Josephine Joseph* is, well, your average Jo. Her husband is traveling for work so she’s all alone and trying to keep her cool. She’s up early, showering, dressing, doing her hair. She gets the kids fed, rarely gets herself fed and packs the car with three lunches for children, her own laptop and clothes that need dry cleaning. Her cell phone has rung three times already and it’s only 7.30am.
Since she can’t share parental duties this week, she drops her eldest at summer soccer camp and her middle child at karate camp. One says she wants to do another camp next week and the other says he’s done with swimming and wants to do something different. Rock climbing, maybe. She figures out how much these camps cost and bites her tongue before telling him to head to camp and uses one of her common mom phrases she used to hate as a kid. “We’ll see”. Between camps and daycare, she wonders how much of her salary she actually takes home but her kids do love their summer activities, and this is life as a mother these days. Her cell phone rings again but she doesn’t answer it because she took that Oprah no phone zone pledge. Yet she feels pressure to get to work fast to start responding to all these voice mails. Otherwise she’ll never catch up and the kids get out at 5pm.
She drives into her parking lot, grabs her laptop and grimaces as her cell phone rings again. She run inside and finally sits down. She wonders how single parents do it all. Her co-workers smile. They know her thoughts because they have them too. Another day, another dollar, she says to herself, as millions of other moms say the same thing.
Three hours later, the receptionist tells her that daycare is on the phone. She says she’ll them right back. Probably a question about potty training again. They call again an hour later and leave a message that they assume her toddler is with her mom or dad today. Josephine reads the message ten minutes later and her legs feel like they’ll collapse beneath her. Running to her car so fast that her heel breaks she says over and over that it’s ok, the voices in her head are lying, everything’s ok and everyone’s fine. It’s a practical joke that she’ll get mad about later. Or she'll wake up in just a second because none of this is real.
She gets the car open, biting back the need to vomit. The searing heat makes her gasp. She tries to unbuckle the car seat that still holds her baby, a baby that has been strapped into her car seat for four hours in 140 degrees of suffocating heat. She looks like a large baby doll, still and silent, unresponsive to her mother’s cries of horror. Her coworkers watch helplessly, terrified by what they know is the obvious outcome. Someone calls 911. Her baby is pronounced dead of hyperthermia at the childrens hospital 40 minutes later. Josephine Joseph, racing through her life, has left her child to die in a car that essentially became an oven that can kill within minutes.
Josephine Joseph is not alone. Every year, dozens of babies and children are killed this way. The majority of parents face heavy criminal charges although some are never brought to trial as charges are dropped.
As a result of these incidences, marriages can fail and parents lose their jobs. A young child with everything to live for has lost her life because she was forgotten about. There is prison time and legal separation of parent and the remaining living children. The devastation can last a lifetime. Many believe that the vast majority of the parents involved are not deliberately negligent, nor do they want to harm their kids. Especially when a routine has suddenly been changed, an adult brain goes into cruise control and genuinely forgets that things need to be done differently.
Others insist they would never, ever forget a child in a car. How could someone? Are we that self-absorbed and distracted that even when we leave a child in a hot car, we don’t remember unless we’re prompted, 8 or 10 hours later? We remember to take our cell phone and computers with us but not our child? As parents, don’t we know there are no dispensations for being ‘busy’ or ‘overwhelmed?’
The fact is that almost 40 children will die this year from being left in hot cars and truth be told, some of these children are indeed left due to neglect or intentional homicide. But even experts like David Diamond, Ph.D., a scientist at the Veterans' Hospital in Tampa, Florida who has been involved in many of these cases, believe that in many cases, it is purely accidental.
To avoid this happening to your child:
-Make sure you put your cell phone, laptop bag and purse in the back seat. This way you cannot miss seeing your child. Write a note and stick it to the dashboard or even attach one to your ignition if you have to.
-Use a special alarm that indicates your child is still in her car seat. It sounds when the car is turned off. You can find these online or any baby/child store.
-Make of a point of asking daycare or school to call you if your child does not show up at her regular time.
-Place a note prominently displayed in your office/place of work. “Have I dropped my child off?” "Did I take her from the car?"
-And always make sure your cars are locked in your garage or driveway. Kids love to play in cars and can easily die while you are pulling weeds or tending to another child outside.
While so many ideas on this checklist may seem obvious or even silly, at least 40 babies and children could be saved by these simple methods.
For more information on this, please check out http://www.kidsandcars.org/
Polls about this topic are all over websites. Some saying it could never happen to them, others said it has actually happened and some parents on the fence. Maybe... they think. Just maybe....
Tell Us
What you do think of all these children being left to die in hot cars? Should all parents be held criminally liable, even when it was a genuine accident? Is 'accident' even the right word? Do you think this could happen to you?
*not a real person