A hot car can kill your child

If you think about it, a car is a greenhouse. It is a closed space with a lot of glass. This means that a car can heat up incredibly quickly in the sun, especially in the summer. If you leave your child in the car, your child can literally bake to death and die.

Try this experiment at lunch one summer day. Run your car with the AC on to cool it down to a comfortable temperature. Park it in the sun with the windows closed, turn the car off and walk away for 10 minutes. Then measure the temperature of the interior of the car with a themometer. A car can easily reach 120 to 130 degrees F (50 degrees C) in just 10 minutes. It is amazing how fast a car heats up in the sun. It only takes a few minutes to create fatal temperatures.

Even so, people leave kids in the car all the time. Here are several news stories that show the extent of the problem:

A child should never be left in a car, even for a minute. The reason is because it is easy to get distracted. You get out of the car thinking it will "only take a minute", but something happens and it takes five minutes, then ten. In just 10 minutes, the inside of a car has already become an oven, even if the windows are "down". In the winter, children die just as easily of hypothermia. Steps you can take Additional Resources