By making a conscious decision to leave your child in the car, even to pay for gas, you are putting your child in harm’s way. Car thieves and child abductors lurk; your child could unbuckle them self and get caught in the power window or move to the front and put the car into gear.
via What Could Happen to Your Kid in the Car While You Pay For Gas? « FreeRangeKids.
In Oklahoma one was not permitted to take one’s child into a liquor store–and these were the only places where the wise and judicious legislators of Oklahoma would permit residents to purchase wine. Jennifer and I found it convenient that most of these stores were small storefronts with big windows so we could park and get in and get back while keeping an eye on our (then much younger) kiddos.
Anyway, looking at this hysterical response, I have to ask: Do real parents believe this stuff?
My inclination is to assume this comes from people without children and the fact that it is taken seriously is a reflex of the fact that legislative interns and many lobbyists are young unmarrieds. What do you think?
(Of course, the other factor is that the P-Class [Political/Predator/Parasite] is populated by people who delegate their children to servants and have no idea what real responsibility even smells like among the hoypolloy.)
No, it’s not just people without children. Parents are some of the worst about this kind of thing.
I could write a whole essay about the mentality behind this kind of thing (most of which would be speculation, though I’m pretty sure I’m right) but it’s more about people with the socio-economic affluence and emotional luxury of inventing things to worry about and the ability to conduct all kinds of elaborate, if unnecessary, systems to protect themselves from those imaginary fears. Those of us who actually have make choices about more things are forced to take a more realistic view of risk and assess it more rationally.
IOW, people who have to worry about the soldiers coming or where their next meal is coming from don’t have time to sit around thinking about all the things that could happen in a given situation, even to the extent of thinking up new ones when their initial scenarios are shown to be nonsensical. And to a lesser extent, people who live somewhat more stable lives, but don’t have scads of free time and money (e.g. your family and mine) have to be a bit more practical as well.
The other day my wife went out to run some errands with all of our five kids. At one place she left the kids in the car, ran in to the store for what she planned to be just a few minutes. As it turns out, it was even less time.
As she was picking up the things she wanted, she heard a message over the loudspeaker about a van in the parking with kids in it, blah blah blah. So, of course, she responds and is greeted by a random, nosy lady yelling at her about how dangerous it is and ‘how can you do that to your children?’ and how she’s a bad mother and on and on. Just shouting really evil, cruel things to my wife. Threatening to call the police and all that. My wife responded with far more grace than I ever would have, and just said ‘well, that’s what we do’ and promptly left. And as if my opinion of this lady wasn’t tarnished enough, she says to my wife as if to threaten her, “I’ll pray for you!”. ugh.
Interesting to note, my children reported that as the lady was trying to tell them what to do through the windows of the van (and I am proud to share they didn’t do what she said, but instead started honking the horn as they had been instructed. This probably got the ladies panties into a tighter bunch. The only problem I have with our plan is that my wife didn’t hear the honking), and her husband was off a ways telling her to leave it alone. When she was shooting off her tirade in the store, her husband was sheepishly standing off to the side. Probably embarrassed from the look of it.
And BTW, “child abductors lurk” is a stupid statement. No one lurks around a gas station in broad daylight with customers coming and going constantly waiting for the chance to abduct your children. And there isn’t a car thief in the world who wants a kidnapping charge added to his rap sheet, or even to have to deal with the nuisance of the kids while making his getaway and doing whatever it is he’s up to.
Are crimes like this beyond the realm of theoretical possibility? No. But I don’t structure my life around this any more than I make my house into a bunker on the off chance that a passing military plane in peacetime flown by a mental case might drop a bomb on it. They’re both about equally likely, and both make equal amounts of sense to the perpetrator.
That’s what’s so stupid and sick (in the mental sense) about people who concoct these scenarios — they’re counter-factual as far as the way crimes really happen. They require a conscious effort to sit down and think through what COULD happen, in very precise circumstances, with a simultaneous refusal to think through whether it makes sense to worry about them.
And as for the power window thing — take the keys, duh.
Richard,
your scenario is the most likely of the unpleasant outcomes of leaving kids in the car. When I do it I’m more worried about what you described than about anything else. Sorry it happened to you.