See a Kid in a Car? Get Out Your Crowbar and Start Smashing, Says New Law

Tennessee has just made it legal
to break into a
car if you see a child in there and have a “good
faith belief” that he or she will suffer harm if not immediately
removed.

In other words, feel free to get out the crowbar.

This would make sense if we had a realistic sense of when kids
are truly in danger. But we don’t. We have been told by the media
and the government that kids are in danger absolutely any time they
are waiting in the car, even for a single minute. Look
at this
story, for instance: a mom found guilty of neglect for not
hauling her sleeping kid into the store with her on a 10 minute
errand. Or this
one—a four-minute errand. Or this
one, a mom berated by a “Good Samaritan” for a
20-second errand.

I hear from moms who got yelled at for returning their shopping
cart to the corral after first getting their kids into their car
seats, as if this put their kids in mortal peril.

We have become so hyper sensitized to the danger of kids waiting
in cars, we can no longer see the difference between a child
waiting while mom picks up the pizza and a child locked in the car
all day while mom plays the slots.

But there is a big difference. I can find no instance of a child
dying in a car who was there for the duration of a short
errand. Of
the 30-40 kids who died in parked cars, 86 percent perished
because their parents forgot they were in the car and didn’t come
back for hours, or the children got into the car unbeknownst to the
parents and then couldn’t get out. (That wouldn’t be the case in a
parking lot.)

The Tennessee law
requires that before a would-be Samaritan crowbars the car they try
actually opening the door, and also call 911. But that immediately
involves the police in a parenting decision. A far better course of
action would be to simply stand by the car for a while and wait for
the parent to return.

Smashing the window or prying open the door without waiting a
while for the parent is extreme. It’s acting as if every time a
child is waiting in a car he’s in danger, when—thank
goodness—that’s not the case. We know that because most of us often
waited in the car as kids.

That practice simply was not labeled negligence back then,
because it wasn’t and still isn’t. It’s a decision that decent,
rational parents who love their kids make every day.

Sometimes it makes sense to bring a child in while running
an errand, sometimes it doesn’t. Parents should be allowed to make
that choice without the law breathing down their necks.