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Perhaps we should flag down the cops for people who take their kids into the store instead:

These are all articles that are making my point for me. Leaving a four year old alone in a parked car in a parking lot is leaving a four year old alone in a parking lot.

From the very first article:

"Sgt. Steve Martos said the child's mother was loading her purchases into her car when Jose darted between vehicles and into the driving lane. The driver did not see the child and ran him over."

If she had left the child in the car, this wouldn't have happened.

The point isn't that you should always leave your child in the car - the point is that our assessment of risk is terrible, and the risk of leaving a child in a car on a mild weather day has not been proven to be more risky than taking them into the store.

You cannot leave a four year old alone in a car and trust that they will not get out. Nobody's four year old is trustworthy; they are not biologically capable of being trustworthy at that age.

Meanwhile, a four year old escorted through a parking lot with their parent is at least somewhat visible. A four year old alone in a parking lot is invisible.

You can't have your child out of your sight for a single instant without a chance of them getting hurt. When you are asleep they could easily leave the house and get run over in the street. I'm generally a fan of your comments but this time I don't see your point at all.

And I am not advocating for a parenting strategy that demands total attention to your children 60 minutes out of 24 hours a day. I'm simply saying that one time you can't let a child out of your sight is when they're in a parking lot.

Let's make this simpler: would you leave your four year old alone in a parked car for 5 minutes while you ran into a store?

> would you leave your four year old alone in a parked car for 5 minutes while you ran into a store?

Yes. No, not really, but yes if I lived in a different time and day (a time and day I wish we did live in).

As another commenter pointed out, the biggest reason many of us don't do this these days is purely the fear of running into ridiculous situations as described in this article.

It really seems odd that you're avoiding the biggest data-driven argument that's raised in the article and has already been put directly to you. Namely, why do you assume that it's safer to take the child with you?

Parents make tradeoffs regarding safety, risk, convenience, happiness, cost, temperament, health, development, etc. ALL. THE. FREAKING. TIME. It's great that "society" cares about how parents do their jobs. It's not so great that society mandates in great detail how that job should be done.

Every parent, every child, every situation, every tradeoff is different. Until it's proven that they're no good at it, let's leave that work to the people who signed up for it.

I'm a parent of 4 kids, 2 of whom have passed the age of four. I don't recall if it's a law or just a regulation I have to follow as a certified foster parent, but either way I'm not allowed to leave any child under 6 unattended in a car.

If it weren't for that rule, then I absolutely would have left one of my kids in a car unattended for 5 minutes, but not the other.

The one I would not have got antsy fairly easily. Even they could probably have been trusted for less than 10 minutes, I wouldn't be willing to take that risk. The other, I have no doubt would have stayed in the car for a half-hour.

More recently I did leave one of them in the car, in the shade, with the windows cracked on a 65 degree day. She was 7 at the time. Someone did report me to the cops, but I said "She's 7, was in the shade and I was gone for less than 10 minutes" and never heard anything from then again.

7 is borderline. I wouldn't do it, but you know your 7 year old better than I do, and you know where you parked and I don't.

4 is not borderline. There does not exist anywhere in the world a trustworthy 4 year old.

No, because of the risk of someone calling the police. And I don't have children and stories like this weigh against any decision to have children. We're to the point of arresting parents for not parenting the way the media wants them to, logic and rational risk assessment be damned. Do you really think you were never left in the car alone as a child?

The author was right - the most irresponsible thing she did that day was to drive with her child in the car.

> "This other parent let their nine-year-old ride the subway by themselves." Well, I think that's a bad call too, but who cares?

Whether that's a bad call depends on the child and the nature of the subway. When I was 12, I travelled by train through the country for 4 days, planning my own journeys, visiting musea and relatives. Not every 12 year old would be able to do that responsibly, but I was sure I could do that, and after checking that I knew my way around a train schedule, my parents agreed.

9 is younger than 12, obviously, but if it's a fairly safe subway, and it's just a single trip, dropped off at one end, picked up at the other, and the child is familiar with subways and comfortable traveling alone, I see no real problem.

The parent we're talking about here famously let their 9 year old ride the MTA anywhere in NYC, kicking it off by dropping her kid off at Bloomingdales and then assuming he'd eventually make it home (which involved a bus transfer).

Did it work?

She wasn't "grappling", she was retelling what was probably the most emotionally trying experience of her entire life. Cut her some slack maybe?

She wrote an article that is in large part a defense of leaving toddlers alone in parked cars. That was her choice. It is reasonable to criticize an article on its own terms.

I don't find that it advocates leaving toddlers alone in parked cars at all. She states in multiple places that it was a bad decision. What it does advocate is that this shouldn't require legal action. The response in terms of police manpower and court time is wildly out of proportion to the risk.

Skip forward to the part where she's conversing with her attorney. The attorney sums the situation up as a lapse in judgement. She responds with anger towards the bystander who called her child --- alone in a car --- in to the police. Or reread the section where she interviews Skenazy. The Skenazy section overtly argues that leaving kids alone in parked cars is a negligible risk. No, think you're wrong. I think this is a piece that says, in effect, that people should chill the hell out about leaving four year olds alone in parked cars.

In all the articles you linked above, not one involved a child being left alone in a car and escaping, then getting hit in the parking lot. So, yes, until there's a documented case of that actually happening I would consider the risk to be negligible.

However, if you arrest the parent, saddle them with months of legal fees, potentially take their child away and put them into a foster care system, that's not without risks to the child as well. It's not like having your parents impoverished and potentially put in jail does wonders for a child's future either. That has a far higher probability of happening than your so far completely hypothetical scenario of the child escaping from the car in five minutes and wandering around the parking lot until getting hit.

That's because parents don't generally leave four year olds alone in cars, not because four year olds left alone in cars generally do just fine.

You called her an asshole. That isn't criticizing an article. You interpret it as a defense of leaving toddlers alone, but really it's just a story. There's a lot of important points to it, like the fucked up judicial and legislative process, and the fact that all parents make mistakes. It's not a whitewash. It's real life.

I called her an asshole for summing up the risks to a toddler left alone in a parked car as: "He wasn’t kidnapped or assaulted or forgotten or dragged across state lines by a carjacker." That's really how she summed the risks up! It's an excerpt of a paragraph, not the whole paragraph, but it's the only part of the paragraph that acknowledges risk. And those aren't the real risks. The real risks are (a) that you've underestimated how likely it is that the heat in the car will injure your child (she touches on this later and it wasn't a factor here) and (b) that your child will escape your parked car and wander around, practically invisible, in a parking lot full of moving vehicles.

The whole article is full of misdirection like this; appeals to "helicopter parenting", or whole grafs about how enraged she was that another person called the police upon finding her child alone in a parked car.

It's simply a terrible article. It's meant to stir up outrage at the nanny-state and busybody bystanders and mythologized risks to children, but it repeatedly, reliably misses every mark it tries to hit. In that regard, it's at least valuable as a rorschach test to how carefully people think about what they read.

Words matter. A four year old, unless developmentally disabled, is not a toddler... A toddler implies someone who "toddles" as if at a very early age, and leads readers to infer that the child was closer to 2 than four. (Unless my daughter was precocious when she was walking at 11 months.)

Except this wasn't the "blistering heat of July" like in the article you linked. This was a cool, 50F day. And the author pointed that out. The child was in no danger and the parent was coming right back.

The point of linking to Weingarten's piece wasn't that the author missed a terrible risk. She covered that risk in her piece too. The point of Weingarten's piece is that it carefully looks at the issues of culpability involved in leaving kids alone in parked cars in situations that resulted in the deaths of children. And it does not come to the conclusion that all such cases should be crimes.

Would you flag down a cop even if you could talk to the parent instead? Why?

What, exactly, are the risks to a child in a locked car on a cool day for five minutes?

My thoughts immediately go to "that they will get hit by a car when they figure out how to get out".

The article states that the car had child locks, which were used, so the doors could only be opened from the outside. Furthermore, the kid specifically wanted to go on the trip in the first place so he could sit in the car and play with the iPad, which he was happily doing.

It's not impossible that in the space of five minutes the kid could get bored of the iPad, unbuckle the car seat, and figure out how to disable the child locks from inside the car. It's just very, very unlikely. If that's what had happened there would be a case for getting the police involved, but it didn't happen. If we're going start prosecuting people for every crime they could hypothetically commit at any given point, every single person would be in jail.

I don't agree with tptacek on this (at all), but front doors don't have child locks and it's trivial for a child to crawl up to the front seat.

You totally disagree that it's unsafe to leave a four year old alone in a parked car?

I don't, but that's not what I, the article, or your OP were really talking about. What I disagree with is this statement/attitude:

> I've flagged down a cop seeing a kid alone in a car, and would do it again.

The interesting and proper question isn't whether it's unsafe to leave a four year old alone in a parked car, it's whether leaving a four year old alone in a parked car warrants involvement from the State -- particularly, involvement kicked off by a fellow citizen.

It surprises and deeply concerns me that we live in a country/world of social content and community-driven projects, yet when one of our (real-life) community members might possibly be in trouble, a cellphone video and call to the cops is the default (and lauded) reaction. Look, had that 4-year-old been in real danger, a cellphone video wasn't going to help him. A call to the cops wasn't going to help him either (clearly, as they arrived after mom had left). Ok, maybe a coin flip on the cops at best.

What can the cops do that the nosy neighbor -- or you -- couldn't? Truly, if someone felt a child's life was in danger, everything else could wait while you supervised the situation and sent someone else to go fetch mom out of the store. Or use that cellphone to call the store, or whatever. In other words, you could actually do something. Unless this fictional example kid is literally dying before your eyes and you think medics/the coroner are going to have to be involved, what's the point of calling the cops? Two options: either a) to throw mom under the bus or b) to let yourself think you did all you could so you can get going to that next meeting.

Oh, you were making a political point. Now I get it.

I disagree that the child locks make it safer. By locking it up, the child is unable to take care of itself. If anything happens, it's stuck. If I can't trust the child to make its own judgments about how to behave in and around the car (which is indeed unlikely with a 4 year old), then I shouldn't leave it alone in the car at all.

I'm all for letting children roam free and find their own way. I'm not a fan of locking them up without supervision.

You're all for letting four year olds roam free in parking lots?

Depending on the parking lot. Of course it's not a suitable place for kids, but as long as he knows to watch out for traffic, and the parking lot is fairly open, it's better than locking him up. If it's a big and crowded parking lot, I'm more worried about him getting lost than getting run over.

How cool is "cool"? According to this[1] 15 minutes at 75 degrees can be enough. It's even possible at 50-60 degrees for an infant with blankets.

[1] http://www.parenting.com/article/tragedy-in-the-backseat-hot...

Ask yourself: How many kids are killed annually by being left alone in a car, and how many kids are killed annually in car accidents? I have no doubt that the number killed in car accidents is vastly higher.

So which is the biggest sin? Which should be the crime?

I have no idea what your point is here. More kids are killed annually in car accidents than are killed by alligator attacks, too.

The point is that you don't flag down cops for parents driving their children down the road, which is the bigger risk to their safety.

That's not true, but the fact that you think it's true is one of the reasons I find this article so off-putting, because the article tries its hardest to set up that bogus comparison. I want to say something here about the base rate fallacy, but I'm too tired and impatient to figure out how to articulate it.

> ... I'm too tired and impatient to figure out how to articulate it.

I wish you'd have given it a go. It sounds like an argument about evaluating the risks of an action proportional to the frequency of that action being taken.

If that's the case, it seems the best conclusion you could hope to come to is "we don't have enough data". Because there's no way to know how often parents leave their kids in cars without incident, and no way to know how many parents would leave their kids in their cars were it socially acceptable.

It's almost certainly possible to come up with an estimate for how often parents leave their kids in cars. If by "we" you meant those of us currently discussing it on HN right now, then maybe you're right.

Either way, it's obvious that more kids are driven in cars than are left in cars (since nearly all kids left in cars were also driven in them as part of that trip).

I don't see how would base rate fallacy apply if you compare child death rate per hour of being driven around and per hour of being left unattended in a car.