Last edited Sat May 5, 2012, 11:01 AM - Edit history (1)

I can't even imagine.

We tell ourselves I could *never* do that, we cannot let ourselves imagine doing such a thing to our own child.

If you could forget your wallet or your cell phone you could forget your child, our wetware is remarkably buggy in a lot of ways.

I read an article several years ago that basically said in virtually every case it's a disruption of the normal routine of the parent(s) that leads to this.

http://www.salon.com/2009/03/09/fatal_distraction/

The subhead of Gene Weingarten’s heartbreaking article in yesterday’s Washington Post asks an inflammatory question — “Forgetting a child in the back seat of a hot, parked car is a horrifying, inexcusable mistake. But is it a crime?” — but it’s a bit of a red herring. Weingarten makes it clear from the outset that his answer is no — and that, in any case, no punishment could match the life sentence of guilt that parents who have done so were handed the moment they realized what happened. Seeking to demonstrate how even the most conscientious parents can have a tragic lapse of memory, Weingarten not only interviewed 13 people who have endured the horror of killing their own children in a “perfect storm” of distraction and absent-mindedness, but also a memory expert, David Diamond, who explains why it could happen to any of us: “Memory is a machine, and it is not flawless. Our conscious mind prioritizes things by importance, but on a cellular level, our memory does not. If you’re capable of forgetting your cellphone, you are potentially capable of forgetting your child.”

As unbelievable as that statement may sound, Weingarten makes a strong case for its truth. In every instance he covers, the parents responsible were dealing with unusual interruptions in their morning routine, got distracted and believed they’d already dropped their children off at daycare or with the baby sitter — when in reality, they’d skipped that step and left the children in their parked cars as they went to work. Says Diamond, “The important factors that keep showing up involve a combination of stress, emotion, lack of sleep and change in routine, where the basal ganglia is trying to do what it’s supposed to do, and the conscious mind is too weakened to resist. What happens is that the memory circuits in a vulnerable hippocampus literally get overwritten, like with a computer program. Unless the memory circuit is rebooted — such as if the child cries … it can entirely disappear.” Weingarten makes it chillingly clear how the lack of that “reboot” can lead to parents sincerely believing their kids are safe in their daily routines while they’re actually dying. “Several people … have driven from their workplace to the day-care center to pick up the child they’d thought they’d dropped off, never noticing the corpse in the back seat. Then there is the Chattanooga, Tenn., business executive who must live with this: His motion-detector car alarm went off, three separate times, out there in the broiling sun. But when he looked out, he couldn’t see anyone tampering with the car. So he remotely deactivated the alarm and went calmly back to work.”

“I was that guy, before. I’d read the stories, and I’d go, ‘What were those parents thinking?’” says Mikey Terry, whose 6-month-old daughter, Mika, died of hyperthermia after he left her in a car while he went to work driving a truck, only to realize what he’d done when he was 40 long miles away. For those of us who haven’t experienced such a tragedy, perhaps the most disturbing element of Weingarten’s article is how he indicts us for our knee-jerk judgments of these parents, our insistence that we would never be so careless. He quotes psychologist Ed Hickling, who’s studied the effects of fatal car accidents on the surviving drivers: “We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we’ll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don’t want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.” Weingarten follows that up with an example of one of the comments on a Charlottesville News Web site article about Lyn Balfour, who left her son, Bryce, to perish in her car: “If she had too many things on her mind then she should have kept her legs closed and not had any kids. They should lock her in a car during a hot day and see what happens.”

I'm going to repeat an excerpt from your article because it's so appropriate:

self-examination?

Fortunately, this thread has taken a turn for the better, in case you haven't looked further down lately.

That day I almost forgot my daughter seemed as normal as any other day. I don't know what happened for me to have forgotten. My husband and I were working and going to college full time. We had another older daughter. We had full schedules that kept us going constantly.

It was like any other day, too. For some reason that I cannot explain I just bypassed the daycare altogether and went to work. Temperatures were below freezing.

Thinking about all this now has me just about crying because I know how close I came to killing my baby girl. Even though it was many years ago, it still feels like yesterday.

Thank you.

They are 5 and 3, and both times they recognized the error immediately and told me.

But reading this thread does give me chills. Could such a thing happen if only my third child were in the back seat? He is only 8 months old and could not notice such an error or tell me about it. He is so even-tempered that he rarely even cries. It pains me to say it, but I think it is not completely impossible that this could happen.

"You just can never be careful enough".

He said that so many times it was sort of like a family joke that he was so protective.

But he was correct. You really never CAN BE careful enough.

many years ago my cousin who had six or seven children at the time went to town which was several miles away. Half way there she realized she'd left the baby at home. Anything could have happened there too, luckily it didn't but it could have. She was not the type to have done anything to hurt one of her kids, she was busy, tired and her husband was on the road, everything depended on her.

it was her responsibility and she failed in it.

Who else is at fault?

but it was her fault.

You're better than those bad parents..

you're making like this is no different than forgetting your wallet.

Difference of course being that one is a human child that dies in agony whereas the other is just a few strips of leather.

You're not being neglectful or abusive. This is why these parents are rarely charged in cases like this. These are tragic accidents.

I'm sorry for your upset, I can but imagine what that near miss felt like to you..

doesn't make their responses wrong.

For instance: priest molests dozens of kids, gets away with it.

Probably anger, disgust, disbelief, and the like.

Predicting that in advance doesn't make those responses unjustified.

Positronic brains don't forget, flesh and blood is more fallible.

as if it were an argument to itself. I keep hearing "dun dun DUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!" music in the background every time I read that.


For 99.9999% of parents out there it's true: they never thought it could happen to them and it didn't.

That's why these cases are extremely rare.

In some basic way they are not you, you could never ever do that.

murderers, child molesters, rapists and so on.

I suspect you do as well and say things like "I would never rape a child". Is that true? Because by your logic that makes you sick and proves you in fact would do that.

I would never deliberately drive into a crowd of people, I can easily envision a scenario where I drive into a crowd of people by accident, brakes fail, steering fails, tire blows, oil slick on the road from a broken car, stroke, heart attack, seizure, fall asleep.

It's two entirely different things, you are trying to claim that an accident will never befall you.

Here's someone else it *almost* happened to, they aren't guilty of anything, they didn't kill their child.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002645828#post79

You see my bias in this matter. I make no excuses for it. I have the facts, just as you do; the main difference is that, probably unlike you, I understand on an uncomfortably personal level that this unthinkable, impossible horror could befall anyone.

I feel no sense of superiority to any of those parents whose children did not happen to wake up and say something. I am alert to the ironies of life and death. I recognize that it is simply a matter of chance that Molly is not a pile of small bones in the dirt in Florida, but alive and working today in a clinic a few miles away from me, as a veterinarian.

Every one of those scenarios results from something you had no control over.

Your breaks going out =/= forgetting about something.

You have the illusion of control but your conscious mind does not control your memory absolutely.

I find it hard to believe that a human being can reach adulthood and never once had a brain fart, never once spaced something out because they became distracted, never once made a stupid mistake that cost them in some way.

Falling asleep is one of the scenarios I listed, are you admitting that a person can fall asleep without intending to when it might endanger themselves and or others? If so then you admit we don't even control our own consciousness absolutely.

they're charged frankly depends on their race and socioeconomic status. Whenever this happened in the area I lived in in my former state of Ohio, you could predict the charges like clockwork based on their race and where they lived. If it was a black or other non-white parent living in a poorer neighborhood, charges would almost always be filed, with the maximum sentence requested and continual demonization of the parent in the media and public. If it was a white suburban or upper-class parent, no charges and sympathetic clucking from the media and public about how horrible it was for the parent and it was just a tragic accident. Like clockwork.

I know that's not the case everywhere, but it is in a lot of areas. In my current state, with a large native american population, the same can be said for white versus Indian parents. An Indian parent merely looks at their child in a seemingly wrong way, and down comes the hammer of the law and social services.

I have grandkids, raised a child myself, I don't want to think that I could have done such a thing but I have to be honest with myself and realize that given a perfect storm of circumstances I could have..

perhaps if you are incapable of remembering such things having a child is not the best course of action?

It's not a matter of viewing your child as insignificant either. People forget. It's a difficult concept for you to grasp, but it happens to the best of parents. It's tragic, but it's the truth.

It's not just a river in Egypt.

If she doesn't commit suicide over this, she will be in a prison of her own making as a result. No one will punish her worse than she is punishing herself.

who broiled to death.

"Just a simple oversight - like forgetting your wallet - hahaha."

As the article points out our conscious minds prioritize but our memory does not..

And you are doing exactly what the article said you would, pretending it could never happen to you.

“I was that guy, before. I’d read the stories, and I’d go, ‘What were those parents thinking?’” says Mikey Terry, whose 6-month-old daughter, Mika, died of hyperthermia after he left her in a car while he went to work driving a truck, only to realize what he’d done when he was 40 long miles away. For those of us who haven’t experienced such a tragedy, perhaps the most disturbing element of Weingarten’s article is how he indicts us for our knee-jerk judgments of these parents, our insistence that we would never be so careless.

from leaving a baby to broil in a backseat.

Just as the author of the article predicts..

It scares you to think that you might do something like that, you *have* to believe that there was something wrong with these parents.

It was below freezing in Montana and I just happened to glance at the backseat when I got out of my car. I forgot my baby girl and nearly killed her.

It can happen to the best of us.

If any have, link to the posts, and I'll alert.

Great post.

a cell phone is a thing, a child is a human being you have an intense human bond to. we have protective instincts towards kids that we do not have to our stuff. IMO treating forgetting a thing and forgeting a child as if they were similar is simply flawed.

Tell it to this guy..

“I was that guy, before. I’d read the stories, and I’d go, ‘What were those parents thinking?’” says Mikey Terry, whose 6-month-old daughter, Mika, died of hyperthermia after he left her in a car while he went to work driving a truck, only to realize what he’d done when he was 40 long miles away.

You've convinced me! These are just minor booboos like forgetting your cell phone.

You cannot accept that it just might happen to you or someone you love or care about, they all have to be "bad parents", different somehow from you and your loved ones.

This is a lot more like lightning than you can allow yourself to believe, it could happen to anyone given the perfect storm of circumstances combined with what would otherwise be as you put it, a minor booboo.

The minor booboo can turn into tragedy for anyone given the right set of circumstances, that's the point of what the research both of actual incidents and cognitive science shows.

you could try reading the other dozen or so times it's been posted as if that one account is simply irrefutable across every possible case.

Someone who who was celebrating their own personal lack of infallibility.

Here's his own experience in this matter:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/another-child-dies-in-a-hot-car-and-gene-weingarten-asks-why-was-this-a-crime/2012/03/14/gIQAXm01ES_story.html

“Murder” is an unforgiving term for what nearly happened that day, but to prosecutors in Prince William County, it is appropriate. That was the charge they brought last year against Bristow veterinarian Karen Murphy, whose 2-year-old, Ryan, did not do what my 2-year-old, Molly, did on the day I almost killed her: wake up at the last minute and say something.

So I didn’t park and lock my car and head into my office that morning, as Murphy did last June 17. Instead, after steadying my nerves against the knowledge of what I’d almost done, I drove my daughter to day care, as I’d meant to do before I somehow — inexplicably, inexcusably — forgot that she was sitting in the back seat.

(SNIP)

You see my bias in this matter. I make no excuses for it. I have the facts, just as you do; the main difference is that, probably unlike you, I understand on an uncomfortably personal level that this unthinkable, impossible horror could befall anyone.

I feel no sense of superiority to any of those parents whose children did not happen to wake up and say something. I am alert to the ironies of life and death. I recognize that it is simply a matter of chance that Molly is not a pile of small bones in the dirt in Florida, but alive and working today in a clinic a few miles away from me, as a veterinarian.

Interesting and chilling read for sure..

I recognize that it is simply a matter of chance that Molly is not a pile of small bones in the dirt in Florida, but alive and working today in a clinic a few miles away from me, as a veterinarian.

The key to remember is that babies are in their carseats in the back of the car, and the parents are up front in the driver's seat. Parents can't see their children in the back. The baby falls asleep. You're driving to work. Instead of driving to day care first, you absentmindendly forget and drive straight to work. There is no reminder, nothing to tell you that you have forgotten something crucial.

Last edited Sat May 5, 2012, 11:57 AM - Edit history (1)

or how off kilter, forgot I had a baby in a car seat. And the reminder is that I put my baby in the car seat.

to know the babies were there. my husband on the other hand rarely had the babies. emerged in work.... quiet, routine, mind on auto, i get it.

accidents happen. please let me take the moment as a do over. we dont get that. the do over. but i get it.

my cousin about a year ago ran over his two yr old in the drive. was in a fenced area next to drive way. the om was out there with the child. for a minute, maybe two, she ran in for a soda. he didnt even think about the child out of the yard. ran over child. do over. we dont get that.

these are accident, true real accidents in hindsight so preventable.

but i get it.

Baby and mom.

Years ago when my daughter was a baby, I forgot to take my daughter to daycare. This was in Montana during the middle of winter. When I got there, I got out of my car and happened to glance and there she was just sitting there in her carseat as quiet as can be.

It freaked me out to no end. I didn't sleep for a week it seems like. All I could see was her sitting in the freezing car all day long.

I'm glad I was able to see her. She was always a quiet baby and to this day I can't explain how I could have forgotten my baby girl. Even now, over 20 years later, it still rattles me to the core.

My heart goes out to this poor mother.

I routinely lose car keys, clothes, purses, my wallet. This year I lost our tax return for a week. I've left the grocery store without all my groceries. I've spent time looking for my cell phone while it was in my hand.

But never once did I ever lose one of my kids or leave them in a car seat.

Maybe because I am used to losing things, I was hyperfocused on making sure I knew where my kids were when they were younger. I was afraid every day I would do something stupid and they would get hurt.

So I just can't relate. Sorry.

and we had two daughters.

We had our hands full as it is.

Not that it is an excuse, but I can understand how something like this does happen. I was never one to lose or misplace anything. I'm a pretty organized person who loves routine. For some reason that day, I completely bypassed the daycare and went straight to work.

I can't tell you out much it scared me and thinking about it now still rattles me. If I had left my daughter and lost her in this way, I know I would have killed myself. I have no doubt about it.

This mother is probably on the verge of suicide after this. This is a tragic accident and she will live with this for the rest of her life and no prison in the world can punish her more than she is punishing herself.

It's a VERY common experience and having a child does not make you immune to it.

and what COULD have happened. Every parent has a story like this.

Please try not to be so hard on yourself though I completely understand what you're going through.

one way or another, we have all experienced something with our babies that we said... woosh, came out a happy ending. but what if

i think that is why many of us can understand this.

it may not be this exact situation, but somewhere, sometime, our mind went elsewhere and we were lucky.

the back where they fall asleep. Maybe mom and dad share dropping baby off, and ... it happens.

The airbags in the front have been known to kill. Not only that, in an accident a baby is more protected in the back rather than the front. It's not likely to change anytime soon.

I understand and truly am glad that my kids were young when car seats were still allowed in the front seat. I could quickly right a tipped bottle or re-plug a binkie and easy things like that rather than listening to crying or screaming, I also could keep track of whether they were choking or anything like that.... Back seat just isn't tendable, and it is our jobs to tend our babies.

Fix the seats, fix the cars, bring the baby seats back to the front so parents can do the job right without making dangerous back seat reaches, looks, and/or not remembering to tend them whence they fall asleep and are quiet.

... the middle of the back seat is still the safest place in the car.


These are tragedies, but so are the greater number of babies who would die in accidents were they seated up front.

Seeing that reminds you the baby is still in the car.

It is so tragic when parents forget due to the hectic workday. I can almost see how that could happen.

That is sad.

The ones I cannot forgive are the ones who leave kids in the car to die while they are in a store playing video poker. That happens a lot in NC. In those cases, they KNOW the kid is in the car for hours on end on a 95+ degree day. Those are the ones I feel contempt for.

Some kind of reminder in the front seat is a very good idea.

it seems since car seats are forced to the back, I've read at least one a year of this happening, iirc.

when the keys leave the vehicle.

I'm thinking of my fairly new Prius. It has some weight detector thing in the front that turns off the air bag if it thinks a child is there (usually it's my laptop bag). So, you could have an optional detector for the back seat that parents could activate. Then if they get out of the car with the child still in the seat, the alarm would go off to remind them to check the seat. For people who don't cart kids around regualarly, they could deactivate it.

I don't know if it would work. It would probably have to be more sensitive than the front seat thing in my car. But maybe it would work.

minor but necessary tending of babies when Mom's in front and baby's in back without creating a driving issue.

A tip that I used not related to baby but a tip I used when I started for work in the dark and had my lights on by the time I got to work headlights weren't necessary.

Shoe off, headlights off.

Now that most cars have auto headlight shut off, it would be shoe off, baby in the back seat,

So is making it a habit to check the backseat. Or, putting a sticky note on your dash "remember to check the backseat".

I won't sit here and judge. I've never forgotten my children, but when my kids were babies, I was a stay at home mom. Now that I'm a single mom who is a full time student, I'm much more harried, and forget things often. My kids are old enough now that I don't have to worry about leaving them, but I've done dumb things like drive past the turn off to their school, or their babysitter. I can totally see a scenario with a quiet, sleeping child and a harried parent late for work where the nightmare scenario plays out. Thankfully, for me, I've never had to deal with dropping off a baby to daycare. Also, thankfully, it's so rarely hot where I live, that when it IS hot, I'm a tad paranoid and check my car (and other cars in the parking lot) for animals and babies. I can see where it's always hot, you forget about the dangers of rising temps in the car because of complacency.

That's a lot more common than people who can't keep track of their kids.

At least my daughter's Honda can. Mine is older and can't. But I have no doubt that through a mechanic it can be temporarily disabled.

Disabling the front passenger airbag is generally only recommended if there is no rear seat option for a small child. Doing so permanently (and there are legal limitations on doing so) endangers any adults who use that seat. Also, children are significantly safer in a rear seat anyhow, as this generally places them farther in the passenger cabin and reduces the energy their bodies absorb in a collision.

The risk of absent-minded parents is thankfully small, while collisions are the #1 cause of accidental death in children. Reducing accident risk by placing the child in the rear seat in a properly installed safety seat is just about the most important thing that can be done to protect their health as small children.

Anyway, 4 door sedan, back seats and a switch for turning off the front passenger airbag.

It isn't at all hard to put in proper anchors, disable-able airbags, carseats designed for the front seat, etc.

Ideally the most vulnerable passenger should be in the most protected seat, which is generally the rear center.

The risk of a collision is infinitely higher than the risk of a space cadet parent who can't keep track of their kid.

a child in the backseat that can't tend itself.

Cars are so much safer as well as the car seats, and if you want to put the center back seat, fine, but I don't think it should be mandated but instead safer car seats, better design for front seat usage, and then the freedom to make that choice parent by parent without having to trade one type of safety for another but rather can choose the one that fits their driving style, their kids' needs (which as they get older a lot of the tending needs go down and I moved them to the back seat, but before 2yo, I didn't and wouldn't), and so on.

Every related organization strongly suggests keeping kids in the back seat until they're adolescent and roughly adult sized. Front seat restraints aren't really designed for anybody smaller than a small adult.

in other words, if it "thinks" there's a child in the seat. I'm not sure what the weight range is. There's a warning light in the dash when the airbag is deactivated. I've never seen the light come on when there's an adult in the seat.

But the child in this situation was 13 months old. That's way too big for a rear facing car seat. So he belongs in the back seat, not the front.

but barely big enough for a front facing seat to even be an option. A rear facing convertible would still be the best choice to protect that child, because they reduce the risk of spinal injuries in particular. Ideally a child should remain rear-facing until they reach the upper weight limit for doing so, usually somewhere in the 40 lb range. I had to turn my kid around at 12 mos because he was 35 lbs then (which was the highest rear facing weight limit on any seat in the US at the time) but most kids can be rear faced until they're toddlers or even preschoolers.

http://www.car-safety.org/rearface.html

if they detect a child or something lightweight in the front seat.

We can never judge. We don't know what people deal with on a daily basis. People are over scheduled, overwhelmed, and extremely preoccupied with the anxiety of managing their daily lives.

it happened at a a bank down the road, I think of it whenever I drive by. It happens to good parents. They have a routine, take baby to day care, somedays the husband, somedays the wife. They are busy, full time jobs, households. Routine is disrupted, they rush in to work. It happens to good people, and I can't judge them. They will live with the horror and shame the rest of their lives.
So sad.

my heart aches for the parents and family. *cries.

I cannot imagine how these poor parents feel.

It happened to an elementery school principal in this area last year. Two hrs later she went to get something out of the car and there he was asleep. She called 911 herself, to come to the scene. Said she wanted the public to know it can happen to anybody

grandson being left in a car. Things are so hectic for most people that it can happen to anyone. I think the best advice is to put something you need next to the carseat. Even one of your shoes if necessary. Here in Florida we mostly wear flip flops anyway, and the heat is really intense.

Anything that snaps a tired parent out of autopilot would be great. The shoe idea probably wouldn't work for the people who drive stick shifts, but what a great idea for everybody else!

people will *not* forget their cellphones.

It's hard work, parts of it suck, and not everybody's good at it. Not only that, you have to learn the hardest part of the job while you're sleep deprived, hormonal and generally feel like utter shit, and the baby's got colic is teething, and wants to eat every hour and a half. It gets better after that, but that first six months or so is pure hell, and anybody who tells you any different is blocking most of it out.

It's not like most other tasks a person takes on, because if you suck at it you will ruin somebody's life. Knowing your limits well enough not to take on a responsibility you can't manage is ok. Hell, it's admirable.

If you can't keep track of where your kid is while you're tired, busy, upset, whatever, you really shouldn't have one. Nothing against you but why take on an enormous responsibility you're not well suited for?

Pay one parent to be home with the child full time for a few years. Don't put pressure on parents to be superparents.

When I had my near miss with my daughter my husband and I both worked full time and went to college. We had an older daughter as well. We were always on the go constantly. Looking back, I often wonder how we got through it or why the hell we pushed ourselves like this.

Parents should be encouraged and supported to have the ability to slow down and spend more quality time with their kids. I don't think we necessarily need to warn people away from it...just helping them figure out the best timing and doing more to support them.

Of course, the "families first" crowd on the right would scream their heads off.

imo.

There was an incredibly sad case in Virginia some years back in which a little girl died after being left in her car seat. Not only her father but also her older siblings evidently didn't realize she was missing until it was far too late...and she was literally steps away from the family all the time.

Let's face it: People are far more vulnerable than we acknowledge most of the time.

which is why our species went extinct one generation after coming in to existence.

Like the ones discussing cognitive psychology studies that indicate this is way more than simply neglect?

one guy goes on and on reposting the same quote by someone who says it could never happen to them. Was that what you meant?

Not only that, but these sorts of phenomena happen with changes in technology. When i was a kid, people were backing over their children in the driveway. So much so that there were PSA's about it to warn people. In fact, this year, when the weather got warmer, I started hearing PSA's aimed at parents encouraging them to make a habit of checking the back seat. Part of this comes from the move of baby car seats from the front seat to the back seat for safety reasons. There's so much more to these stories than someone was just being a horrible parent.

I would say a horrible parent is one who kills his/her child.

Saying this used to happen as well only proves there were neglectful parents before 2012, a claim no one has argued against.

And some things you don't get a break for doing on "autopilot".

A surgeon zones out and kills his patient. Good doctor or not?

Skinner come on the thread and pointed out that those who are convinced it could never happen to them may be more likely to have it happen. The unsure parent might take that final look in the back when they park at work, just because they have a tiny doubt.

The person safely wrapped in their own infallibility won't bother to check, they're perfect and would never do something stupid.

Edited for speling.

"if you say it can't happen to you maybe you're the one *most* likely to have it happen!"

And you can stop with that silly "you are still convinced it could never happen to you" you've been c/ping over this thread. Yes: it will not happen to me.

And there is a huge difference between believing you are infallible and simply remembering not to slow cook your kid.

You claim it is only perfection that allows a parent to not kill their kid this way. No one else is making that argument.

We've even had at least two DUers come on here and say how they forgot their child, in both cases it didn't end in disaster but it could have.

Not every incidence of memory lapse ends up in tragedy, but some small percentage do.

How often do people driving multi ton vehicles at high velocities forget to pay attention to what they're doing and cause crashes because they're talking on the cell phone?

Given that we are dealing with human beings, perfection is out of the question, the only other thing left is luck.

With kids in the back seat, out of sight of the driver, some small random selection of drivers is going to forget their kid in the car, it's about twenty to thirty per year in the US, people from every walk of life, every race, every class.

Next time you park at work, will you think about this conversation and maybe take a glance in the back seat, just to be absolutely positive?

You might as well say that you'll never get hit by lightning.

You insist on relating this to things you have no control over.

A parent cannot control the weather, unless they have x-men powers.

A parent can control where they leave the kid.

You also believe it's sheer chance that some people *don't* murder their kids. I guess most every parent is extremely lucky then. Amazing we've managed to survive when children don't even warrant a passing thought.

You are arguing that people have perfect control over their memory, I am arguing that they do not, cognitive science is heavily on my side of the argument.

Is the fourth law of robotics "I will refuse to admit humans are imperfect"?