Slow Down Baby aims to reduce child deaths
Old Lyme — Liz Reemsnyder, daughter of First Selectman Bonnie Reemsnyder, knows firsthand how easy it is to make a mistake that could have been disastrous.
About a month ago, the Old Lyme resident locked her keys in a running car with her now 9-month-old son, Zane, still inside.
One other thing: Her cellphone was locked in the car, too.
So she had to run into Stop & Shop and call the Old Saybrook Police Department to break into the car.
"It could happen to anybody," said Joe Campbell, Reemsnyder's uncle.
"And I have just one kid," Reemsnyder said. "I can't imagine having three."
Campbell and sister Julianne Godwin of Westbrook are aware of the statistics: Since 1998, about 680 children nationally have died after being left in cars, according to NoHeatStroke.org.
Slightly more than half of those deaths were because of distracted caregivers, according to the website SaferCars.gov.
So the brother-and-sister team have come out with a new product, Slow Down Baby, that is a $24.95 low-tech solution.
The product, sold locally only at the Bowerbird gift shop on Halls Road, is essentially a large tag that parents clip to their keychain or hang around their neck to remind themselves — or alert others — that they have a little one in the car.
When parents scoop up their child, they must leave the tag behind on the car seat by removing the lanyard from their neck or unclipping the bright yellow, oversized tag from their keychain.
When they forget to grab their child, and therefore still have the tag, the idea is that the product will be a reminder for parents or a conversation starter for others wondering what Slow Down Baby means.
"We wanted something that was simple and easy," said Godwin, the product's inventor. "It's a no-brainer."
Godwin, who works in food services for the state Department of Correction and is mother of two boys in their 20s, said her heart hurts every time she reads about an infant being left unintentionally in a hot car.
According to SaferCars.gov, heatstroke can set in when children reach a core body temperature of 104 degrees, and death can occur at 107 degrees.
In an unshaded car with windows rolled up, those temperatures can be exceeded in a matter of minutes during the summer.
And it is surprisingly easy these days, with all the distractions of cellphones and other electronic devices, to become disoriented and forget about a sleeping child in the backseat, said Godwin and Campbell.
Tragic incidents just last month included a Louisiana teacher and baseball coach who left a baby in his car, and a New York police officer who did the same.
"I do believe distractions happen," Godwin said.
"There's so much parent shaming right now in the media," Reemsnyder added.
So far this year, 19 deaths nationally have been tied to children being left in hot cars, compared with 24 for all of last year.
Connecticut has had only three incidents since statistics were kept related to children's hot-car deaths.
Fathers are slightly more likely to be responsible for car heatstroke deaths of children — 34 percent to 29 percent over mothers — and most deaths involve newborns to 3-year-olds, according to statistics.
But even older children can have trouble escaping a hot car because of child locks in the back seat, Campbell said.
Campbell said the first run of 1,000 Slow Down Baby tags is complete, with the tags produced in China.
If the product is successful, he said, he could see manufacturing being moved closer to home.
"It's the epitome of a small-town startup company," he said of SDB LLC, the formal name of the enterprise he and his sister have self-funded.
He is hoping Slow Down Baby becomes part of the lexicon, and that hospitals perhaps will hand out the tags to parents after the birth of a child, or that women will give them as baby-shower gifts.
"Our vision is to have this as a kind of an emblem," he said.
Perhaps in the future, Campbell said, a similar product could be used for pets.
The only real competition, he added, are a few apps being developed to remind parents of kids being left in the car and some efforts by car-seat manufacturers to create electronic means to warn that kids have not been removed from the car.
But Campbell said he sees high-tech as part of the problem today, adding more distractions to a parent's busy day.
The only challenge he sees to gaining traction for Slow Down Baby is convincing people of its necessity.
"Our biggest obstacle," he said, "is people thinking they would never leave a baby in a car. ... But the world is such a busy place, it happens."
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