Blog: No One is Infallible
Posted by:
Alyssa Hahn
at Aug 09, 2011 12:00 AM CDT
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Education
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As a college student, I experienced a lot of “firsts” this summer as I started my internship at Safe Kids: my first house, my first job in an office, and also, my first exploration of the issue of heat stroke. Indeed, I had heard of children being left in cars in the summertime, but I had always assumed that the parents were alcohol or drug impaired. I did not think that heat stroke was an issue in this country.
I had minimal understanding of both the magnitude and the reality of these situations, and I now realize that this minimal understanding is common among the general public. Of course, there is a subset of heat stroke incidents that falls under the “irresponsible parent” category, but these are the minority. The main issue here is not drug and alcohol abuse (only 7% of cases in the past 13 years have involved substance abuse) or an uncaring parent; in fact, it’s something much more daunting. It’s forgetting.
When I tell my friends and family about the work I’ve been doing with Safe Kids on spreading awareness of heat stroke, I always get an incredulous response, something along the lines of, “How could you possibly forget your child in the car?” or “How could parents be so reckless?” But it happens more than you think.
In the period between 1998 and 2010, 253 of the 494 known incidents of child heat stroke death occurred because a parent forgot that his child was in the car. Everyone is looking for and wants to believe that there is an easy technological solution to this problem: a “baby button”, a window thermometer, a key chain. However, these solutions are ineffective, mostly due to the fact that no one wants to believe that this could ever happen to them. No one thinks that they could forget their child.
What has struck me the most this summer, especially as a Psychology major, is Professor of Psychology Dr. David Diamond’s stipulation that, if you could forget your cell phone, you could potentially forget your child. I cannot even recall the number of times that I have left my dorm room in a rush to get to class on time without a textbook or lecture notes that I was going to need for that very class. No, a textbook is not a child, but I can understand how, in our busy daily lives we can simply just forget.
This summer, I’ve met parents who have forgotten their children. These people are not monsters, nor do they abuse drugs, nor are they willfully irresponsible people. They are caring parents and active community members. They are churchgoers, they are professionals, and like the rest of us, they are simply human.
I see how it’s easy for society to be critical of these parents. No one wants to believe that they could become so wrapped up in their schedule that they would forget their sleeping child in the back seat. In this day and age, we’ve started to succumb to the ideology that there is a fail proof technological solution for everything. Unfortunately, for forgetting there is not. There are so many things that I have taken away from this internship, but the most important is that no one is infallible. I hope that, if I have accomplished one thing this summer, it has been to spread the messages, never leave your child alone, not even for a minute and never presume that forgetting a child cannot happen to you.
Learn More About How to Prevent Heat Stroke (Hyperthermia)
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