Columnist Susan Snyder: Laws alone can’t make good parents

Tuesday, April 9, 2002 | 8:18 a.m.

This is a delicate subject.

And I'm going to handle it in an indelicate manner.

What is wrong with a legal system that would consider lodging felony child-neglect charges against a parent who leaves her child unattended in a bathtub, where he nearly drowns, but does nothing to the parent who leaves a child to bake to death inside a car?

We're not talking about who gets to walk free, because neither of these parents do that. Their lifetime burdens will always weigh heavy with despair.

It's not likely that anything constructive would come of charging parents who made a mistake or forgot or didn't think that a few minutes of inattention would make a difference. If the risk of injury or the death of your own child isn't enough to make you slow down and think, what good is the threat of a felony charge?

According to a report published last week in the Sun, police are investigating the deaths of two infants who drowned in bathtubs.

And two other children, both younger than 2, nearly drowned last month. One of them had been left alone in the tub while his mother talked on the telephone and watched "Survivor." The other fell into the family's swimming pool after squeezing betwen the bars of a locked gate.

Last year nearly 60 children younger than 14 years of age drowned or nearly drowned. Two infants died in locked cars last summer after their parents forgot about them being there. Those parents weren't charged with crimes.

And maybe criminal charges aren't the answer. They smack of retribution and they don't solve the problem.

I was talking with a state public safety official last week about kids who do dumb things to themselves -- such as driving a Jeep into a hole 35 feet deep while tearing around construction sites where they don't belong. How do we, as a society, raise children with judgment like that?

"We don't," he said. "Nobody's raising them. That's the problem."

People have kids and then say they need time for themselves or time "to find themselves," he added. "But that's not what you signed up for."

Nope. Parents sign up for no more sleeping in on weekends. They're going to be late for work, miss "Survivor" or be forced to tell the friend at the other end of the phone that they can't talk right now.

"It's not that we don't feel badly about the parents," Erin Breen, executive director of the Safe Communities Partnership, said. "But anytime you have small children, you don't leave them alone."

Not ever, she says. Not for three minutes or 10. Not for two hours with an 8-year-old sibling. Not for anything.

It takes a long time to be a parent, she says. Once you are a parent, you always are a parent.

And spending time is more like doing time if you end up being a parent whose child died from inattentiveness.

"It's part of the fabric of society anymore," Breen said. "Parents play Russian roulette, thinking it'll only be for a few minutes. Being cognizant of a child is a 24-hour-a-day job."

Never leave a child unattended. That's the issue. It's not about isolated incidents in bathtubs, hot cars or swimming pools. It's our approach.

The crime of inattention has no punishment, but claims many victims.

We need to slash whatever we have to from our lives and raise the children. Too many are simply sustaining and surviving to adulthood.

And too many aren't.