When the weather is warm, a parked car can quickly become dangerous to infants who may have been left inside. Indeed, it can become lethal, as many children die every year from heat exposure after being trapped in their car seats.
In this post, we’ll discuss a couple of tips for child vehicular heatstroke protection for your kids or others you may care for.
Always check the back door
Parents with young children constantly have to multitask. When under stress, it can be all too easy to make a fatal mistake leaving a young child inside a hot car.
That is why safety experts urge caregivers to remember to check the backseat of a vehicle before leaving it (choosing to store a purse or laptop bag on the seat forces one to do this). Just make sure to do this every time after parking and before leaving the car, to make sure there isn’t a kid in the back.
To help build this habit, you could leave a key item like a purse or a cellphone in the back. That will help remind you to check back there before leaving the vehicle.
Check with others
Another safeguard against accidentally leaving a kid in a car is to ask schoolteachers or childcare providers to contact you if your child is not dropped off when expected.
Essentially this builds in an alert. It is possible for a parent who is stressed by an upcoming workday to forget to drop a kid off at daycare and instead leave them in the car. If, however, the day care knows to call or text parent when a kid doesn’t arrive, it will alert the parent to the fact that the child didn’t get dropped off – and may still be in the car.
There but for the grace of God
Safety experts who study the issue of vehicular heatstroke caused by a caregiver’s momentarily memory lapse emphasize that it can happen to anyone. That’s why it makes sense to build in safety practices like those outlined above.
