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Eleven children have died in driveway and parking lot incidents in the United States in just 17 days, according to Kids and Car Safety, the national nonprofit that tracks deaths and injuries involving children and vehicles. The grim count comes as the first major heat wave of the season pushes temperatures into triple digits across parts of the country, bringing with it the other summertime vehicle danger: hot car deaths, which have already claimed five children this year. The organization is urging parents to treat the area around the car as seriously as the road, because the numbers say the family driveway is one of the most dangerous places a small child will stand all summer.
What Is Happening
Kids and Car Safety tracks what it calls non-traffic incidents: backovers, frontovers, hot car deaths, and other vehicle tragedies that happen off public roads, mostly in driveways and parking lots. These incidents sit in a strange blind spot of public awareness because they rarely make national news individually, yet they follow the same patterns every year, and they spike in summer.
The recent cluster of 11 deaths in 17 days is driven largely by children being struck by slow-moving vehicles in their own driveways. And the profile of those crashes is changing. “We have seen a decrease in the number of children who are being backed over. But at the same time, we have seen an increase in the number of front over tragedies,” Amber Rollins, the organization’s executive director, told KBAK Eyewitness News in Bakersfield this week.
The reason is parked in most American driveways. Backup cameras have been mandatory in new vehicles since 2018, and they have helped. But roughly 80 percent of new vehicles sold in the US are now SUVs and trucks, and their tall, long hoods create a forward blind zone that can hide an entire preschooler. There is no federal requirement for front-facing cameras or sensors. “The reality is that there’s a blind zone that exists behind, on the sides, and in front of all vehicles where small children can’t be seen,” Rollins said.
Children under 5 are the most vulnerable, partly because of their size and partly because of how they think. A toddler chasing a ball into the driveway is thinking about the ball, not the car. The organization has even coined a term for one heartbreakingly common scenario: “bye bye syndrome,” when a child slips out of the house to wave goodbye or follow a departing parent and walks into the vehicle’s path. Parents who have lived through it tell Rollins the same thing over and over: it happened too fast to explain.
The Hot Car Half of the Problem
The same warm months bring the danger inside the vehicle. Kids and Car Safety documented 37 hot car deaths nationwide in 2025, and five so far in 2026, with the peak season just beginning.
The physics are unforgiving. A parked car works like a greenhouse: heat comes in through the glass and has nowhere to go. Most of the temperature rise happens in the first 10 minutes, which is exactly the window of a quick errand. And children heat up far faster than the adults making that calculation. A child’s body temperature rises three to five times faster than an adult’s, which is why a delay that would leave a grown-up sweaty can leave a toddler in critical condition.
The most common scenario is not what most people assume. It is rarely a careless parent who decided to leave a child in the car. “The most common scenario is when an otherwise loving, responsible parent has a change in routine, they’re extremely sleep deprived, and they literally lose awareness that the baby’s asleep in the back seat,” Rollins said. Memory researchers have documented this failure mode for years: an exhausted brain switches to autopilot, the usual routine takes over, and a quiet sleeping baby provides no interruption. It can happen to anyone, which is exactly why the prevention strategies are built around habits rather than vigilance.
What Safety Experts Recommend
Kids and Car Safety’s recommendations are deliberately simple, cheap, and routine-based:
- Walk all the way around your vehicle before moving it. Every time, even for a short reposition in the driveway. Most driveway tragedies involve a vehicle driven by a parent or relative.
- Know where every child is before any car moves. Make it a spoken ritual: each child accounted for, ideally holding a hand or visibly with another adult, before anyone touches a gear shift.
- Treat parking lots like roads. Use strollers and shopping carts, and hold hands. Small children are invisible to drivers backing out of spaces.
- Childproof the doors that lead outside. Door knob covers, high locks, or inexpensive door alarms stop the quiet escape behind “bye bye syndrome.” If your child can open the front door alone, the driveway is part of their unsupervised world.
- Look before you lock. Open the back door and check the back seat every single time you leave the car, no exceptions, so the habit holds on the day your routine breaks.
- Use the stuffed animal trick. Keep a stuffed animal in the car seat. When the child is buckled in, the animal moves to the front passenger seat as a visual reminder. “It costs nothing. It takes almost no effort,” Rollins said.
Two more habits worth adding: keep parked cars locked and keys out of reach so children cannot climb in unnoticed, since many hot car deaths involve kids who got into an unlocked vehicle on their own, and if a child is missing, check the pool first and the car second, including the trunk.
If You See a Child Alone in a Hot Car
Every summer, bystanders save children’s lives in parking lots, and every summer some hesitate because they are not sure what they are allowed to do. The guidance from safety advocates is consistent: act immediately. Call 911 first, and stay with the vehicle. If the child appears unresponsive, flushed, or in obvious distress and help has not arrived, getting them out becomes the priority. Many states have Good Samaritan laws that specifically protect people who break a window to rescue a child in danger, and 911 dispatchers can talk you through the situation in real time.
Know what heat illness looks like in a small child: red, hot skin that may be dry rather than sweaty, rapid breathing, lethargy or unusual sleepiness, vomiting, and in serious cases confusion or unresponsiveness. A child showing these signs needs to be cooled quickly, moved to shade or air conditioning with cool water applied to the skin, while emergency help is on the way. Heatstroke in children is a true emergency where minutes change outcomes.
Teaching Kids the Driveway Rules
One more pattern worth knowing: risk goes up when the routine changes hands. Holiday visits, grandparents’ houses, and gatherings with lots of cars and lots of relatives are overrepresented in driveway tragedies, because visiting drivers do not know the household’s kids and the usual supervision gets diluted in a crowd. When family gathers, assign one adult as the designated child watcher whenever any vehicle is arriving or leaving, and say it out loud so the job actually belongs to someone.
Habits work on the child’s side too, once they are old enough. Teach toddlers and preschoolers that a parked car is not a hiding spot and not a place to play, ever. Establish a safe spot ritual for departures: a specific porch step or a hand on the mailbox where kids stand and wave while any car is moving, every single time. Make the rule physical and visible rather than abstract. School-age kids can learn the bigger principle: if you can touch the car, the driver cannot see you. Walking children through what the driver’s mirrors actually show, letting them sit in the driver’s seat and try to spot a stuffed animal placed in the blind zone, turns an invisible danger into one they understand.
What This Means for Parents
The uncomfortable truth in this story is that the families involved are ordinary, attentive families. The driveway deaths are not happening to people who let toddlers roam; they are happening in the seconds between an adult getting in a car and a child appearing where no mirror or camera reaches. The hot car deaths are mostly happening to organized, loving parents on the one chaotic morning their routine changed.
That means the fix is not to be a better person than those parents. It is to build systems that do not depend on having a good day: the walk-around, the look before you lock, the stuffed animal, the door alarm. None takes more than a few seconds, and together they cover the two ways summer turns vehicles deadly. If you are doing a seasonal safety sweep anyway, it is also worth checking your gear against this month’s wave of child product recalls, because June is apparently determined to keep parents busy.
Summer is when childhood happens: driveway basketball, sprinklers, errands with the windows down. The point of these numbers is not fear. It is that a handful of five-second habits, repeated until they are boring, are what keep the season exactly as carefree as it should be.