Fighting Adolescent Vehicular Heatstroke Deaths

When
I was in the first grade, my father forgot my brother and me in the
back seat of his car. He had driven to work before he realized he had
forgotten to drop us off at our school. This past summer, while
volunteering at the Sylvia Kuvet Memorial Child Care Center, the
subject of infant deaths in hot cars came up during a conversation I
had with the director of the center. April, May, June, July – each
month saw helpless children as young as seven-months to
three-years-old perish in hot cars all around Texas. I did not want
this to happen to any of the children I was caring for at the child
care center. This was an urgent problem that needed solving.

I
began researching the scope of this issue and discovered that Texas
had the highest number of child deaths due to heatstroke in hot cars
in the nation. And according to noheatstroke.org (2016), more than
half of these deaths were the result of children being “forgotten”
by a parent or caregiver, a problem that was clearly preventable.
Many car companies were already engineering systems to go in their
future cars to prevent these tragedies, but I wondered if there was
something I could do right now. After a few weeks of brainstorming, I
finally came up with a simple and achievable solution-a yellow
diamond-shaped tag for hanging on the rearview mirror to remind
drivers to “Check Backseat for Child.” 

The
car tag was inexpensive and easy to make and could be deployed
immediately. Its bright color, bold caption, and diamond shape were
designed to serve as a warning and constant reminder to drivers not
to forget their precious cargo in the backseat. After I presented the
idea to the director, she was so impressed that she had them produced
and distributed to the parents at the childcare center. As of today,
a hundred of these car tags have been in use locally, with further
plans to produce and distribute them to daycare centers throughout
Brazoria County, Texas.