that night, my first thought was, "That could have been me." When I read about a parent who backed her car over her infant, I immediately remembered the morning I backed over my lunch because I had been up all night with a screaming newborn and my morning routine got off a beat when my neighbor interrupted it to ask a question.

The real tragedy here is that we could probably greatly reduce these incidents by giving new parents extended maternity leave or providing them some other form of social support. Unfortunately, the same mindset in this country that considers these tragedies "criminal" are also the same people who think giving a new mother time off is some kind of free ride.

If you read stories about these tragedies and your gut reaction is "shitty parents" who "want to kill their children," then your ethical mindset is completely alien to me. I don't know how to teach you the importance of compassion and sympathy for your fellow human beings.

Re: Forgetting a Child in a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009)

#210

Post by m_mueller » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 2:47 PM UTC

comstock wrote: post #202

m_mueller wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points. All I'd like is for a second independent study to (a) confirm that SIDS is indeed solved in NZ (i.e. it's not just some statistical fluke e.g. due to counting methods) and (b) figure out why it works. Whether it's that particular fungus or not I don't care, as long as the wrapping method works. Supporting evidence, e.g. about mattress handling, IMO lines up well with Sprott / Richardson and is unexplaine…

So, on further research it seems pretty clear that the mattress wrapping stuff is junk. Here's a decent study refuting it [1]. One key quote is "SIDS mortality has declined 63% from 1994 to 2004. The prevalence of plastic wrapped cot mattresses has remained constant since 1997. The decline in SIDS cannot be explained by changes in the proportion of plastic-wrapped mattresses." The promotion of "mattress wrapping" coi…

I'm aware of that one and I don't think it explains everything if you pay closr attention.

They don't go further than taking a general population statistic and try to to infer from correlation that mattress wrapping is disproven. What happens if you actually have two groups, one using wrapping and one from the same demographics who don't? Sprott hypothesises that laying infants on their back will reduce SIDS thanks to less exposure to toxic gases from funghi consuming plastics. That causal link is unproven as it seems, but it gives an explanation for the numbers you quote that agrees with the results reported by Sprott / Richardson.