Anyone Can Forget a Baby in a Hot Car, Even You
We’ve all seen the agonizing headline: “A child dies from overheating in a car.” And it is very likely that we, ourselves parents or not, all of us reacted negatively to such news and wondered how any of the guardians can forget that the child is still strapped to the back of the car and just leave them there. ?
About 37 children die from overheating in their cars every year in the United States, and more than half of them are unintentionally forgotten by their caregivers . The harsh reality – that anyone can forget a child in such a situation – is based on science.
As Quartz reported earlier this summer, “This fatal failure is caused by a neurological quirk that can and does happen to anyone, regardless of competence, intelligence, education, gender, age, or any other demographic marker. If you have a brain, a daily routine and stress, you can forget the child in the car. “
David Diamond, professor of psychology at the University of South Florida and longtime researcher of the topic, called the neurobiological problem the “forgotten child syndrome.” In his research, he showed how the brain’s memory systems work together and compete with each other.
The hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex interact at a high level to help people cope with all the difficulties of their day (abandoning a puppy at the groomers, picking up Jane from preschool, stopping at the grocery store, picking up the puppy again, going home.). The basal ganglia and the amygdala, which respectively control habit-based behavior and emotional processing, can disrupt this schedule in stressful or unexpected situations. The person may become preoccupied and focus on the immediate stressor and simply drive past the grocery store or, in the worst case, stop to pick up bread and bananas, but forget that Jane is in the backseat.
In a country where there seems to be a technical answer to most problems, there hasn’t been one yet. (Some are in development.) But the bigger issue may be that, as Quartz points out, research shows people won’t buy foods that could save their children’s lives in situations like these because they don’t believe that they would ever make such a mistake.
It was the theme of the story that earned Washington Post journalist Gene Weingarten the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. And this topic has been close to his heart, because, as he wrote in a blog post that accompanied his article in the Post , 25 years ago, he received one day he was driving to his then-job “Miami Herald”, drove into the parking lot and looking for a place, heard as his two year old daughter said something to him from behind.
“Until that moment,” he wrote, “I did not remember at all that she was in that car.”
That morning, his daily routine changed – he was not Molly’s usual daycare driver. And he cannot remember what bothered or distracted him, but this situation haunted him all his life.
Even if technical solutions emerge, such as the HOT CARS Act introduced in June to the House of Representatives, which requires all new passenger cars to be equipped with child safety warning systems, education will continue to be critical.
“What I remember about this moment,” Weingarten wrote, “is the lasting memory of how I looked with drooping jaw at the little girl in the back seat and felt a strong attack of physical nausea. In the summer it was Miami. Molly wouldn’t have lived fifteen minutes in this car. ”