Parents, please pay attention to the back seat of your vehicle. Before you leave the vehicle, make sure you don’t have kids in the backseat. This is especially true when you’re doing something out of the routine or are under pressure.
Most parents don’t leave a child in the car because they don’t care or love their child. However, their mind is so pre-occupied with a deadline or errand they need to run, they can sometimes forget they have a child in the back seat. We don’t have to hash up the old news articles and heartbreaking stories of parents devastated because they left an infant in the back seat of their car only to forget and find their precious baby cooked to death under the brutal South Florida sun.
Unfortunately there are also some parents that could care less about their kids and treat the car like a baby sitter. This is absolutely horrible.
Good Samaritan Protection
NOTE:Â If you see a child alone in a car on a sunny day, Florida law allows you as a bystander to break the window of the car to gain access to the vehicle and save the child from cooking to death.
Why is it dangerous to leave a child in a car?
In addition to the fact that your child is unsupervised and unprotected, a car is like an oven. And in South Florida, that’s not just during the summer months, but all year long. Temperature.
For example, let’s say it’s a cool day in December wth lows in the 60s and a high of 80 degrees. Within just 50 minutes, your car’s interior temperature can climb to a scorching 120 degrees.
Now it’s summer and it’s scorching outside just walking to the car. With our high humidity, we’re sweating bullets with a high temperature in excess of 90 degrees. Your car can easily exceed 130 degrees.
If you leave a child in a locked car in Miami, they will literally roast to death. First they will start sweating profusely as their body tries to keep them cool. However, as the temperature continues to climb inside their vehicle, their now dehydrated body begins to experience organ failures as the body can’t compensate for the extreme heat and they die. And while a full grown adult may last longer in a hot car, that’s because of physics. It takes more energy to heat up a larger body than a smaller body. In other words, your child will cook much faster than you will.
Folks, nobody wants to see another tragedy. Please, whether you’re a parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, baby sitter, etc., if you put a baby in the back seat of your car, put a sticky note, set a reminder with your phone to alert you at your destination, but whatever you do, don’t leave a child in alone in a car.
God bless you all and stay safe.
