Posted on 04/20/2015 9:14:41 AM PDT by No One Special
See my post 11. I could live with the misdemeanor—in many cases it is the equivalent of jaywalking. Less than perfect behaviour, but those who make a big deal about it are OCD. Yes, there should be a law against jaywalking, but people who sit around and fret about what other people do need to get a life.
It would be nice if the media publicized these case for the purpose of shaming the government.
I used to leave my 2 kids safely strapped into their seats if it was perfectly safe.
For example, the feed store to get our chicken feed was a rural store, you can park right at the front where there’s a big window. I could see them from inside the store and the conditions were perfectly fine (not hot). I was out within 5 minutes. It actually would have been pretty silly to NOT leave them safely in the van.
um... i raised my kid, and she was NEVER alone in the car. NEVER. it only takes a second for someone to jump in and either take the car, the kid, or do damage. it isn’t worth the convenience.
If you are a babysitter, that is somewhat different. Where you are also makes a big difference. I live in a very small town, with small parking lots, small lines, and most of the people know each other.
My question about leaving them alone in the driveway stands. If the four year old is asleep, did you ever haul in the one year old first, leaving the four year old momentarily unattended?
Stories like this are why if one or both of my kids (6 and 2 and a half) are with me when I’m out somewhere, they’re coming with me.
you don’t know. you could fall and be knocked unconscious. you could be abducted, or the child could. we have plenty of carjackings with infants in the car whilst mom/dad ran inside to pay for gas. not sure i would go so far as call the police, but i certainly wouldn’t leave my kid (and i never did) in teh car alone
When I lived in Europe (late 1990s), I used to see strollers with kids in them parked outside restaurants. Moms would be inside eating lunch. No one thought anything was wrong with that.
Now, the one with the 8 year old, I don’t think I would do that, but maybe it was not a “crime”.
There is a reason I live in Canuckistan rather than Connecticut. I live in a place where not only can I leave my kid in the car, I can leave my keys in the ignition, though my wife (who is from Toronto) has broken me of the habit. If you leave your keys in the ignition, they are a lot harder to loose. I wouldn’t advise doing it everywhere, but one should take local circumstances into account, and blanket laws and statements do not do this.
JudyinCanada has a good post right before yours.
I have sympathy for the mom. I don’t think she was an abusive mom. It always amazes me how the system seems to so often ignore much of true parental abuse and actually works hard in many cases to replace children from abusive homes right back into that very situation they were rescued from.
That being said, I would never trust elementary school aged children left in a parking lot to supervise younger children. All it would take is some adult pervert to come to the car and give some lame story about how their mom asked them to come to get them.
Im not sure what the purpose of this article is. Every summer I read horror stories about children being left in a locked car and dying from heat exhaustion and dehydration. I do not care if you parked your car in the shade with the windows down. I do not care if you didn’t want to wake up your child. I do not care if you were only gone for 10 minutes. YOU DO NOT LEAVE A CHILD UNATTENDED IN A CAR! Parenting 101. How can anyone defend this. This has nothing to do with liberals or democrats. This is common sense. 10 minutes is 9 minutes and 30 seconds longer than it would take for some freak to take your child. This is your kid we’re talking about. Your own comfort should not come before their safety you idiot. I feel as though this system worked. I’m willing to bet that you and the other parents in this story haven’t left your kid in the car again.
BTW—if you have more than one kid, life gets more complicated.
“The officer said his wife needed to call the police about an incident in a parking lot.
Courtney was baffled but did as instructed. “I just thought I needed to explain it,” she told me. “I thought that it was all a misunderstanding.”
She and the officer spoke for about 30 minutes.”
Big mistake. If the police had enough evidence to arrest her, they would have. Saying “they want to talk” was just another way of saying “we want you to give us more evidence so that we have enough to arrest you”.
Blue states...all three of them. I’m not surprised at all. This would never have happened where I’m from in Alaska.
“If these scenarios would’ve been the case when I was 6 or so, my mother would have been arrested because she left me in the car for 5 minutes while she used the post office to mail things. “
When staying with my grandmother, whom I adored, when she’d park the car in the town square, she’d station us to watch out for the meter reader before she went on short errands, with instructions to insert the penny she gave us if we saw a meter reader approaching. Being a woman of principle, she objected to the installation of meters for what had always been free parking, and refused to pay unnecessarily. Plus it gave us kids something entertaining to do. I imagine I was around 10 or so. (I’d never seen a meter reader before, so had to ask for a description, and I’ll tell you, I was nervous that I’d fail at lookout and disappoint my grandmother, so I kept an eagle eye out for ... exactly what I wasn’t sure.)
It wasn't that many years ago I was raising them but it was a totally different world. A world where people generally minded their own business.
BTW, hot-car deaths do happen. But that's because the parents go into a casino or a bar and spend hours inside. In my neck of the woods, a father had his child die because he went to work with him in the back seat and completely forgot he was there - it was 90 degrees and the child was strapped to his car seat for 10 hours. To all you would-be busy-body "heroes" out there, all of that is not even in the same ballpark as a harried parent dashing into the store for a quick loaf of bread. If you are really that concerned, then by all means, spend a few minutes by the car until the parent comes out. Give them a self-righteous lecture if that floats your boat. But don't go calling the cops on them and ruining their lives.
Reminds me of the witch-hunt that the MADD people are on, where they want to destroy the lives of people having a glass of wine at dinner.
Stupid, stupid "progressives." Always demanding new laws to prevent statistically tiny social imperfections, always making excuses when one of their own breaks the law.
When one soldier dies in combat, when one homosexual couple is offended at a bakery, when a tiny minority of legal gun owners use a gun illegally, they go batcrap crazy. But in this dweeb's mind, it should be okay to leave children in the car because the odds of something happening are low — a few abductions and deaths here and there would be more convenient for the "greater good" of lazy liberal parents who forgot to abort when they could have.
This article has plenty of blame for the butt-inskies, the third parties who called the cops.
And yeah. Too many people need to MYOB.
However, my Giva Dam meter for the moms here must be broken. Its not even moving.
1. The State is incapable of caring for my kids more, or better than I can.
2. I, and I alone, determine how to raise my children.
3. The progressive, it takes a Village communists need to be destroyed.
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