On a hot Sunday in July, a father in Mississippi tried to coax his 3-year-old daughter into learning how to release the buckle on her car seat.
The preschooler couldn’t figure it out. So he tried to get her to learn how to open the back door on her own. That didn’t work either.
“She just couldn’t do it, which is terrifying to me,” said Lawrence Patihis, a memory researcher at the University of Southern Mississippi. Patihis had become concerned about his daughter after hearing news of the spike in heat-stroke deaths in children left behind or trapped in cars.
Safety experts are pushing regulators and the auto industry to come up with technological solutions to help solve the problem of pediatric heatstroke in cars. But it has been hard to get momentum on the issue in large part because the public blames parents for being irresponsible rather than seeing the issue as one that could affect anyone.
But as an academic who has studied the way memory works, Patihis said he knows he’s just as likely as anyone else to forget his daughter in the car.
“People are much more confident about how accurate their memory is compared to how accurate it actually is,” Patihis said. “In this case, I think people might overestimate how their enormous instinct to protect their child would overcome memory lapses.”
As of Friday, Aug. 5, 26 children have died from overheating in cars this year, including a set of twins in Georgia on Thursday. That surpasses the number of deaths for all of 2015, which hit 25. Not all children are forgotten — some children climb into vehicles to play or retrieve a favorite toy. And others are left by their caregivers on purpose; people who are unaware or disregard how dangerous hot car interiors can be for small bodies.
The problem is complex, with no simple answers. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has addressed it with a public education campaign aimed at teaching parents the dangers of hot cars and providing memory tips and tricks. Most aftermarket products aimed at alerting parents of a forgotten child are unreliable, and only General Motors has come up with a reminder technology that could tackle the issue, now on the 2017 GMC Acadia but expected for more models.
But unlike other issues that have involved child entrapment — like the instances of children trapped in abandoned refrigerators in the 1950s or heatstroke deaths of children trapped in trunks in the 1990s — legislators have been unmotivated to tackle this issue. Caregivers who have dealt with this problem, researchers and safety experts say they believe that’s because society places the blame solely on parents.
“Before the accident, I thought it was incredibly bad parenting that led to this,” said Eric Stuyvesant, a landscaper from Garland, Texas, who left his 3-year-old son Michael in the back of his car one hot morning in June 2015. “I was a parent-shamer on the Internet for years before realizing it could happen to anybody.”
Read more of the original article in Automotive News.
