By lilac09
Many of us must have heard the shocking news that recently happened in Texas –a father who supposed to drop off his 18 month son at day care center that day, forgot the baby in the car at the company parking lot. In the afternoon, when a passerby happened to notice the baby and call the police, the baby had already been long dead. In such scorching hot summer days, especially in Texas, confined within the car under the sun with all windows up and no air conditioning, the poor baby was baked to death.
What shocked me most is that the couples are Chinese. Chinese parents who always come across as overprotective and cautious ones shouldn’t and wouldn’t allow this happen. But parents are human beings. They do make mistakes, even for good parents, although this is the kind of mistake no parents can afford to make.
When I went into the details of the news, there were many unusual things that should have caught by the parents’ radar to prevent the tragedy from happening. There are some lessons we also can learn from this as parents, but not in a hard way.
The father and mother switched their cars that morning on their way to work. It is not hard to tell usually it is the mom who drops the baby at daycare center. But that day the duty somehow shifted to the father. That is unusual No1 – routines are broken. When routines are broken, errors are prone to follow. So we need to be very careful when we find our daily schedules have a sudden change. Do something to remind us in advance, like posting a note somewhere obvious to you or tell your partner/spouse to help you remember it. That works like double security.
If the father had put his briefcase or his laptop on the backseat as a reminder, which would force him to turn around to retrieve his stuff when he parked the car, he would see the baby, mistakes avoided in the first time.
If the mother remembered to call her hu*****and to check on their baby that morning, the blunder would have been corrected before it was too late.
Mothers are always paranoid when it comes to their dear babies. They always care too much, worry too much and think too much according to most hu*****ands. They tend not to trust anyone, even the father of the children. In above case, it won’t even take a paranoid mom to call her hu*****and to check on the baby if the original plan has been changed. In my opinions, we all need to be a little paranoid, a little skeptical when it comes to kids, especially when they are little. They completely rely on you to survive in this world. We have to take that heavy responsibility with all our heart.
Lots of comments on line said that they couldn’t believe how a father can leave his baby son in car and totally forget about it for a whole day. Not all the people are capable of multitasking. Many people are single tracked minded, who can only do things in serial. According to the news the father has just got his current job after unemployed for a while. Maybe he was too preoccupied with his work to set his mind on anything else. Men traditionally as the bread earner of the family are under more career pressure compared with women. For Chinese men abroad, this pressure is even harder. I am not trying to exempt this father with excuses. Nowadays, in such bad economy, we all somehow so caught up with these kinds of “important things” – job, house, status and stocks that we often neglect what seems so common to us: family, kids and health, thinking these will always be there with us until one day life may prove us wrong in a hard way. Cherish what we have and count our blessings.
No matter the father will be sent to jail or acquitted, nothing can be more punishable than losing beloved son by his own negligence. Their relationship if not smashed will be severely compromised after this devastating accident. My heart goes to the family. Hope this kind of tragedy will not repeat to all families.
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