Keep Children Safe by Always Locking Car Doors
When you think about locking your car doors, in most cases, your biggest concern is keeping people from stealing things in your car or the car itself. While this is certainly a serious issue, one Reddit user cited another important reason the doors should be locked: keep children out.
Reddit user Monstermommy posted a story about her four-year-old daughter this week . The child told his grandmother that he was going to play on the back porch. When her mom went out to find her, she was gone, making her mom fear the baby had been kidnapped. She ran up and down the driveway, screaming at her daughter, and eventually heard her scream but couldn’t find her.
As it turned out, the child climbed into his father’s insider F250 and accidentally locked himself inside, in the heat, unable to get out. The truck’s windows were darkened so no one could see her inside.
“I found my child on the verge of losing consciousness there, her skin so red it looked inhuman and so wet with sweat it looked like she had just got out of the pool,” says Monstermommy. “Somehow a four-year-old girl managed to open the door of a large truck and climb inside and then lock herself trying to get out. All the windows where she hit them, trying to get out, were prints of sweaty hands.
So: make sure you always lock your car doors to prevent something like this from happening to you. Young children love to explore, and if someone gets into your car and gets stuck, you may not realize it until it’s too late.
And let’s be honest: locking your car doors all the time is generally a good idea, even in the safest areas and parking lots. Even if you don’t personally have young children, it can be easy for a neighbor’s hide-and-seek game to end up with someone hiding in your car. It only takes a second to make things significantly safer.