Omigosh, this is such a good point. I may update my piece to include it. I see this all the time on Facebook incident pages for local police/fire departments. When there’s an accident or an arrest, people get so mean without knowing any of the details. Many times friends and relatives get the news about their family members from these posts! Also, sort of related — stories about children who die from accidents tend to attract the most vicious comments from readers who blame the parents (e.g., that would NEVER have happened if it were my child!)

But bad things happen even we try our hardest to be great parents. Sometimes chaos wins. I wrote an article about one specific case of this called “forgotten baby syndrome” which is something that happens when parents forget their child in a hot car. It’s awful. I was desperate to stop the hateful comments directed at these parents. https://medium.com/@jacquelinedooley/forgetting-a-baby-in-a-hot-car-can-happen-to-anyone-d65cc8df3631