Reply #25: If you can forget your cellphone you can forget your child.. [View All]

[Fumesucker]

At least that is the conclusion of someone who researched this tragic phenomenon..

http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2009/03/09/fatal_distraction/

Some parents actually drive all the way to the daycare center with their dead children in the back seat before realizing what has happened.

In every instance he covers, the parents responsible were dealing with unusual interruptions in their morning routine, got distracted and believed they'd already dropped their children off at daycare or with the baby sitter -- when in reality, they'd skipped that step and left the children in their parked cars as they went to work. Says Diamond, "The important factors that keep showing up involve a combination of stress, emotion, lack of sleep and change in routine, where the basal ganglia is trying to do what it's supposed to do, and the conscious mind is too weakened to resist. What happens is that the memory circuits in a vulnerable hippocampus literally get overwritten, like with a computer program. Unless the memory circuit is rebooted -- such as if the child cries ... it can entirely disappear." Weingarten makes it chillingly clear how the lack of that "reboot" can lead to parents sincerely believing their kids are safe in their daily routines while they're actually dying. "Several people ... have driven from their workplace to the day-care center to pick up the child they'd thought they'd dropped off, never noticing the corpse in the back seat. Then there is the Chattanooga, Tenn., business executive who must live with this: His motion-detector car alarm went off, three separate times, out there in the broiling sun. But when he looked out, he couldn't see anyone tampering with the car. So he remotely deactivated the alarm and went calmly back to work."