When Habit Wins

Is it just me, or has there been an influx of stories of children dying in hot cars, mixed with horror (understandably) and severe, SEVERE judgment for these parents? Facebook is helping us hurl our stones, methinks.

People swear THEY would never leave their child in a hot car. The vast majority of these cases occur by accident—the child falls asleep, often with a change in routine.

Chris and me, we do not judge. We can see how scary possible it is to make the same mistake.

When my routine with the kids is different, it’s hard to shut off autopilot. If, say, the kiddos are at home with a grandparent and I have no daycare stop to make? I automatically turn down the usual street I would to pick them up, even while thinking about them at home with Omi or Nana, and then have to make a U-turn. Particularly on maternity leave, when Lorelei slumbered in rear-facing car seat and I drove to wherever, I’d forget she was even there, feeling blessedly alone in the car. Inevitably, I’d remember with a gut-wrenching OH-MY-GOD-WHERE-IS-SHE? moment before I confirmed, yes, she’s in the backseat. I didn’t forget her at home. Or in a grocery cart.

I put much of the hot-car tragedies blame on current car seat guidelines. Recently, right after Charlotte slipped by, the AAP suggested children up until the age of TWO remain rear-facing. Our pediatrician cited stuff about degree of injury in all these studies, and it was convincing stuff. In the event of a car crash, do I want my child to have a pelvic injury or a spinal cord injury? Obviously, the former.

But I hate car seats. Oh, sure, I use them, I rely on them, I haul them on airplanes and have spent eons of my life buckling and unbuckling those car seats. Sometimes I’ve strapped in screaming children who Do! Not! Want! To! Be! Buckled! I have spent a fortune on winter coats that provide maximum warmth with minimum poof for car seat purposes, I have stood in pouring rain buckling children, I have stood in wind gusts taking the temperature to 15 below zero, I have fought to buckle children in 100-degree heat with a thousand impatient people waiting for my parking space.

And we all love the Car Seat Militia Moms, who freak out about how everyone else on the planet buckles their child. Moms LOVE to have Actual Safety Standards to use as ammunition against people like us who let their younger-than-two toddlers face forward.

You THINK you’re doing the right thing, keeping that seat facing rear. (We had such shallow reasons for flipping Lorelei as room for her legs to straighten, giving her a freaking VIEW, and the ease of handing her a fallen sippy cup.) But I really, really wonder if the risk of forgetting a child in a hot car outweighs the benefit of rear facing kids.

I can see how easily such a tragedy could occur to good, well-meaning parents who adore their children. I don’t think such cases should be prosecuted. (This does not apply to the idiots who KNOWINGLY leave their kids in a car for a “quick errand.”)

And I think it’s sheer cocky, self-righteousness to be SO CERTAIN that such a slip of the mind couldn’t happen to you, especially on a hectic morning, made extra hectic with some sort of change in routine. I mean, seriously. Haven’t you ever intended to stop at the post office on the way home and driven right past it, forgetting?

Chris and I are lucky that our daily routines vary just enough that we have to stop and think what is going to happen—who will get the kids, or whatever. Now, our girls face forward: We have the major visual cue of our kids, right there! A small infant in a gigantic, rear-facing seat? You can’t see squat—no hand, head, foot—anything. Yes, there are mirrors for this purpose, but you might remove it when having to put the seat down for something, and someone may neglect to reattach it (ahem, CHRIS).

I don’t have too much of a point here, except that I think we need to be more empathetic to the poor souls who have accidentally done such massive harm, and we could also rethink how our constant attempts to mitigate any possible harm could create greater harm, like those rear-facing seats.

Innocuous example: Charlotte and her bike, which has training wheels. The closer I hover, the greater chance she freaks out, RELEASES her grip from the handlebars, and grabs onto me. She then wobbles in a genuinely dangerous fashion, because I don’t have any real control to save her. Here I was, THINKING I was being a diligent mommy, trying to catch her from any fall onto concrete. But she was getting WORSE at riding her bike. Finally, I told her to just ride FAST (for someone as cautious as Charlotte, FAST is not THAT fast), which of course makes bumps and knolls a piece of cake. But me trying to account for everything that COULD go wrong prevented her from learning, and I was making the situation significantly more dangerous.

I think this could even be applied to breastfeeding pressure (you saw it coming, right?). How our all-or-nothing approach to this TEENSY TINY facet of mothering is correlated with higher rates of postpartum depression and at times, a very real interference with the mother–baby relationship, especially the feeding relationship. And for what benefit?

Car seat safety is important. For all the thousands of times I’ve buckled up my children, it has never, ever mattered, but that doesn’t mean it’s pointless. Ditto for the tens of thousands of times I buckled myself up. We all know: It just takes one second.

But the same is true for the hot cars. It takes one slip of the mind, one thought to crowd out another, one ingrained habit to trump a good intention. Would the cool little fob alarm (intended to prevent hot car deaths) that a young woman invented save a child’s life?

Maybe, if the parents were open enough to realizing they too could so easily make the same, simple, tragic mistake.