A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post Magazine’s feature story (titled Fatal Distraction) focused on parents who’ve accidentally left their infant or toddler in a locked car, resulting in the child’s death from hyperthermia (overheating). Between 15 and 25 children die like this each year, mostly in the stifling summer months.
Though each was in some ways unique, the stories Weingarten described were also eerily similar. Each parent was so absorbed in his or her own thoughts and tasks that they simply forgot the child was there, in the backseat, awaiting daycare drop-off. The parents weren’t deadbeats, they weren’t unloving. They were simply overwhelmed and exhausted. And who among us isn’t?
Families are busy. Parents work long hours, often at more than one job, to keep up with their mortgage payments, save for kids’ college, and afford music classes and family vacations. Our brains are constantly buzzing with to-do reminders and the worries of modern life. We travel to work and back largely on auto-pilot, repetition numbs us to the details.
Even when we’re driving, we’re not focused – we’re multitasking. Talking, text messaging, reading, eating – you name it, people do it behind the wheel. If you’re a parent, I suspect you sometimes drive to work while talking on the cell phone with colleagues from work, eating your breakfast (black coffee and a power bar, anyone?), and making silly faces in the rear-view mirror to entertain your fussy pint-sized passenger. We’ve all been there.
Leading Man doesn’t often read the Washington Post Magazine. He prefers the newspaper itself, and devours the international news and sports sections while I slurp coffee and read the Magazine. But he usually asks about the feature story, and I give him the highlights.
Our discussion of this particular story was somewhat one-sided. I described each of the families Weingarten interviewed, talked about their similarities, the enormity of their losses. For me, it was impossible not to feel some sense of personal connection to these parents – any one of us could (given the right but oh-so-wrong circumstances) forget that we hadn’t dropped our child off on the way to work. Especially if something unexpected happened and our usual routine was upended somehow.
Leading Man's response: “That could never happen to me. I’m always focused on being a parent.”
I (mostly) left it at that, since I didn’t want to slip into psychologist mode on Sunday morning. But evidence against his position mounted in my mind.
The positive illusions that keep people sane and happy make them unlikely to see the potential for negative events such as leaving your child in a hot car all day. Our identities as loving, capable, devoted parents are 180 degrees out from forgetting about our children. But memory is fickle – when we’re under stress, it fails us miserably. We simply need to believe this could never happen to us. The alternative is too much to bear.
I’m sure parents whose errors have injured or killed their children never thought it could happen to them, either. That’s just human nature. But I think it’s healthy for all of us to slow down, tune in, and take precautions so it doesn’t happen to our own children. It’s not so hard to look in the backseat before heading in to the office – I’ve started putting my purse and my laptop back there so it becomes a habit.
