How about analyzing the series of dangerous conditions that failed leading to a child dying in a car? For example, why have we built a car dependent society where you need to put a child in a car to do virtually anything?
Blaming the last failure in a chain of failures -- the drunk driver, the tired parent, the 737 pilot --- prevents prevention.
I’m a parent of a toddler. Reading this article hit me hard. I could not stop imagining this happening to my child. Stories like this used to be tragic, but now it feels personally tragic.
At the same time, I agree with this. I’ve been thinking a lot about the structural ills of modernity for years. So while others have mentioned this might be gauche, I think these are exactly what we should be discussing as a society.
It isn’t just building a society where we are so car dependent. We have also lost the social net of extended families, village and communities.
Where were the grandparents and extended families that could watch a kid so that they don’t have to go to daycare?
Why are we so driven for material success that we overwork and juggle the care of children with other things?
When that toddler turns to a teen, how has our world of “share this” and “retweets” that changed our sense of truths affect that teen? Gen-Z are already struggling to make sense of this.
100% agreed. Turning a parent a few years ago, has completely changed my personal experience of car-dependent cities, from a more intellectual curiosity into why it came to be, to something that I feel innately as a great malevolent force. Technology is not divorced from value-systems, and car-technology is inherently sociopathic.
> Where were the grandparents and extended families that could watch a kid so that they don’t have to go to daycare?
It's heartbreaking really.
> When that toddler turns to a teen, how has our world of “share this” and “retweets” that changed our sense of truths affect that teen?
While I have an unbridled confidence in my children, I still worry about their teen years. Adolescence has always been hard, how much harder will it be for them, with pervasive social media, and rudderless and overwhelmed adults at the helm.
Yeah, I remember the early years of Wired magazine, and buying into the idea of technology being value-neutral. And it's not. And this has been observed before. Marshall McLuhan lived through mass-electrification, broadcast radio and TV and talked about it extensively with "the medium is the message".
> Adolescence has always been hard, how much harder will it be for them, with pervasive social media, and rudderless and overwhelmed adults at the helm.
I have a teenage stepdaughter and got a view into how destructive social media has been -- close contact with behavioral hospitals. It's worse than the reports about teenage girls having low self-esteem and have suicidal ideation. My wife's aunt has been in special-ed for years, and has mentioned a rise in kids who are not resilient, lack grit and growth-mindset; don't even mention being anti-fragile. An example being, a cell phone was taken away during classtime from a high school kid, who proceeds to roll around on the ground in a toddler fit because his world has crumbled without a cell phone.
Two recent articles that had been posted here on HN comes to mind:
That second article describes a fake conspiracy theory that had enough of the Gen-Z markers where the Zoomers know it is fake and ironic, but the conspiracy theorists don't. In a lot of ways, stuff like that is how the Zoomers look like they are coping with a world where we can't agree on basic truths, undermining of social institutions across the political spectrum, and fractured values.
With my toddler, my wife and I are making some conscious choices about values, and even world views and paradigms. Emotional intelligence is just as important as being able to reason; we've been working our way through Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood (the successor for Mr. Roger's). I've been slowly absorbing and integrating the Living Systems World View and Regenerative paradigm (Carol Sanford, Regenerative Life). I've already got things I learned about grit, growth mindset, anti-fragility that's encapsulated by a traditional Chinese cultural value of gongfu, and will be passing on to my toddler. We're already going to implement something from traditional cultures, and expressed in Daniel Tiger's as "everyone's big enough to help with something" (https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/09/6169288...). That is, I want my kids to grow up knowing they can voluntarily contribute meaningfully to the greater community and society, and that drives the development of growing their capacity to do so.
Great, thank you for all the links, looking forward to dig more into it.
> Emotional intelligence is just as important as being able to reason
+100
Side-note wrt. McLuhan, I think we'll look back at the 70s as a time when we already had these most perceptive understanding of modernism and its fallout, e.g. it's amazing how relevant Wolfe, Jacobs, Lasch, McLuhan, Baudrillard, ... still are today in understanding the current condition. But then nothing really changed, if anything, we just doubled down for another 50 years. Keeping fingers crossed for grassroots change this time around.
Bingo. The fact that performing routine errands such as food shopping requires a multi ton machine accompanying each human indicates the contributing failures here started long before the specific incidents. Another good book on the topic is Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow.
Sad this is getting downvoted hard. Probably because it feels gauche to bring this up in context of this article. Sort of every time a child accidentally gets shot, you cannot bring up the fetishization of guns as the underlying condition.
Anyway, you have my upvote. The accidental killing of children with our cars (which forgetting them in the backseat is only a minuscule portion of) is purely 100% because the public realm we've built is unaccessible without cars. Revealing too that the majority of "fixes" to this problem are additional technological layers (cars with cooling mechanisms! occupant alert system! mnemotechnic devices! better code enforcement!), rather than supporting the removal of misapplied technology in the first place.
Blaming the last failure in a chain of failures -- the drunk driver, the tired parent, the 737 pilot --- prevents prevention.
There Are No Accidents.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/There-Are-No-Accident...