All the guidelines recommend rear facing car seats placed in the middle of the back seat for your baby, but there is a hidden danger to reverse seats that too many parents this year discovered the hard way. Forgetting that your baby is with you. It seems impossible, right? Forgetting a baby is in the car. But forty nine children died from being left in hot cars this year, which is a new record, and more than half of parents who have lost a child that way admit that they simply forgot their child was there.
We all know we’re busy, stressed. Tired. We forget things every day. I can see all too easily how you could strap your baby in, jump in the car and drive to work on autopilot, completely forgetting that the peacefully sleeping child was there and needed to be dropped off at daycare. Or how you could be on an emergency call for work and run into the grocery store, mind completely blanking on the fact that you’ve got your baby with you today, particularly if you’re not used to having your children with you.
As if being a parent wasn’t terrifying enough.
“They think of the people this happened to as monsters, and they don’t put in place the safeguards you should,” Janette Fennell of Kids and Cars tells the Free Press. “If you have the ability to forget your cell phone, you can forget your child.”
Kids and Cars is trying to help, printing up “Look Before You Lock” warning tags to distribute to new parents when they check out of the hospital. Whether you have a pre-printed version or not, leaving yourself a little note, on the steering wheel, your key ring, your phone, anywhere you’ll check as you leave the car, might save your baby’s life.
