Why Are ‘Good’ Parents Forgetting Their Kids in Hot Cars?

It seems so unbelievable when we read it on the news, but child deaths from hyperthermia are on the rise—and it’s because parents are simply forgetting their children are in the car.

By Anastacia Mott Austin



It’s beginning to sound distressingly familiar. Mr. Goodfather leaves home with his infant strapped into a carseat in the back of the minivan. Usually he drops the baby off at daycare before going to his high-stress job, but for some reason on this particular day he forgets, and heads straight to work. The baby is forgotten in the back seat, and the father walks in to work, leaving the child to suffer heatstroke and die in a car that can reach temperatures of 130 degrees or higher.


These cases are on the rise, and they are not simple matters of negligence or child abuse. We are not talking here of the mom who leaves her toddlers in the car all day while she is passed out drunk inside, or who gets her hair done while her babies overheat outside in the van.

Many of the recent cases in the news are of hardworking, caring, responsible "good" parents who love their children and would never dream of leaving them in a hot car, even for a minute.

On August 23rd, a seven-month-old baby was discovered inside a car in a parking lot at the Washington University School of Medicine. The baby had been left in the car by his parents, a doctor and a medical researcher at the university. The infant had apparently been in the car for over three hours on a day that reached into the 90s. According to statistics posted on the website for Hyperthermia Deaths of Children in Vehicles, the inside temperature of a vehicle will rise 19 degrees in 10 minutes, and up to 50 degrees in one to two hours. That means that the temperature inside that car was as high as 140 degrees.

On the same day, a two-year-old girl was found dead in a parked car at a middle school near Cincinnati, after her mother, an assistant principal at the school, had left her there by mistake.

The two recent incidents mark the 21st and 22nd vehicle heat-related deaths of children this year.

Small children and babies have immature respiratory systems, and their bodies heat up at much faster rates than adults’ bodies do. "Children have a higher anabolic rate than adults" said Dr Lynn Sears to reporters at WMTV in Madison, Wisconsin. "So their body heat rises two or three times as fast [as] adults. Given a child in a hot car and an adult in a hot car, the [child] will overheat much more quickly and the results can be much more severe than adults."

Almost 40% of child heat deaths in cars are attributed to the caregiver simply forgetting the child is in the car. In today’s busy, over-stressed, sleep-deprived world, there is even a name for these momentary losses of memory: stress-induced memory failure. David Diamond, a psychology professor at the University of South Florida, has studied the effects of stress on brain functions such as short term memory.

"In most cases episodes of failed memory are relatively benign and may even be amusing," says Diamond. "In other cases, stress-related memory failures can have tragic outcomes."

The rising number of heat-related deaths of children in cars is attributed to laws requiring young children to be seated in the back seats, away from front-seat airbags. Yet vehicle-related heat deaths far outnumber fatalities caused by airbag injuries.

Some experts blame our increasingly busy lifestyles, with both parents often working high-stress jobs and juggling childcare into their commutes. The recent death of the seven-month-old baby was caused, say police, by a misunderstanding between the two parents. The mother put the baby in the back of the father’s car, and the father was unaware of the infant’s presence.

"There was a horrible, devastating mix-up as to who was going to take the child to day care," said St. Louis police captain James Gieseke.

While it may seem like absurdly obvious advice to make sure to check one’s car for the baby, some parents are just forgetting their children are in the car—and the children are dying.

Child safety advocates have recommended new safety devices that warn parents of their children’s presence if they step too far from the vehicle. Devices like The Child Minder and The Child Presence Sensor involve a clip-on or weighted sensor that fits onto the child’s carseat and sounds an alarm if the caregiver steps more than about 10 feet away from the car.

The problem with these products is that parents have to buy and install them. They are relatively inexpensive and quite simple to install, but unfortunately they don’t take into account the fact that virtually all parents think "I would never leave my baby in the car."

It’s a virtual certainty that the parents whose children have died in this terribly tragic manner felt the same way.

One solution offered by safety experts is to have alarms installed as part of new car packages. After all, we have alarms that sound if we’ve left our keys in the car or the lights on.

In the meantime, there are several simple actions parents can take, even if they think it will never happen to them. Child safety advocates recommend that the diaper bag or a stuffed animal be placed on the front passenger seat, or that mom or dad’s cell phone be placed in the back with baby.

We may think, "It would never happen to me," but these simple acts could be the remedy to ensure that it never does.
By Buzzle Staff and Agencies