As predictable as the tinkling of the ice-cream truck and the thrum of air conditioners is a more macabre sign of summer’s arrival: the beginning of news reports detailing some parent, somewhere, whose child died after being locked in a hot car. A decade ago, we would have considered an occurrence like this a freak accident; now there’s an average of one such death per week in the months between spring and autumn.
Child deaths by hyperthermia have been on the rise since the early ’90s, when new safety regulations mandated that children, often injured by front-seat, passenger-side airbags, should always ride in the backseat. No one disputes that children are indeed safest in the backseat; the laws did successfully reduce airbag injuries to kids, but they also inadvertently made children less visible in the car, and they’re one of the factors often cited to explain the eightfold increase in hyperthermia deaths since the regulations passed. According to nonprofit consumer-safety advocates Kids and Cars, an average of thirty-seven children have died this way each year since 1998. In the first six months of 2010 alone, twenty kids lost their lives after parents left them in cars unintentionally.
Just as predictable as the grisly news reports are the reactions from other parents, invariably wondering, What kind of parent would do a thing like that?
“The thing people should understand is that this could happen to anyone,” says Janette Fennell, founder and president of Kids and Cars. The parents who make these terrible mistakes have little in common in their personal lives: some are blue-collar, some are executives, some are mothers, and some are fathers. They’re people that would otherwise be described as loving and competent parents. “This isn’t about a lack of love,” says Fennell, “it’s about our brains not functioning the way we want them to.”
A “Mis-remembering”
In the human brain, the basal ganglia (sometimes called the reptilian brain) is responsible for our day-to-day tasks, repetitive actions, and habits. It allows us to go through the motions of driving to work without consciously considering each turn or action, thereby delegating the responsibilities of conscious thought and decision making to the more evolved prefrontal cortex. Ordinarily, these systems work together seamlessly to delegate tasks, but under stress, the basal ganglia tends to take over like an autopilot. What parents who end up leaving their children in cars have in common is that they tend to be under stress and have experienced a significant change in their daily routine. Perhaps it’s not their usual day to drop the child off at daycare, or perhaps they were distracted by a pressing work call. Even something as simple as a detour on the highway can cause the prefrontal cortex to cede control to the basal ganglia. Conscious thought is disrupted, and the parent drives to work on autopilot, oblivious to the quietly sleeping child in the backseat.
