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Brittney Hernandez
Dr. Smith
English 1302
February 5, 2021
Nightmares we should Prevent:
Analysis of “It Can Happen to Anyone: Forgetting About Your Child in a Car”
“It Can Happen to Anyone: Forgetting About Your Child in a Car” by Hylton I. Lightman is
an article developed in the Orthodox Union that explains the science behind children being
forgotten in vehicles and the science provided shows that the horrific child car death can
happen to anyone. Lightman is a board-certified pediatrician and member of the American
Academy of Pediatrics, which serves pediatric and adult allergy and asthma clinics and hospitals.
Also, Dr. Lightman is actively involved in teaching pediatric and family nurse practitioners. The
rise of child car deaths has recently gained his attention and is the reason for the research he
has developed. I am researching leaving children behind in a car. What I want to know is the
answer to this question: If we know the dangers of leaving kids in hot cars, why is it still
happening? This source will be helpful because the information is scientifically proven and it
explains why children get left in cars. This article outlines scientific evidence of the brain’s
memory systems, the factors that cause the competition between the brain’s memory systems,
and why child car deaths should never happen by giving solutions.
Dr. Lightman begins by stating we should never judge parents who forget their children
in cars. Parents who have left their children behind are not bad, it only happens because of the
way our brains work. Anyone with a vehicle, caring for a child, is vulnerable. So, to break it
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down, our brains have two memory systems that seem to compete with each other, habit
Memory and Prospective Memory. Habit memory involves responsibilities that have been
repeated and are completed automatically. For example, during your workweek, you take the
same roads every day to get to and from work. Habit memory allows us to multi-task without
being fully conscious so that while we are driving, we might have a conversation with another
person or listen to a podcast; think of this as being on auto-pilot mode, Lightman says.
Prospective memory is a type of memory that involves remembering to do something you plan
on doing or remember a planned intention at a future point in time. “It is a daily occurrence
that habit memory will prevail over the prospective memory” (Lightman). So, the reason for
children being left or forgotten in cars is because of the continued battle between the brain’s
