Kids and cars

This was a story that turned out to be a much easier to write than it was to research and report. It’s Monday’s Digital Savant column, which runs a bit longer and bigger than usual as a lead Life & Arts story.

It’s about the horrible phenomenon of children left in cars who die of heat stroke. It happens 33 times per year nationwide on average and shows no sign of abating despite calls for more awareness and efforts to incorporate technology into vehicles that could prevent these cases from happening. In 2010, the number peaked at 49 and as of this writing, 15 such deaths have already been reported for 2012.

My goal was not to write any kind of definite article about this because that has already been written. The heartbreaking, rigorously reported, Pulitzer Prize-winning 2009 Washington Post story, “Fatal Distraction” by Gene Weingarten is the starting point for any discussion on what happens. (And if you are one of those people who believes as a parent that it could never happen to you and that parents who lose a child this way accidentally should be prosecuted as criminals, please read the Weingarten article before commenting.)

I also found the transcript of a live chat that Weingarten held after the story was published to be incredibly helpful. And by helpful, I mean that my wife came upstairs asking if I was OK when she heard me upstairs in the office gasping and crying halfway through the original article. It’s a tough read, but also a must-read.

Instead of rehashing that excellent piece, my article was meant to look at the tech aspect of this — why there hasn’t been technology built into vehicles yet to prevent such accidents and if such technology does exist, why it’s not selling like gangbusters to parents who otherwise buy every safety apparatus out there. The whole article idea started when I was emailed by a local inventor hoping to sell just such a technology and that led to the other sources in the story.

As I say in the article, I’m haunted by the idea that something like this could have happened to me in the hazy, forgetful, incredibly stressful first year of parenting (and even after that) and I think writing this story helped me deal with that fear to some degree. (You can also read the Statesman.com version of the article here.)

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I’m on vacation right now.

It’s the first official vacation on the books I’ve taken all year and by around June I was getting really, really antsy about needing a break. I was also sweating quite a bit, but I bet that had more to do with the start of summer than stress.

Later this week, I’m attending BlogHer to do some writing research, but also hoping to have some great food and enjoy New York. My wife and a good friend of ours are going and we’ve already got tickets to The Book of Mormon and plans to eat bagels until we can’t walk.

I worry that we’re trying to cram too much into a trip where I’m already booked up for two solid days at the conference, but I don’t care. I miss traveling so much that I’ll take it.

I have a bunch of stuff I wrote in advance running in the paper over the next week, but I’ll wait till I’m back in town to go over all that. For now: NYC! Excitement!