BABIES IN CAR SEATS - Lest We Forget -
- Megan Haldane
- Feb 26, 2018
- 13 min read
Parents leave babies in car seats, lock up their cars nicely, walk away and forget their baby is locked inside. The baby dies due to hyperthermia, a distressed unthinkable death, unthinkable in terms of the suffering the baby has to go through to die. Children's thermoregulatory systems are not as efficient as an adult's and their bodies heat up at a rate 3 to 5 times faster than an adult's. A baby in a hot car will experience a thermoregulatory mechanism overwhelm once their temperature reaches 104 degrees. After that, as the core body temperature reaches the lethal level of 107 degrees the baby will suffer damage to the cells and and his or her internal organs begin to shut down. That is how the body works. During this time the baby will suffer dizziness, disorientation, agitation, confusion, sluggishness, seizure, hot dry skin, loss of consciousness, rapid heart beat, and hallucinations. I want parents to consider that this is what their baby will go through to die.
... and yes, this parental condition of leaving the baby in their car seat has been given a name. It is called Fatal Distraction, in my terms, almost an insult to any baby who has been through the horrific experience only to die, their death due to their parent's distracted state of mind. There is a Pulitzer prize winning feature article in The Washington Post of 2009 titled 'Fatal Distraction'. It was written by Gene Weingarten.
The accounts of the babies' deaths are distressing to read. Some parents are charged with neglect or involuntary manslaughter but so far there is a lot of debate about how to categorise this situation in terms of the law. Since there is usually no intent and the parents are nearly always proven to be normally very attentive and caring, much focus has been placed on the question of memory. How could a parent 'forget'? ... and what is memory anyway?
Very recently a Father in a suburb not far from where I live in Perth arrived at a day care centre to pick up his eleven month old baby only to be told that the little boy had never been dropped off in the morning. The child care worker and the Father rushed back to his car and found the baby dead still sitting in his car seat.
As yet, there has been no coronial inquiry published. The police announced there would be no charges laid. Therefore I am quite confident that the tragedy would have occurred in a similar way to others which have been reported all over the world.
The Father who had the baby in his care became so distracted he 'forgot' to leave the baby with the child minders at the day care centre. He drove to work and left the car parked somewhere, possibly in the sun with no thought of his son ... end of son but not the end of the story. I am assuming that, like myself, no parent could feel anything but compassionate regard for this Father and of course the baby's Mother. For the Father, to live every day of his life with 'that terrible mistake' in his mind would make for a torturous life. There are mistakes and there are MISTAKES! He will need constant support and loving care for a long time to come. I tend to keep in mind the suffering of the baby also. Many reports focus on the parent because we all identify with the one who is left but we must be daring enough and willing enough to consider the plight of each baby who has died otherwise we may 'forget' to do something about that.
...Then came the defense brigade. A major Australian newspaper declared in a headline 'It could happen to any of us'. The article reporting this particular tragedy was written by a female journalist virtually admonishing the reader for ever thinking it could not happen to them, for ever considering that they could never find themselves in the same position as this poor Father. 'How dare we judge' was the message. Here is an excerpt:
'It's not difficult to imagine a bad night, a tired toddler, a rushed morning - all of which may have led to the child never being dropped off in the first place.
It's been one of my biggest parenting fears ever since reading the Pulitzer-prize winning account 'Fatal Distraction' of similar stories in the US, published in 2009.
Daycare staff called the Perth event an "unfortunate incident" and indeed, it could happen to any of us. Who else has driven right past the school gate with their mind pre-occupied, or driven halfway home along a familiar route, with no recollection of the journey? We tumble through our busy lives without pause, from breakfast-dropoff-work to pickup-dinner-bath-bed, using schedules and routines to keep ourselves on track.
It's when the schedule changes that we often become unstuck, forgetting to pick a child up, or as the case may be here, forgetting to drop a child off.
Gene Weingarten, author of Fatal Distraction, researched the occurrence of these incidents in the US and found that they rose in the 1990s, as child seats became mandatory and often rear facing. Since then, there have been 15 to 25 cases of children left accidentally in cars each year in the US, prompting Weingarten to ask the question, what sort of person leaves their child in the car? The answer it seems, is all of us. "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 counsellor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a paediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist."'
The article then went on to invite the reader to give suggestions which might go toward preventing babies being left to die in cars and here are some of the suggestions received from readers on their newspaper's forum:
'Request daycare call if your child does not arrive one morning. Place your purse or mobile phone in the rear seat, forcing you to open a rear door when you arrive at your destination. Set an alarm in your phone. Order a car seat which sends an alert if a weight is in the car seat for an extended period.'
Have we really come to the point where our babies can be considered as a 'weight in a car seat?' Yes, it seems.
I have also seen a suggestion that every parent, once they have parked, go to the back of their car just to check to see that there is no baby there. How absurd is that suggestion. It means that while driving the car we put the baby, our own child, out of our minds. Is out of sight out of mind necessarily? It seems, yes, even if the baby is in our care.
Please for the sake of all of our babies, our current babies, our future babies... let us stop defending ourselves in situations created by us where we are so busy, so distracted, that we forget we even have a baby. I understand it can happen. I see it does happen. Here is my suggestion as an antidote. It comes from an understanding about why we can forget and sometimes want to forget our babies. We just don't care about them enough. We care about them but not enough.
I can hear the defensive cry of many parents. 'We do care! We do! BUT we are just so busy multi tasking, working hard to pay the bills, running children here and there at all times of the day and night, tending to sick and unsettled babies and children all through the night, never getting enough sleep. We are sleep deprived. We are stressed out. It is so hard to manage!...
This is all true but really, something is very wrong because all of this busy-ness means we are not enjoying our role as parents enough. Our children become a chore. We love them but it is all too hard, especially when we choose to hand the caring role over to others. If all of our distracted busy-ness causes the death of even one baby then something has to change. We all have to change.
It begins at the beginning. We decide to have a child. There is an account in the article 'Fatal Distraction' telling the story of a Mother leaving her baby in the car to die. Her name is Raelyn Balfour and her son's name, Bryce. An excerpt reads:
'Raelyn Balfour is what is commonly called a type-A personality. She is the first to admit that her temperament contributed to the death of her son, Bryce. It happened on March 30, 2007, the day she accidentally left the 9-month-old in the parking lot of the Charlottesville judge advocate general's office, where she worked as a transportation administrator. The high temperature that day was only in the 60s, but the biometrics and thermodynamics of babies and cars combine mercilessly: Young children have lousy thermostats, and heat builds quickly in a closed vehicle in the sun. The temperature in Balfour's car that day topped 110 degrees.
On the day Balfour forgot Bryce in the car, she had been up much of the night, first babysitting for a friend who had to take her dog to an emergency vet clinic, then caring for Bryce, who was cranky with a cold. Because the baby was also tired, he uncharacteristically dozed in the car, so he made no noise. Because Balfour was planning to bring Bryce's usual car seat to the fire station to be professionally installed, Bryce was positioned in a different car seat that day, not behind the passenger but behind the driver, and was thus not visible in the rear-view mirror. Because the family's second car was on loan to a relative, Balfour drove her husband to work that day, meaning the diaper bag was in the back, not on the passenger seat, as usual, where she could see it. Because of a phone conversation with a young relative in trouble, and another with her boss about a crisis at work, Balfour spent most of the trip on her cell, stressed, solving other people's problems. Because the babysitter had a new phone, it didn't yet contain Balfour's office phone number, only her cell number, meaning that when the sitter phoned to wonder why Balfour hadn't dropped Bryce off that morning, it rang unheard in Balfour's pocketbook.'
In the Washington Post article the journalist gives an account of a meeting with Raelyn Balfour on a typical morning in mid October 2009. By this time Raelyn has had another baby. Here is a further part of the feature article written by Weingarten.
'It's mid-October. Lyn Balfour is on her cellphone, ordering a replacement strap for a bouncy seat for the new baby and simultaneously trying to arrange for an emergency sitter, because she has to get to the fertility clinic, pronto, because she just got lab results back, and she's ovulating, and her husband's in Iraq, and she wants to get artificially inseminated with his sperm, like right now, but, crap, the sitter is busy, so she grabs the kid and the keys and the diaper bag and is out the door and in the car and gone. But now the baby is fussing, so she's reaching back to give him a bottle of juice, one eye on him and the other on a seemingly endless series of hairpin turns that she negotiates adroitly.
"Actually," she laughs, "I'm getting better about not doing too much at once. I've been simplifying my life a lot. Balfour is reenacting her movements from that day after work. She walks from her cubicle in room 153A of the JAG school, out to the front of the building. By mid-afternoon she had finally checked her cell and discovered she'd missed an early morning call from her babysitter. She called back, but got only voice mail. It didn't worry her. She and the babysitter were friends, and they talked often about all sorts of things. Balfour left a message asking for a callback.
It came when she was standing where she is now, on a spacious stone patio in front of the JAG school, heading toward the parking lot. As it happens, there is a Civil War-era cannon that is aimed, with unsettling irony, exactly where she stands. The babysitter asked Balfour where Bryce was. Balfour said: "What do you mean? He's with you."
It is 60 feet to the end of the patio, then a stairwell with 11 steps down, then two steps across, then a second stairwell, 12 steps down, one more off the curb and then a 30-foot sprint to the car. Balfour estimates the whole thing took half a minute or less. She knew it was too late when, through the window, she saw Bryce's limp hand, and then his face, unmarked but lifeless and shiny, Balfour says, "like a porcelain doll."
It was seconds later that the passerby called 911.
From a tape played during court proceedings
'The tape is unendurable. Mostly, you hear a woman's voice, tense but precise, explaining to a police dispatcher what she is seeing.Initially, there's nothing in the background.
Then Balfour howls at the top of her lungs, "OH, MY GOD, NOOOO!" Then, for a few seconds, nothing. Then a deafening shriek: "NO, NO, PLEASE, NO!!!" Three more seconds, then: "PLEASE, GOD, NO, PLEASE!!!"
What is happening is that Balfour is administering CPR. At that moment, she recalls, she felt like two people occupying one body: Lyn, the crisply efficient certified combat lifesaver, and Lyn, the incompetent mother who would never again know happiness. Breathe, compress, breathe, compress. Each time that she came up for air, she lost it. Then, back to the patient. After hearing this tape, the jury deliberated for all of 90 minutes, including time for lunch. The not-guilty verdict was unanimous.' The reference to Lyn Balfour being a certified combat lifesaver was linked to an earlier part of the article where she had herself served in the war in Iraq.
As we can see this does not necessarily translate very well to a real life situation back at home where her lack of awareness did not serve her baby well. Some people are good in an emergency and need an emergency to turn on the adrenalin but this poor Mother was not awakened to the emergency until it was too late.
Having children is akin to being thrown into something like an emergency situation. At least compared to ones life before children, everything becomes much more immediate in terms of ones focus and attention. It does not necessarily have to be stressful but the changes that we experience in time, energy and focus is something people don't really know about until the experience itself is upon them. If we don't give the time to our children then we will never focus on them to their satisfaction. We will leave them in car seats to die or we will leave them too alone where they will slowly die in spirit and we won't even notice.
In a recent article by the children's author Mem Fox she said:
''Really, why do we have children if we can't spend some time with them? It is just not right for the child. If we can't spend time with our kids, we shouldn't be having them.''
This is such a forthright statement in our sad and crazy world where usually we are commanded to follow every kind of 'correctness'. There should be no such thing as parenting 'correctness'. Instead there is such a thing as the needs of children, needs that are no longer considered nor understood in order for a child to develop into a relaxed, well balanced adult.
My voice is for the children and I do not need to hide behind Mem Fox's daring statement, for which she has been highly criticised, to say that we must make time to be with our children and keep our awareness kindly, affectionately and lovingly on them. We parents do not need to be with them every minute. The children are the ones with needs. They need to know that we are there, that we would never forget them for a minute. Until a certain age children experience 'gone' as 'gone'... full stop! Of course they will be trained at a certain age that a parent will return but until that age, 'gone' IS 'gone' and children suffer a lot from separation at an early age. It definitely changes who they will become, as does everything. We must ponder about how it feels for our child when we desert them even when we are present with them. What happens to them? What do they learn? How do they feel? A child does not have to die to show us that our distractions and distracted minds cause much harm. We need to take an extra good look. We must learn to observe what is going on inside the minds of our children.
I observed some children just this week as I passed a day care centre near me. I pass every day around 8am and see some of the children playing happily in their tiny playground. This day the distressed cry of a baby drew my attention to a different playground... a baby one. There was a rocking horse, a tiny slippery dip and different plastic toy like objects lying around and on a chair sat a very young sweet woman trying to placate the distressed baby who would have been aged around two and a half years by my estimation. She was jiggling the little girl on her knee. The little girl refused to look at her as she tried to get her attention. Instead the baby screamed and turned her face in the opposite direction. I could tell the care giver's endeavours were reminding the little girl of who she was missing, either her Mother or Father or both. She became more and more disturbed so the young woman stood up and placed her on her hip and jiggled her some more. The baby tried to throw herself backwards. By now she was frustrated and angry. The child care worker was very patient. She walked around trying to distract her with various things and nothing was working. She was crying to meltdown point. Nothing could placate her under those circumstances. She was left with double breathing spasms as her body tried to correct the hyperventilation she was left with amongst her post crying sobs and I could no longer watch. I could not be the one she wanted.
In the meantime 2 very small baby boys were standing kicking sand and were becoming disturbed by the crying baby. One boy began to cry. He looked around and could see there was no one there for him. He sucked those tears back in. He took two breaths as though they were sobs he had to swallow and then he stood there quite still and stared at the other boy. Other boy was banging his hand on a tap looking nowhere in particular. His dazed look was disturbing. I thought of each of the three toddlers' heightened cortisol (stress hormone) levels as I departed with a heavy heart. I kept my non interference child minding correctness in place but I was rather disturbed for the rest of the day. I usually prefer not to look.
These 3 children lost their parents that day. The substitute care giver was inadequate and not insensitive. That is just not good enough for a child so young. Each of the three children, because of their age, needed just one person they considered a prime attachment figure to be around them at least. Even a Mother or Father cannot console toddlers sometimes but their presence goes a long way to helping the toddler stay connected to the 'known', something familar. This goes some way to assuaging the shock, trauma, fear development being set up in the child's mind. This inner conditioning later comes through and manifests as all kinds of anxieties, fears and mental disorders ... and no one knows where it came from!
We care but we do not care enough! We do not know enough. We are too busy to want to know. If we understand and, as parents, surrender to our babies we will always have a 'mind' for their existence. We will help them change and grow... change from not knowing to knowing but not at the cost of their mental health, rather at the price of simply being there. If we do this, we may leave them at child care but we will never leave them in a car to die. Never... not one!
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