AN OTHERWISE-loving parent inexplicably forgets about a child in the car. The young child dies in the sweltering parked car.

In the United States, this happens 15 to 25 times each year.

This horrific fact is revealed in a recent harrowing Washington Post article, Fatal Distraction, which tells the tragic stories of parents who have lost children that way.

Writer Gene Weingarten interviewed 13 such mothers and fathers, including a Fulbright scholar who is a professor of education at the University of California at Irvine.

The latter forgot to drop his 10-month-old son off at a childcare centre one morning.

He returned from lunch to find the police and a crowd surrounding his vehicle and his son’s tiny corpse.

Mr Weingarten’s excellent piece is not easy reading for a paranoid mother like me.

I am always worrying about forgetting to pick my three-year-old son, Julian, up from pre-school. Mindful of my Swiss cheese-like memory, my husband sends me periodic SMS reminders to collect the boy.

But I fear that, some day, I may indeed lose track of time and fail to do so.

The bottom line of the Post article is that it can happen to anybody.

A parent gets stressed out at work or at home, gets confused by a change in routine and succumbs to the “out of sight, out of mind” syndrome, leaving his quiet baby buckled in a rear-facing car seat in the back.

If you haven’t experienced such colossal memory lapses before, you may be confident in thinking that it’ll never happen to you. Sadly, many parents are also quick to vilify bereaved parents whose kids have died in this unfortunate manner.

As Dr Ed Hickling – a clinical psychologist quoted in the article – points out, they are often judged with disproportionate harshness by the public because of a fundamental human need to maintain the narrative that terrible things do not happen at random.

Adds Dr Hickling: “When this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us.

We don’t want to resemble them – the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with.”

I haven’t been able to unearth any statistics about child deaths in locked parked cars here. But the issue – and the stories Mr Weingarten tells – has to be taken very seriously.

No matter how careful we think we are, mothers prone to memory blips could use any extra help to prevent this from happening.

Devices are one example.

Ironically, a child-presence sensor developed for cars by three National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) engineers – after one of their colleagues accidentally left his nine-month-old son to die in a parked car – has been unable to find a commercial manufacturer for the past five years.

Happily, there is a similar child-safety seat-monitoring system – US$69.95 (S$116) from www.babyalert.info) – which works with a keyring unit that sounds an alarm when a parent walks too far away from a vehicle while a child is still in it.

Perhaps car dealerships here can consider integrating such systems into back seats and offering them as add-on options.

After all, a safety feature like this will probably cost less than so-in-vogue GPSes – which are being bundled free – and potentially save little lives.

Meanwhile, I’ve absorbed the lesson in Mr Weingarten’s cautionary tale.

I think guiltily back to the one and only time I left Julian strapped in his car seat while I nipped off for 10 minutes – albeit with lots of head-craning checks – to buy a Christmas ham from a kerbside shop.

What was I thinking? Never again. The risks are too huge.

Let your vigilance slip for a minute and you might regret it forever.

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