IN THE discussion of the latest prominent news story about a mother who forgot her child not once but twice in her parked car and has been charged with his death, Josh F. writes:

I am in the process of raising a fourth two-year-old. The idea that one could forget a two-year-old in the car seems impossible. A child this age will almost certainly either be requiring constant attention or will have fallen asleep alerting one to this occasionally alleviating event.

Exactly. These deaths are inconceivable. These events are mind-blowing. Even if they are rare, they are the extreme manifestation of something very common: a callous detachment from the young. Liberalism has endlessly encouraged and celebrated this state of detachment in mothers. The fact that it has also encouraged parents to spoil and indulge their children, to shower them with gifts and gadgets, does not negate its murderous indifference. Indulgence and neglect are part of the same cultural phenomenon.

The child alone in his car seat, strapped in, crying in bewilderment, slowly dying from hyperthermia while his parent files papers or answers phones a few yards away, is the inevitable consequence of a radical estrangement between the generations and the withering away of the institution that protects the vulnerable: the traditional family.

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