Family Drives 90 Miles Before Realizing They Left Toddler Behind
A couple in France left their 3-year-old at a rest stop and drove two hours before realizing their daughter wasn’t in the car. (Photo: Twentieth Century Fox)
Parents in France forgot their child at a highway rest stop on Sunday, driving 90 miles toward their vacation destination before realizing their 3-year-old daughter wasn’t in the car, according to French authorities.
The young girl was discovered by another family, who notified the police that the little girl had been left alone, according to ABC news. The 3-year-old was able to tell the police what her family’s car looked like, and that she had seen her father drive away — with her mother, brother, and sister also in the car.
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The family, who was en route to a coastal town of southern France at the time, only realized she wasn’t in the car when they heard a police message on the radio asking them to pick up their daughter. “They were obviously traumatized,” Clara Thomas, deputy prefect of the town of Die, said on French TV. According to Thomas, the parents had no record of prior problems. It is unclear whether the parents will face charges.
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Stories of parents forgetting children have made plenty of headlines lately, though those incidents almost always involve a mom or dad leaving a child in the car, not driving away without them. David Diamond, a professor of psychology, molecular physiology, and pharmacology at University of South Florida and an expert in the phenomenon of parents forgetting their kids — technically called Forgotten Baby Syndrome — says this story deviates from the typical pattern.
“Usually, when good, well-meaning, not-negligent parents forget their kids, what you find is that these people are involved in some sort of routine, and they are driving a well-traveled route where they go from point A to point B all the time, so it’s almost automatic,” Diamond tells Yahoo Parenting. “So you might have a parent that sometimes drives straight to work and other times takes the child to daycare, and let’s say there’s a fork in the road and you can go to daycare or work — the habit-centered part of your brain might take you to work and then you just lose awareness that there is a child in the car.”
Diamond says this kind of thing happens incredibly often, though there are no hard statistics since parents who forget their kids aren’t likely to report it if no harm is done. But incidents like it, which involve leaving a child behind in a hot car and resulting in that child’s death, happen about 25 times a year, he says.
In the case of these French parents, Diamond says he can’t be sure what happened. “They were on vacation, so presumably this was a unique situation,” he says. “They were at a rest stop, so maybe they were stressed, but stress alone doesn’t necessarily make you forget things. In this case, I can’t think of any valid explanation for why they forgot the child, other than there being an element of negligence or drug use or something we don’t know about. But, as a memory scientist, this case makes no sense to me.”
When it comes to the more typical cases of Forgotten Baby Syndrome, Diamond says preventing it starts with realizing that it could happen to anyone, even the best of parents. “I really believe the first thing is accepting the possibility that you can forget a child,” he says. “The problem is that parents say ‘this only happens to bad parents, it could never happen to me.’ That feeling of invulnerability puts you at greater risk. Once you accept the possibility it could happen to you, then you are willing to do something to ensure it doesn’t happen.”
Diamond suggests putting something related to the child, like a diaper bag, in the front seat where you will see it. “That’s the most important habit,” he says. “It will remind you that the child is in the car.” People who refuse to do that, he says, are driving at their own peril.
In the case of this French family, Diamond says they should feel especially fortunate. “These parents are very lucky that nothing bad happened to their child,” he notes, “and that she was found by the right people.”
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