Little discomfort the other day, opening my Hurry. A mother made the front page, with this title: “No one should go through what I went through”1.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
What she experienced: her 6-month-old son died of heat in a car, forgotten by his (now ex-)spouse.
It’s impossible to read Émilie Bilodeau’s text about the pain of this mother, Anaïs Perlot, without feeling a lump in her stomach.
I summarize: in 2018, at the beginning of the summer, the father of the child had to drop him off at the daycare.
He forgot to drop off the child, he went to work.
And the child died.
After the police investigation, the father was not charged. Like the father of Saint-Jérôme, in 2016, who had also forgotten his child in a car. In 2003, a father was charged with manslaughter for the same fatal oversight of his child, but the Crown eventually dropped the charges.
The mother of little Cassius, in The Presshad two messages, on Monday.
One, she asks that we impose security devices in cars, so that a child left alone is detected and, if necessary, an alarm is triggered. The coroner who investigated Cassius’ death asks the same.
Two, she wonders why the father hasn’t been criminally charged. She is thinking of filing a private complaint to reactivate the file, so that the father is accused.
And it is on this second point that I had a discomfort.
My discomfort is not related to the criminal complaint that Mr.me Perlot is considering filing — a procedure that rarely works — against her ex.
She has every right.
At Paul Arcand’s2Mme Perlot went further than in The Press, claiming that facts may have escaped the police. If so, reopen the case.
My discomfort comes from the certainties of Mme Perlot on the nature of forgetting in human beings. I quote her: “If someone always thinks about their phone, thinks about never forgetting it wherever they go, but doesn’t ask themselves the question with their child, that’s a problem for me. Another quote: “If a parent forgets their child in the car, it’s not an accident.” I owe her, my son. »
I’ll say it with three pairs of white gloves and walking on eggshells: Mme Perlot is wrong.
This is not my opinion, it is that of David Diamond, professor of psychology at the University of South Florida, who has studied these tragedies since 2004. I spoke about the Dr Diamond in 2016, after the tragedy of Saint-Jérôme3. He was quoted in an investigation by washington post on these tragedies that have killed 1,000 people in the United States since 19904.
“Our memory is imperfect,” David Diamond told me in an interview earlier this week. When these cases arise, many people say: “Of course, you can forget many things… But you can’t forget your child!” I understand this reaction. But it is unfounded. »
Memory is a faculty that forgets, they say. One could add that memory works at different levels, all activated by different parts of the brain: the prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus, the basal ganglia…
Professor Diamond has been studying human memory since 1980. He has spoken to dozens of parents since 2004 who have fatally left their child in a car. He has testified in about 20 trials of criminally accused parents.
And for him, it’s clear: these parents have been cheated by two competing memory mechanisms, prospective memory and habitual memory.5.
Habit memory: the one that regulates the routine, the one that makes us go to work on automatic pilot, without having to enter, five mornings a week, the address of our workplace in Google Maps.
Prospective memory: the one that regulates things to do in the future, for example not forgetting to drop off the child at the CPE this morning, when you are driving to work.
“In just about every one of these tragedies there is a break in routine,” says David Diamond. For example: the parent who forgets is not the one who usually drops the child off at daycare. »
Now, the conscious brain is structured for routine. In these tragedies of children fatally forgotten in a car, habitual memory crushes prospective memory.
Every week, the habitual memory overwrites our prospective memory. For example, when you forget to stop at the grocery store on your way back from work, even if you thought you had nothing for supper…
“But people say you can’t forget your child, teacher…
“I know,” David Diamond replies. It is a mystery to many people. But if you accept that someone may forgetting your child in a car means that you could forget them too. It’s like accepting that you don’t love your child. People therefore frame the issue as follows: good parents who do not forget their children, versus bad ones who forget them in a car…”
One day, David Diamond testified in a trial, for a parent who had fatally forgotten his child in a car.
“The parent had always said that it was impossible to forget his child, that it would certainly never happen to him… And it happened to him. »
where M.me Perlot is absolutely right when she talks about the urgency of imposing technological solutions so that children are not forgotten in a car.
These technologies exist6.
The state has imposed seat belts, airbags, brake lights, impact resistance standards, winter tires, ABS brakes, child seats, windshield wipers…
Why don’t we impose the devices which would make it possible to give the alert when a child is forgotten in a car, courtesy of the shortcomings of habitual memory?