Out of the Window
July 1, 2008 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
A 3-year-old girl who has a “form of autism” was treated at a hospital and released after jumping out of her mother’s moving car. KY3 reports that:
The mother called 911 to report the girl jumped out of the moving car near the intersection of Farm Road 171 at Farm Road 66, south of Highway KK near Fellow Lake Recreational Area.
The child showed up six-tenths of a mile away from where the mother parked her car. Cleo Link heard a scratching at his door at 6986 N. Farm Road 171 and opened it to find the girl about 7:30 a.m.
An ambulance took the girl to a hospital. Corcoran says the mother has a proper child seat in the car. He doesn’t expect her to be cited or charged.
Yet another argument for child safety locks in the backseat, and on the windows.
I was constantly worried about that when my son was younger. From ages 2 through 5, he was a total escape artist–there simply was not a car restraint system on the market that he could not undo. (Even on the pre-school school bus!) Backseat door locks were crucial to my sanity and his survival.
We tried a seatbelt lock and Charlie figured it out in, oh, about 5 seconds (I still remember him grinning at me and waving the plastic piece). A family told us about their son opening the car door on the highway……we’ve kept the child safety locks on and any guests in the back seat just have to wait. Also had a period of Charlie putting his prism lenses out the window—-and the more we got upset, the more likely was to do it.
My 3yo daughter is high functioning autistic and an utter nightmare to keep in the car. We had the child safety locks on but she would always fiddle with them. I tried to remember to always double check the lock was on but occasionally it slipped by me. She loves to fiddle with buttons and clips – so the child safety lock, the door handles, car seat buttons.
A couple of times she managed to get the door open but thankfully we were on quiet roads and the car door alarm alerted me straight away.
Final straw came the day she opened her car door in peak hour traffic and leaned out to close it again. I was terrified she was going to hurt herself before I could pull over and get the door locked up and closed again.
My brother in law came over that night and removed the mechanism from inside her car door. So now it can only be opened from the outside.
Wow…how scary
Wow! That is truly scary. We have had no problems with the boys but we have a mini van with power doors. They won’t open when the car is moving. I have heard the buzzer go off a couple of times but that was when a foot nudged the button by accident. And with the Florida heat, we use a/c instead of opening windows.
Not surprising that this would be a common issue for autistic people. One of my earliest memories was of having a rattle with a ball trapped inside it. It also made noise (like rattles tend to do), and I was mildly interested in that, but the thing my mind focused on when I had that rattle was to figure out a way to get the ball out. Luckily I didn’t have much physical strength, as I was a small baby at the time. I have very strong and distinct memory of my thought processes at the time, how I went about trying to get it out there. Good thing babies don’t get access to power tools!
I also had a few times opening the doors when we were driving. Usually I closed it as soon as my parents noticed though, so there wasn’t much time the doors got to stay open. Also the seats were usually filled up with my two sisters and dad when I was in the car, so if I didn’t close it right away somebody else did, even though my mom was driving.