I jumped out of a perfectly good plane. I wouldn’t make a very sick kid do that. Or a well one.
I grew up when riding on the dropped gate of the station wagon to do our paper route was normal. My parents wouldn’t have put me in a car trunk to transport me to the hospital because I was sick enough to go to the freaking hospital.
And for those saying it’s not “really” abuse - how is it not neglect? Failure to provide proper care needed by a very sick kid you’re responsible for? Can you cite an authority that recommends transporting kids in car trunks?
All I know is that prison time for a primary caregiver and thousands and thousands in lawyers fees will make his future even brighter now! Score one for covid!
Back in the day, we did occasionally use the trunk to smuggle people into the Drive In. Two friends had an allegedly memorable time getting to know each other while sharing the close quarters.
I don’t know about others. But I’m from Texas and we don’t have much left of whatever social services were established prior to 1980 and we tend to make examples of people a lot. So it speaks to my hopelessness and pessimism about my surroundings (and theirs). I hope the media drops it and this family gets some support and education cause they clearly clearly need it. But ngl I have very little hope left to spare.
I grew up, like others, riding around without seatbelts, riding in the cargo part of station wagons and even in the back of a pickup truck on the flipping highway. I was never given a bicycle helmet, but was allowed to ride miles along a minor highway with no shoulder and a 55 mph speed limit at age 12. I survived, but I don’t think that stuff was at all okay, looking back. Even at the time (1980s) people knew better.
So, for everyone taking a trip down memory lane to defend this woman, do you think our learning about traffic safety plateaued in 1970 and we shouldn’t have to do anything any differently? Because traffic deaths per capita have dropped significantly since then, even though there are presumedly many more vehicles on the roads today. I know there are plenty of reasons, but one is improved safety laws.
As others have mentioned, wearing masks, and cracking the windows while pressurizing the vehicle by running the fans on full blast would’ve been a safer option for all.
The most troubling part to me is this person is a teacher. Someone whose job is the care and well being of children. Someone who should know better.
To those of you who say no big deal I rode in a trunk and I’m fine. Yeah I rode in a trunk, as a teenager, with a friend on a ride to high school because all the seats were full, and we hotboxed the trunk. Good times. Teenagers do stupid things but adults should know better. If you don’t see the difference here perhaps childcare isn’t for you.
Oh, I don’t because in the US it all depends on the people involved, and where the crime occurs. In this case, I figured she wasn’t going to have her child immediately taken from her, and that she’d be given the benefit of the doubt. My next prediction is that unless there’s a prior history of abuse, negative feedback from her son, or other incidents on her record, any penalties she faces won’t be severe.
what especially baffles me about this is - you don’t have covid symptoms without already being infectious. as a parent, it was already too late for her to avoid being exposed.
and if that’s too pedantic for some about how covid works, what was going to happen next exactly? have the kid sleep outside? no bathroom privileges? refuse to give food and water lest anyone get too close?
im sure the sick child would happily agree to all that too. heck, i set my own broken bones and stitched up my own gunshot wounds as a kid. that’s just good parenting /s
The comments on this topic leave me with one thought, parenting skills should be taught before you have a child, perhaps somewhere in the curriculum they can slip in the small but important point that as a parent you should never place a child in the trunk/boot of an automobile.
I am not with the mother, and I don’t consider her judgment to be rational in this case, for the following reasons:
Enclosing her son in a small windowless space is not going to make her safer. Even if she didn’t have a mask, she could have driven with all windows open. This isn’t Alaska, it’s Texas, so it’s probably a reasonably comfortable temperature outside, and virus doesn’t seem to travel very well in the open air. Fresh air from a moving car with open windows is not likely to cause her to be infected (if she wasn’t already).
Covid-19 (and especially the Omicron variant) is not Ebola. The current variant is not particularly deadly, especially for the vaccinated/boosted or young. I might consider her actions understandable if her son potentially had Ebola and was bleeding, but this is Omicron, and all her son is doing is breathing.
Perhaps she was trying (and now succeeding) to become the next OmiKaren on social media. But otherwise, the mother’s actions were stupid and indefensible.
Back in the early 90’s we had a big ford panel van, and we had planned a family trip around campsites in the US over summer vacation, so, on the day school got out we go home, and both me and my brother were running a fever, we both had pretty strong cases of strep throat. We ended up on the floor of the van on sleeping bags, popping penicillin we picked up from the Dr’s in the early morning and occasionaly being sick, after 48 hours we were back to normal.
I also have stories like my parents driving aross Australia in a 69 beetle with 9 month old me in a wicker cradle in the back, the only take away was we were LUCKY
Ha! I definitely remember coming down a road into Huntington on Long Island [headed, I probably hoped, for the Hamburger Choo-Choo] and standing in the back seat looking between the two front seats as we coasted into the village. And my parents were reasonably well-educated with regard to safety. My mom had been an ER nurse, so she’d see all sorts of horrors.
My next prediction is that unless there’s a prior history of abuse, negative feedback from her son, or other incidents on her record, any penalties she faces won’t be severe.
