Extreme heat can add stress to families already stretched thin.

Children rely on regulated adults, but heat and stress can make regulation harder.

More research is needed on climate change as a potential child-maltreatment risk.

This post is Part 2 of a series. Part 1 can be found here.

My son was two that summer. I had an old Volvo with a broken clutch we couldn't afford to properly fix. We had rigged it with a vise grip. Like the mother at Target, I didn't have AC either. And as I left the store, I was pretty sure I had just bounced a check buying groceries.

It was July. My son refused to get into his car seat. When I tried to put him in, he started hitting me in the face. An older woman came over. "Just swat him back," she said. "Or he'll grow up to be a brat." I was horrified. I would never hit a 2-year-old. But I've thought about that woman since the afternoon at Target. What did I look like to her? I was trying to control my voice, using that low, slow way mothers sometimes talk when they are trying very hard not to lose their patience. I was sweating through my shirt. My face was red from embarrassment and from being slapped. And my son was not giving in.

Eventually, I got him buckled in. He screamed all 25 minutes home. Our apartment didn't have AC either. When we got inside, I put him in his playpen and went into the bathroom and cried. I knew enough then to understand that when my frustration became too much, I needed to make sure he was safe and walk away for a few minutes. Later, we found out my son had strep throat.

Thirty-seven years later, I watched........

© Psychology Today