Parents can damage/kill their kids in uncountable ways. Most don't and really try to avoid that. Trying to watch over their shoulder isn't 'Good citizenship', it's crazy and a witch hunt. You start to be labeled as child abuser if your kid is crying like hell (toothing maybe, or really interested in strawberries that you don't like to hand out - but the people around you don't understand that, don't have the slightest bit of clue about the situation. More often than not, OTHER parents are worse than the rest).

Give it a rest. The scenario you describe sounds terrible. But it's not relevant to the situation at hand. The person in the article describes that she checked the temperature, knew how long it'd take (even had a deadline on multiple levels, not only 'Today I do not want to choke my kid in the car' - she even planned to take a flight before the kid could have taken any damage. More seriously, a parent decided something for her kid. Something she does gazillion times a day. People might object to a number of her decisions and this particular one got her in trouble? Someone 'snitched'? Sad. The system failed.

I understand:

- someone was worried, called the cops

- cops reacted (yay!)

But:

- before cops arrived, kid was gone and obviously safe with the parent

- charges were pressed, just because?

One word: Insane.

I'm a father of two, both younger than the kid in the car.

edit: One of the worst typos I made so far.

By the way, this is what I think of every time I hear someone use the phrase ”a good samaritan”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIVB3DdRgqU

The second half of your premise contains two completely unwarranted assumptions. How exactly were the police supposed to know the now-departed child was a) safe and b) with his parent? Recall that the Mom who wrote the piece was driving a vehicle that wasn't registered to her and so therefore didn't match the description on the registered owners' driving licenses. We know with hindsight that she had borrowed her parents' minivan for the trip, but the police would not have been justified in making that inference.

- Call about the kid

- (Optional) Visit owner (grandparents) in person and take an official statement

- Drop the case

And what is the danger we're protecting the child against here? People seem to like the 'baked in car' setup. You seem to fancy the 'kidnapped wholesale with car' idea? I mean - your neighbor is taking the kid to the car, and gets back in (probably forgot a thing). 30 sec later you look out of the window and the car is gone. What happend?

a) The car was stolen, kid inside

b) The owner of the car and responsible person for the kid inside moved it outside of the viable area from your position

Really?

Most likely the person who called the police was thinking about the risk of heat (even if the weather didn't seem to justify it, but the fact is it's very unusual for a parent to leave a kid in car in the US these days. From the police point of view, the confusion about the identity of the car owner and driver is enough to warrant further investigation. When the police hear from the grandparents that the child is inaccessible because the Mom got onto a plane and flew home, that's probably true but they don't know for sure - after all that's the sort of story people give out when they abduct children in custody battles during ugly divorces. It's the police's job to put the welfare of the child first in ambiguous situations like that.

Me, I wouldn't have prosecuted once the full facts came out, but on the other hand a statewide missing child alert uses up a bunch of police resources and that's not free, so the prosecutor may have that demanding some community service in return was justified. I can't tell what state the writer lives in or exactly when this happened, so it would be worth considering those contexts as well.

Read that again.

Why? Why would a random parent (taken from a hat that contains all the names of parents in the USA for this experiment) be less trustable than your neighbor? Because you don't know the person?

If that is the argument, you could probably call the police all the time, whenever there's a kid around that cries, is shouted at, throws itself to the ground and needs to be carried, etc. etc..

It's not my argument that is weak (my example might be crap, if you happen to really like your neighbor. But that also means that you missed the point of my post though, inserting real persons wasn't part of the thought experiment and is entirely irrelevant).

Why? Why would a random parent

Yet again, the assumption of parental status based on hindsight. The police who answered the 911 call at the shopping center had no way of knowing that the author was the parent of the child in the car, and given that that person did not match the description of the registered vehicle owner, such an assumption would have been entirely unjustified. In California, there are about 1900 cases of family child abduction and 50 cases of child abduction by a stranger every year. the chances that any given suspicious episode like this will be a child abduction are thus about 1 in 5000 - a remote probability, but of a sufficiently severe nature that it has to be followed up.

Downvote away, but every single argument you have posted in this thread is built upon hindsight bias.

> In California, there are about 1900 cases of family child abduction and 50 cases of child abduction by a stranger every year. the chances that any given suspicious episode like this will be a child abduction are thus about 1 in 5000 - a remote probability, but of a sufficiently severe nature that it has to be followed up.

Hmm, what "math" did you just do to come up with 1 in 5000?

Hmm, what "math" did you just do to come up with 1 in 5000?

Population of CA is ~38 million, of which ~24% are minors, or approximately 10 million children. 10m/~2000 abductions a year in the state = 5000.

http://www.childabductions.org/ Annual abduction rates http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html CA census data

Are you happy now?

The probability of a crime occurring is not the only factor that has to be taken into account here. There's also the severity of the possible criminal outcome. Kidnapping is actually relatively common in the US by international standards, and it is among the most aggressively prosecuted crimes. Until 1972, kidnapping was a capital crime, ie you could get the death sentence for it.

For it to make a difference you would have to leap to the conclusion that a woman stole the car, stole a kid (?), and then left the stolen car and the kid in the parking lot, which is now very conspicuous in the US (apparently). That could only make sense if you assumed average moms are child snatching car thieves.

I'm told only 2 in 10 mom's snatch kids and only 1 in 10 of those steal cars. So there's only a 2% chance of that happening at once!

Wow... because I know like at least 30 moms and none of them have snatched any kids. To cover the odds, there must be people out there that know a lot of baby snatchers. Those people should be calling the police. :)

I of course picked an absurdly high number because even with two absurdly high numbers it still only nets 2%.

Are you saying that if there's only a 2% chance of something odd being a criminal incident, they should just blow it off?

First, you have to arrive to the cops checking for that. Before that, you must imagine the "good" samaritan, who hasn't seen any driving license and knows nothing about the minivan, speculating about who was that woman leaving and then coming back to the minivan.

But it's not the reason he or she has called the police and the police, at the moment they reached the house of the parents of the woman, they knew the latter was none but the daughter of the owner of the minivan.

Case closed... Except for the charge of having contributed to the delinquency of a minor. By the way, the good samaritan can be charged of the same crime since the video proved that, since even if he could have "caught" the criminal mom in the instant he was starting her criminal act and thus he could have "saved" the child, he preferred keep filming... so, if there was an actual crime, it would have been too late.

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

Having said that, This story is a really good example of how tough it is for some parents and how hostile society is to parenting.

On the other hand, for the person in the parking lot to film the child in the car and call police, but not make any contact with the child or wait by the car, borders on malice. Police and prosecutors should investigate but heavily discount such pseudo-testimony because it is deliberately presented without context.

If the mother (to stay with the original article) would've fallen unconscious or dead in the supermarket, nevermind that both options would have some consequences for the family, the kid would've been fine.

Calling the cops was fine. Creepy the way it was described, but okay.

Cops arriving was fine. That's their job.

"Huh? The "abandoned" kid is gone already? Let's trace the car and take out our frustration on .. the mother?" wasn't fine. That was just braindead. The correct movie quote variation would've been "Nothing happened, move along".

Theoretical "But here's how the kid could've died" arguments are .. weird. And countless.

The decision is not yours, not ours. It's the parent's. Like everything else about the daily life of the kid. That argument contains no value. Of course there are reasons that one might not do that. Loop/Recur to line 1.

there's a middle ground between the state as inflexible guardian and complete parental sovereignty.

The state has laws and agencies to interfere and check (Disclaimer: I've no clue about the US of A here, but I assume it's not too far off from what I know). But that's not related to the action(s) we discuss. Are we missing a part of the picture? Certainly. Is the partial picture scary? Yes.

The adversaries in the story didn't act to protect the kid. They acted in a completely crazy fashion. There's so many things wrong with this story, I cannot even begin to imagine how someone would defend the side of the cops here..

One (out of far too many) questions: If this mother is utterly incapable, if a lawyer actually can make the point that she might lose her kid if she's not complying: Why does it take 10 month to proceed? I'd say that someone with a little ambition can kill a kid in less time than that...

There's not One. Single. Point. in that article that makes sense, on the side of law enforcement. Zero. The only potential reason to discuss why this might not be so far removed from reality that everyone involved should be ordered to take a drug test is that the article might be lying. If that is not the case ... there is no case.

I've said repeatedly that I don't think there was any point in bringing a prosecution. since you don't live in the US maybe you don't appreciate that the police and the public prosecutor are completely separate entities. The police didn't do anything abnormal in this case.

I don't live in the US, but I often get the impression that in the US, they're less separate than in other countries.

Leaving a child in a locked car is a bad idea, even when it's totally safe, and even with a window cracked. (In fact, leaving a car window open when you're not there is also a bad idea, though a few minutes probably won't hurt.) Honestly, in that situation, it's better to leave the car door open, so the child can get out when necessary. If you don't trust the child to make that decision, don't leave it alone.

Also, the returning parent is unlikely to be grateful to the comments of "I was just making sure your left alone child was not dying".

One could say 'why not let the matter drop, the Mom came back and so everything was OK' but that's a classic example of hindsight bias. From the police POV, a child was left alone in a vehicle that was later driven off by someone else. When they followed up, it turned out that the person who drove off was not the owner of the vehicle (which belonged to the child's grandparents). They have to at least consider the possibility of malfeasance.

No "someone else", but the very same woman: leaving the car, returning back to the car. The same woman, not someone else. Unless the good samaritan has deceptively shown just the last part and told the police he (or she) saw a different person leaving the car with the child inside.

The issue here is not car theft, driving license not matching the car owner, or whatever. It was instead a good samaritan evaluating as criminal/dangerous the fact that a mom left his son alone in the car for few minutes. And decided (when she came back) to call the police to...? Check if the child was fine? Whatever.

It takes few minutes to check if the car was stolen and/or the owner knows that someone else is driving it.

I agree that people should report early and report often; and allow experts to make decisions. Sadly, reporting early and often just swamps people who are already far too busy dealing with children who are being abused, or it dumps reports with police who take action when they don't need to do anything more than have a chat.

Are we going to turn this into a 'You need to be careful about talking to a child' debate? If you cannot address/talk to a child, things are worse OUTSIDE of that car.

In a sensible world she would have been able to call out to some car-park lurker "hey I'm just going to grab something from the store, can you just wave at my kid through this window"; or she could just run in and grab something and people seeing her run in and then out would not call the police; or etc etc.

Society has decided that men wanting to work with children are creepy (try finding pre-schools with male workers and early years schools with male teachers), and this extends to the damaging concept of "stranger danger" where someone waiting by the car to check the child is safe is not going to be seen as a welcome bit of support for a busy harassed mother but will be seen as a creepy threat.

It's all part of the same weird system of protecting children without regard to what actual risk is.

Still, leaving the child alone leaves them open to more risk than taking them out of the car.

This parent was not buying anything important - just headphones for a child - and they took the wasy options by i) taking child to shops and ii) not taking child out of car.

I don't criticise other people's parenting because I am particularly lucky with my son but the idea of leaving my nearly-four-yo son unaccompanied (out of eyesight) fills me with cold fear.

Again, the problem here isn't that they left their son for a few minutes in a car, it is that society is pretty hostile to parents and parenting, simultaneously being quick to judge and slow to offer any real support.

So a child in an immobile tested-safe metal box with ventilation, locked and alarmed, is more at risk than being outside the car? I'd like to understand how you came to that reasoning.

The thing is:

1) You do. The post says "She was lazy"¹. That's criticizing.

2) Your pov is noted and fine. You're probably a good parent. But what works for you isn't transferable to other parents and kids. And those parents will make decisions that wouldn't work/make sense for you and your kid. I love that my not-yet-two son disappears and plays in hidden corners. He's probably longer out of my (and my wife's) sight than the boy in that car was, albeit in our apartment. Cold fear sounds nasty. I understand that to a point, but for this particular parent that wouldn't work/would be unhealthy.

We're different. Projecting one's idea about child care is different from laws about child care.

1: Blame reading comprehension skills on my English teacher

Basically, until you are 18, you belong to your parents and have zero rights, treated as a child by society. It's funny how we all forget this once we turn into adults.

Look at vaccinations. (Vaccinations are good; I had no hesitation having my child immunised; I'd like schools to require immunisations for pupils; etc). The early days of the vaccination scandal were not presented as a bit of scientific research, it was "you, as a parent, are harming your child by vaccinating them" (and that's still what the nutjobs are saying). Now that we know that Wakefield is a crook we tend not to say "you were duped by a crook who had financial interests in misleading you so let's help you get your child immunised", we say "you're a nutjob and a bad parent".

Look at HN where parents feel guilt about work life balance for one example of how hard it is to be a parent in a rich first world country.

Look at the number of people on HN who (ignoring law) say they would hesitate to employ women because of the risk of maternity leave.

The fact that "having a child" has to be written into legislation as a protected status shows that status of parents was seen as needing protection.

I'm all for letting kids play with little or no supervision. (Depending on the surroundings, of course; a place near my home where kids can build huts has the explicit rule that kids under 8 need adult supervision at all times, which makes total sense. A mother was upset that someone confiscated the hammer and saw her kids were using while she was away. That mother was wrong.)

But what's important is that if you trust your child to take care of itself, you give it the means to do so. Locking a kid in a car is not that. I'd rather let it play in the parking lot or a field next to it.

So I think the decision to leave the kid in the car is still a bad one. And not even just because of the danger, but because of teaching it about choice and consequences: The kid wanted to come along to the shop? Then it's coming inside. The kid thinks a game is more important than new earphones? Then it's not getting new earphones. Teach the kid consequences.