The Growing Rate of Child Car Deaths and the Fallen Victims of this Mistake

The way you can predict the twang of air conditioners and the jingle sound of the ice cream truck, has become almost the same pattern for a ghastly signal of summer’s arrival: the opening of news reports about a child somewhere, lost to death as a result of being locked inside an unventilated car. If it were the recent past decade, such accident would have been termed freak; at this point, between spring and autumn, one such death on the average takes place in each week that makes up the months between spring and autumn.

Since the beginning of 90s, hyperthermia has been partly responsible for a child’s death – this period was when a new safety regulation about where a child should stay inside a car came into being. The new safety law requires that a child stay at the backseat since the front-seat passenger corner airbags tend to injure kids often. No doubt, the safest place for a kid in a car is the backseat as this has lowered airbag injuries on kids significantly.

But, on the other hand, the law also indirectly made kids not to be easily seen in the car – which is one of the factors referred too often when explaining the substantial rise in death resulting from hyperthermia since the inception of the regulations. The statistics from Kids and Cars – a non-profit consumer-safety advocate shows that since 1998, 37 children on the average have died in this manner. Between January and June 2010, 20 kids died locked inside the car unintentionally by their parents. Of course, the reactions of other parents are quite predictable; they kept on wondering, What kind of parental oversight is that?

Here’s the response from Kids and Cars president; “We should understand that anybody can be a victim of this circumstance”. There are little or no similar traits among parents who have fallen victims of this mistake – some are high class personalities. Some are full-time mothers and some are even fathers. In essence, these parents are enlightened and loving; so, it wouldn’t have been a case of a parent not being mindful of the kid. Perhaps, it could be that our brains are not functioning optimally as we expect.

The Issue
Our daily activities, habits as well as repetitive actions are products of the basal ganglia (an aspect of the human brain responsible for these activities). The basal ganglia enables us pass through the movements of driving to a place without making a conscious effort to take cognizance of each action or turn – thus, the responsibility of voluntary decision making and thought is delegated to the prefrontal cortex (which is more evolved).

On a normal circumstance, these systems work flawlessly together to assign a task. However, when stress steps in, just like an autopilot, the basal ganglia seems to take over. The similar thing among those parents who unintentionally forgot their kids in the car is stress – their daily routines have changed substantially with the stress that accompanies such change.

It could be that they were distracted by an urgent call at the workplace, or that they were not used to dropping off the kid at daycare or taking the kid along to a store. As simple as a diversion on a highway seems, it can influence the prefrontal cortex to yield to the basal ganglia’s auto-control. Disruption in conscious thought occurs immediately; in such circumstance, anyone can forget a child sleeping in the backseat and lock the car for the number of hours he or she would be away from the car.

You can see, that anyone can actually fall victim of locking a child inside a car – which can result to death of a kid.

credit to: gemsling