The news of the death of two children from Bulgaria, who were found dead in a parked, locked car in the Cypriot village of Xylofagu, shocked the country. The boys, aged 8 and 10, arrived in Cyprus in mid-May, writes the Cypriot website philenews.com.
According to publications in Bulgarian media, the children went there to spend the summer vacation with their father. An investigation is underway to clarify whether this is a case of parental negligence. According to the Cypriot publication, citing local investigative authorities, the boys spent over three hours in the locked car, and their death was probably due to the high temperature that developed due to the heat.
Forgetting a child in the car
Such tragic cases are not uncommon. In 2007 in the USA, 9-month-old Bruce died of heatstroke after being forgotten by his mother in a car. At the time, his death attracted enormous public attention and sparked a wide discussion on the topic. Since then, there have been hundreds of cases of babies and young children dying in cars due to high temperatures. Most recently, there was a similar case in Germany.
A car can quickly become a death trap. With an outside temperature of 30 degrees and direct sunlight, the temperature inside the car quickly reaches 40 degrees, and after just one hour it jumps even above 50 degrees.
"Such conditions are a potential danger for any person, but especially for a small child who is strapped into a child seat with a seat belt and has no way to free himself, it's a real trap," says a pediatrician.
There is even a concept for such situations - psychologists speak of "forgotten baby syndrome". In this case, it is usually not about children who have been deliberately forgotten or abandoned - in most such cases, the parents are caring and normal-minded people who love their children. Why does it come to that?
What is "forgotten baby syndrome"?
David Diamond is a psychologist who has been studying the question of how parents forget their children in cars for decades. The aforementioned case of the death of a nine-month-old baby in the USA has been investigated and described in specialized literature. What is the explanation? It turns out that Bruce's mother - Lynn Balfour, who was accused of involuntary manslaughter after the child's death, had been suffering from severe insomnia in the previous days and was forced to deal with various family crises. On the tragic day in question, things did not develop in the usual way. For example, the bag with diapers and other baby accessories was not - as usual - in the front seat, as a kind of routine visual reminder that the baby was also in the car.
All these factors, according to psychologist David Diamond, influence the so-called. prospective memory. Prospective memory is the memory that, unlike retrospective memory (for past events), reminds us that we need to perform certain planned actions in the future - for example, that we need to take medicine at a certain time, call a colleague or buy things for dinner. Diamond describes six factors that can disrupt prospective memory and make us forget our own intentions: sleep deprivation, chronic or acute stress, distraction, doing many things at once, lack of reminders about upcoming tasks, as well as performing automated routine actions.
The described factors lead to increased internal tension, says Berlin-based psychotherapist Daniela Kochalevent. If this tension is too high, rational human behavior becomes difficult. "In this case, we start to act either impulsively or behave as if we are on "autopilot", and this has consequences - we forget to take our prescribed medications, we forget an appointment or a doctor's appointment, we can even forget that our child was left alone in the car," says the psychotherapist.
Intention or negligence? What causes "forgotten baby syndrome"?
"We can never say with 100 percent certainty what a person is thinking. To assess whether the parents forgot the child intentionally or accidentally, psychologists look at their previous behavior and biographies, because they help to assess their specific behavior in this case," says the psychotherapist.
In the trial against Lynn Balfour, for example, it could not be proven that she wanted to harm her son consciously. It's just that something that never happened was imprinted in her mind that day: Bruce was at the babysitter's, just like any other day. Such very real, but actually false memories have been the subject of research in cognitive psychology for decades.
Child seats with an alarm system against forgetting
Many parents also say that they have experienced similar things. Sometimes the parent remembers a little later and corrects their mistake, so it does not always end in a tragic end. In Italy, however, they do not want to rely on chance. Since 2019, child car seats have been introduced there that have an integrated alarm signal. It is activated if the child is left alone in the car - then the system sends a message to the parents' smartphone.
There are no exact statistics on how often deaths of children forgotten in the car occur. "However, we should not forget that parents who make such a tragic mistake are punished with feeling guilty for life", says psychologist Kochalevent.
Author: Julia Vergin