You know, I can never remember these incidences happening over 20 years ago. Either:
a) The sun’s rays are much hotter now (nah)
b) Car interior absorb radiation so much more readily (nah)
c) The incidences just weren’t publicized years ago like they are now (nah... babies dying is newsworthy in any age)
4) People are more stupid, more distracted, and lazier about tending to their charges (maybe)
bump
People ARE more stupid, inattentive and lazier. They are distracted by the most trivial things.
My theory is that we’ve always had a certain portion of the population that was idjits. Now, we’ve more people, so while that percentage is the same, it’s a larger number simply because there’s more people.
Of course, 24x7 news cycle makes this more newsworthy, on top the world wide reach of internet news makes this from a “local tragedy”, to a “worldwide phenomena of abandoned babies”.
Actually C has a lot to do with it. Yeah babies dieing are newsworthy, but really only local newsworthy. But in this modern internet age there’s no such thing as local news, it’s ALL national and even international. This is an incident that happened in Oklahoma, got reported in Ohio, then got picked up by where ever Jalopnik is and now here we are talking about it. 20 years ago it would have been reported where it happened and MAYBE where the parents were from, and nobody that doesn’t live in those two areas would have heard about it.
Cars used to have side vent windows that did a lot to get a flow of air through a hot vehicle.
When my now adult children were babies, they rode in the front seat right in the middle in a sling-type car seat which hooked over the back of the front seat. They were just fine and you definitely couldn’t overlook them. Much easier to attend to.
Actually, babies left in hot cars is one of the modern media's minor hobby horses. It combines with their other minor and major hobby horses to create a society fearful of all sort of risks and susceptible to nanny state regulation.
You never used to hear about babies left in hot cars back in the day, although I'm sure it must have happened. As for babies driven across country in cars without air conditioning, that was routine.