What’s wrong with this admonition from the Department of Child and family Services in Illinois, which states, “NEVER LEAVE A CHILD ALONE IN THE CAR — IT’S THE LAW”?
Well, first of all, it’s not true. As Diane Redleaf, Founder/Legal Director of the Family Defense Center in Chicago just explained to me in an email:
DCFS had announced on its web page that leaving a child alone in a car for even a minute is “against the law.” That is absolutely and unequivocally false; there is no such law.
Nor, she adds, should there be:
The last thing we need is more micromanagement of parenting decisions like running a simple errand–picking up a birthday cake that the parent has called about in advance, running into the store while a child sleeps in a shaded and cooled down car, or…allowing children to wait in a care in a school parking lot while the parent goes in to get another child.
Yet the government has opened investigations in all these cases. One of the moms is even forced to wear a monitor now, like a work-release felon. Asks Redleaf: “Have we gotten to be such a police state that we don’t trust parents anymore to do basic errands with their children?”
Um…yes: DCFS has apparently decided that a child is literally in danger for even a minute in the car. That must pre-suppose that a child is OUT of danger if he or she is dutifully taken out and walked across the parking lot.
And yet we have seen three children (that we know of) struck by cars and killed in parking lots just this July.
So why has Illinois’ DCFS classified as deadly — sitting for a minute in a stationary car — something that is not? Criminalizing parents who let their kids wait in the car for five minutes is not going to bring back the ones who were forgotten there for five hours.
It’s like lumping “driving with a broken taillight” into the same category as drunk driving. All they have in common is a car. Waiting alone for a few minutes, provided the car is air-conditioned or the windows are open, is no more dangerous than waiting while a freight train passes. It is simply sitting in an unmoving car.
Illinois is not the only state going overboard when it comes to kids and cars. Nineteen states have laws forbidding car waits of varying lengths, and some obfuscate the way Illinois does. In Texas, for instance, the law states that children under six can’t be left alone for longer than five minutes, unless supervised by someone older than 14. However, when I was in Dallas a few years ago, there were signs flashing along the highway, “Never leave a child in the car, even for a minute!”
In California, meanwhile, where a child age 6 or under can’t be left in a car with the ignition on, citizens hear a stricter message: “We don’t want anyone to leave any child alone in a car for even one second,” Emma Oldenberger, a spokeswoman at AAA of Northern California told SFGate.com.
As for the rationale that kids are vulnerable to kidnapping during that brief window, let’s remember how incredibly rare stranger danger abductions are.
I realize it’s summer and it’s hot. I’m not suggesting kids wait in stifling cars with the windows up and a.c. off, while the parents shop for the week’s groceries. And if a child is spotted in a parking lot where workers park — the IBM lot, say — by all means, sound the alarms! That child was most likely forgotten there, which IS the way kids die.
But that’s different from arresting a parent who runs in to get a rotisserie chicken, or a life vest she forgot, or headphones for the plane — a single, simple errand undertaken by loving parents who take into account the time they will be away from the car, and the temperature.
So why are Illinois lawmakers so intent on criminalizing any mom or dad who’d do this? Could it be that they don’t research their edicts and therefore don’t realize they are scientifically unfounded? That more kids die in parking lots than in parked cars? Or are they in need of even more parents to investigate, instead of trying to find kids who are actually starved and abused?
Is there so little real danger in Illinois that they have to rough up law-abiding parents to stay busy?
Lenore Skenazy is founder of the book and blog Free-Range Kids, and a contributor at Reason.com.
