The full article mentions the child had been placed there by a “court decision” so it sounds like the parents may have temporarily lost custody.

Or, the window of habitability on Mars was much shorter than on Earth, and there just wasn’t time for complex, multicellular life to evolve. On Earth, life existed for billions of years before multicellular critters popped up. I think one day, a rover is going to turn over the right rock and we’ll see a little smudge of fossilized algal mat. But I am an optimist.