Childcare centre reveals its protocol to prevent forgotten baby syndrome casualties after tragic car death

A childcare centre has revealed it has a protocol in place to help prevent tragic fatalities linked to forgotten baby syndrome, after a one-year-old girl died after being inadvertently left in a car when her father assumed he had dropped her at daycare in Sydney on Tuesday.

Emilys Early Learning, a small childcare service in Ipswich, Queensland, expressed heartache for the parents of the baby girl, before detailing its method for ensuring all children booked in for care are accounted for.

“This is why I will always contact parents by 10am if children have not been dropped off to daycare on their booked days,” she wrote on Facebook.

“I wish this was universal across all providers.”

The Queensland childcare centre described the death of Olivia Ancelet, who was found unresponsive in a car outside Jelly Beings Early Learning Centre in Earlwood just after 5.30pm on Tuesday, as “an absolute tragedy”.

7NEWS.com.au understands her father Etienne Ancelet had turned up at the centre to collect his daughter only to be told he had never dropped her off.

He ran outside and discovered Olivia was still strapped in her baby capsule in the car.

Paramedics raced to Marana Rd but, despite their best efforts, Olivia died at the scene.

Witnesses reported the father was screaming and inconsolable, and was taken to hospital suffering shock.

The phenomenon of forgetting children in cars is tragically more common than some might think.

Three-year-old Arikh Hasan died in similar circumstances in Sydney’s southwest in 2023.

It is understood Arikh had been asleep when his father, Newaz, dropped the boy’s older sibling at school. Newaz then refuelled and returned home to work, failing to realise Arikh had not been dropped at daycare and was still inside the car.

Only at school pick-up time was the dreadful discovery made — Newaz smashed the car window and rushed Arikh into a nearby bottleshop coolroom to perform CPR, while paramedics rushed to the scene, but the boy could not be saved.

‘The nature of the brain’

Inadvertently leaving a child in a car happens when someone overloads their short-term memory system, Monash Institute of Cognitive and Clinical Neurosciences associate professor Matthew Mundy told 7NEWS.com.au at the time.

This short-term failure called fatal distraction, often referred to as “forgotten baby syndrome”, can have “disastrous consequences” and it is more common than people think.

‘Human short-term memory is limited ... we normally only remember between five to nine items at any one time,” Mundy said.

“If we try to remember more than this, we start to forget things — items can just fall away. It is just the nature of the brain.

“Unfortunately, our brain doesn’t distinguish the level of importance of what we are trying to remember — even a child left in the back seat of a car.”

University of South Florida Psychology Professor Dr David Diamond has been studying fatal distraction since 2004 and says the brain often fills in the gaps when it comes to routine actions.

He previously told NBC that if the child is quiet in the back seat the brain can create a “false memory the child was at daycare”.

Experts say a method for parents and carers to tackle this is to train themselves to check the backseat every time they get out of the car so it becomes second nature.

Mundy suggests leaving a phone, bag or wallet in the back seat during the drive until checking becomes a habit, like putting on a seatbelt.

Push for providers to have protective policies

“Absolutely anyone can go into autopilot, it’s a very real and terrifying thing,” Emilys Early Learning wrote on Facebook.

“I don’t know why daycare centres don’t contact the parents when children are away without notification.

“Schools do that for big kids and I just can’t help but feel if we had policies across all providers, it may help minimise this type of devastation.

“R.I.P darling girl. I cannot imagine the unbearable pain of grieving the loss of your child.”