A serious one today, because there was some really sad news here last week about a three-year-old Yemeni boy, who died in a hot car after his family forgot about him and left him in the vehicle for almost three hours. The tragic incident, which happened outside the child’s house, has sparked a campaign in the UAE to remind people that heat kills when children or pets are left in cars (even at lower temperatures than on this poster.)
Because babies and young children are not able to regulate their body temperatures well, they warm three to five times faster than an adult, especially in a car, where the windows create a greenhouse effect. Backseat tragedies don’t just happen in the Middle East, either: very sadly about 450 children have died this way in the US since 1998.
I know I’m always comparing things to our lives in Arizona, but this is just one more I have to comment on! Cars and heat were a scary fact of life there – I think I worried as much about the boys accidentally burning themselves on the outside of a hot car as I did about them being trapped inside one! wonder if we were possibly even a little safer because we were so aware of the extreme heat. There have been quite a few of these incidents on the E. Coast and in the Midwest of the US – when it’s not quite so hot outside, it’s easier to forget that your car can quickly become an oven – enough to start a ‘teddy bear’ campaign. It’s suggested that you keep a teddy bear in the empty carseat, and when you put your child in the carseat, you strap the teddy (or other stuffed animal) into the front seat as a visual reminder that you’ve got a kiddo in the back. A sad story, but it’s good there’s a public awareness campaign.
That’s a great idea about the teddy bear – I do remember that if you just had one child in the back, and he fell asleep, it was really easy to forget that someone was there. So sad that this can have such tragic consequences.