Exactly my and my 'rents line of thinking, especially the part about your kids killing each other.
I think that it doesn’t speak very well of Dopers on this message board that whenever there is a story on the news about a kid being left alone, some Doper comes screaming into the Pit demanding that Child Protection Services take the kid away from his 'rents, as they are obviously :rolleyes: unfit to be parents.
Like the kid is going to do so much better being shoved into a foster home.
Just one thing Cervaise, it would have to be “this nice woman.”
Looking at all the commentary here I think we are going to have to agree to disagree. I felt, in my OP, that the mother(if such she was) was in the wrong. I still do, thinking that a child that young should not under any circumstances have been left alone. But some people don’t feel that way, having come from differing upbringings or backgrounds.
I grew up walking to school in the early sixties, and by myself, and went out alone on Halloween as early as the fourth grade. I was a greedy sucker, and my parents set streets beyond which I could not go, but otherwise I was on my own. But even then it was no “Golden Age”. I remember once, on the four block walk to second grade, a guy asking me to get in his car. But I just said no and walked off really fast, and that seemed to end the matter. My parents had warned me about “strangers”, without going into gory detail. So even then, and I think pretty much forever, there have been predators of kids.
I just know that I would never take a risk I could avoid. As for Sunday, I wouldn’t need a stupid cake so badly that I would leave a child alond to get it.
If you are a responsible human being there are certain things that you just don’t ever do.
Somewhere about a notch above pointing loaded guns at people as a joke, is leaving a child unattended in public.
Make that public place a parking lot is worse. It’s an inherently dangerous place for a toddler. An open window leaves an escape route for the child into traffic.
The scenario described is unforgivably negligent and stupid.
Is anyone else getting flashes of the South Park episode “Child Abduction is Not Funny”? Especially with some of the people posting here; I swear they’d fit right into this episode.
With the capsule from here:
Or, in other words, the parents (as always) are completely over the top. Building walls (all the Great Wall bits are priceless), using scare tactics to teach about strangers, worrying constantly about the latest news reports, and eventually sending all the kids out of town when the news says that the most common abductors are parents. If I remember correctly, the quote is “Your kids aren’t safe, even with you.” Of course, a lot of the episode does have to do with Tweek, who isn’t the most stable of the kids to begin with.
And here is a complete transcript of the episode, if anyone is curious. It works even better if you can do all the voices in your head.
Right you are. I say it IS a different world now, and I could care less about studies that say it’s no less safe than 20 years ago. I for one will not let my kiddos out of my sight, and I’ve got 2 boys (I believe girls are abducted much more frequently.)
In the last week I have heard of kids being killed by a train and a car in Dallas - on their way to school. And I trust I don’t have to even mention the numbers of toddlers that die in over-heated cars each year.
Better safe than sorry, I say.
To Lorene:
The point I was trying to make is that there is such a thing as ‘acceptable risk’. Every time you put your child in a car you are endangering their life and health. Every time you feed them you are endangering their life and health. Every time they get shots you are endangering their life and health. Statistically, the differences between those and leaving your child in the car for a couple of minutes while you run in a pay for gas or pick up a perscription or grab the cell phone you left inside or whatever is negligible at best. And that that risk doesn’t always warrant the effort required to undo all the child safety belts you had to fight to get your child in in the first place, drag them inside while they’re crying and then drag them back out and fight to get them back in the seat.
As someone who had to deal with the fire department on a random saturday when I was 7 to get my younger brother who was 2 out of the car he locked himself in with the keys, I can agree wholeheartedly that it’s generally a very bad Idea to leave young children in the car with the keys. This would be especially true in areas where there may be a risk of car jacking or whatever.
However, I find the under 10 comment to be overreactionary and a detrement to the health of our future children. If a kid can’t be expected not to get himself killed or hurt in a relatively safe area if left alone for a couple minutes by the time he is 5 or 6 (for most kids, there are of course always exceptions) then it is because you haven’t taught them how, or protected them too much. True you can’t expect them to act anything like an adult at that age, but i don’t think it’s too much to ask them to sit still and behave for 5 minutes at that age either.
to Blonde:
And if the kid is locked in the car and strapped into a safety belt while you run into a gasstation to pay for gas or get a soda or snack for the kid what exactly is the risk of them dieing of exposure (overheating)? Do you live on mercury or something? And how many other kids walk to school every day in dallas without a single thing happening to them? And were the kids that were hit ever taught to look both ways before crossing a street or rail line? And how old were they?
The point I am trying to make in this whole diatribe is that every situation is different. And while, from the description of the OP, I am inclined to agree that the person in question was probably out of line for leaving their toddler alone for what was described as a great deal of time in a busy parking lot. But just because this one person may have been wrong doesn’t make every situation of a parent turning their back for a minute automatically negligent. Christ people, how much time/attention do you expect parents to have? It’s not like you can be alert 110% of the time and always know EVERYTHING that’s going on with your kids. You’re only human.
FTR, I agree that leaving a kid in a car alone is not good decision-making. One of the fellow moms in my daycare got a visit from CPS over this. She was running an errand, and her three year old begged to stay in the car to continue listening to her Wiggles CD. Mom acquiesced–and got reported by a passer-by. They were, in general, a family that were pretty lax about safety issues. Maybe the CPS visit helped.
That said, I can’t see how getting outraged over these sorts of things–when you don’t know the circumstances–is a big help. Every parent I know takes chances and weighs risks and makes different decisions. My friend Cat won’t drive an inch unless every little thing in her car is strapped down. Me, I put the groceries on the seats, even though I know that’s risky. On the converse side, I won’t let my toddler drink soda, but I know plenty of parents who allow it as an occasional treat.
Some of these risks get a lot of press or are very visible and therefore get our attention. But I wonder if, in rational analysis, they really deserve this sort of reaction from complete outsiders. In fact, to me a number of people in this thread sound sanctimonious, to express such horror and condemn the parents. In the episode at hand, if you really wanted to be such a big-hearted help, you’d have stood in view the car, out of the way, and made sure the little boy didn’t get out, wasn’t approached by strangers, and didn’t put the car in gear. Once the parents returned, you could’ve breathed a sigh of relief that all ended well. Then you may have taken the license number and made the report to CPS or the police (as you did), to let them take care of it. Maybe all the parent needed was a gentle reminder of the risks. And, if so moved, then you could have written a kindly letter to your paper which reminded all parents that this is not in the best interest of children.
Instead, you got boiling mad, and wished you had a phone to call the authorities so you watch the bitch get busted. You seem gratified that there were a bunch of pinch-lipped people standing around muttering in judgment of this woman, and you capped it off with a scathing letter to the paper that frames the mother as a creep who would make a ‘getaway’ and would try to ‘talk her way out of it’ if the cops had gotten there in time.
For all you know, the woman was picking up a cake to take to her mother’s wake and was barely getting through her day. The point is, we don’t know. We don’t know if she’s a careless mother who doesn’t give a shit, or a parent in a difficult decision who had a small lapse of judgment. And you don’t know if the risks she takes are actually any worse, or any more numerous, than the ones I or you take. Glass houses, ye who are without sin, yadda yadda.
Stick monkey, I loved your last paragraph. And furlibusea’s point hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves, either–that it can be difficult for people with fewer resources and support to be the “perfect parents” we seem to expect them to be in public.
Cranky, to put it bluntly, I don’t care if she was “barely getting thorugh her day.” It would have been a hell of a lot worse if something had happened to the kid. It was a very young kid, loose in the car, windows down, and I say she was taking an unacceptable risk,(in that case) There is no excuse for that.
Shrug If you want to succumb to news paranoia, go right ahead. I’m sure the networks and their advertisers won’t mind.
So does this show that all kids who walk to school alone are in danger, or does this show that some kids should have practiced basic pedestrian safety and not go playing around the train tracks?
And for whatever it was worth, by the time I was eight, my mom didn’t bat an eye at sending me down three or four blocks to the local convenience store to buy groceries, and my brother and I would ride our bicycles around the neighborhood without supervision. Either urban Los Angeles just didn’t have enough child molesters and kidnappers lurking in the shadows, or my Mom trusted us more than you trust your sons.
This actually happened to my brother. It was at an airport, and it was a movator (one that runs on one level across a strip of floor so you don’t have to actually walk for a few meters). I took him to the bathroom and lost track of him on the way back to mom. I was about 9 at the time and him 5 (I was a pretty responsible nine year old) next thing I know security comes up with brother covered in grease and crying none the worse for wear except for his new clothes as Mom and I traced back our steps to find him.
As to the OP… since the kid was 3 years old, yeah I agree she shouldn’t have done that. Dad never left us in the car until I was 6 or so as I was a horrible escape monkey. (Mom tells me they’d be driving and hear me laughing in the backseat… turn around to find me slipped out of my car seat and wandering around the backseat.) I also remember loving to sit and play with the steering wheel, at least until Dad convinced me that this was a BAD idea.
If they are asleep in the backseat and you are running in to pay for gas, yeah that’s acceptable in my mind. You can still watch the car from the store. But to run into a grocery store, to get a cake from the bakery? Even if you prepaid you have to run to the back of the store through the gauntlet of carts and shoppers, hope the bakery isn’t busy, hope they haven’t taken too long to ice the cake and that they can find it easily, then run the gauntlet back. With a 3 year old anything can happen in that time. I would probably be most worried that they set the car into drive or reverse and away they go. Mom was wrong in this instance IMHO.
Nope, not Mercury - TEXAS!!
**Originally posted by rjung **
****And for whatever it was worth, by the time I was eight, my mom didn’t bat an eye at sending me down three or four blocks to the local convenience store to buy groceries, and my brother and I would ride our bicycles around the neighborhood without supervision. Either urban Los Angeles just didn’t have enough child molesters and kidnappers lurking in the shadows, or my Mom trusted us more than you trust your sons..
The bolding is mine.
You must be kidding, man!! It’s not about how much we trust our children, it’s about how much we DON’T trust drivers and child snatchers! I could care less if you think I’m overprotective. If there’s even a minute chance that there’s danger to my child, I’m going to be too careful. Period.
[quote[stick monkeyI just want to point out that your numbers are way off. It isn’t anywhere near a 5% chance that if you walk away from your child for 5 minutes that they will be kidnapped or hurt. It isn’t even a 1 percent chance, it’s more like a couple in a million; despite what Oprah tells you.[/quote]
She didn’t SAY those were the numbers.
She said “IF”. Which is entirely beside the point, whatEVER the percent chance that it might happen, it’s STILL too high to take that chance, you missed her point by nitpicking about something she didn’t even say.
Stick Monkey, not to be snide, but this is the second quote of someone’s that you’ve taken to be gospel truth, when in fact they were making a “guesstimate”.
First Lorene’s “IF I have a 95% chance etc…” and then this statement of mine.
I did NOT say “All under ten children are automatically incapable of being left alone” or the like.
I said “Say 10 and under” meaning “I’m guesstimating around that age, give or take a few”.
I’m not meaning to sound cranky at you, but heck, please read people’s posts in the frame of mind in which they intended them and don’t take a guess and run with it as if the person meant it to be carved in stone.
That said, how on earth would it be “detrimental” to a child’s health should a person be a bit extra cautious with their safety?
And 5 or 6? What? were your kids on kiddie qualuudes at that age? My experience with kids that age is that their attention span doesn’t last too long before, as someone else says, they’ve decided to start stuffing leftover french fries up Janies nose, or worse. I’m sorry, I can’t imagine leaving a 5 or 6 year old in a car alone, and blithely going off out of line of sight.
But I guess you bring up a good question. See. I’m defining “leave a child alone in a car” as going off completely out of sight and ability to get to the car and child within a few seconds.
If you’re paying at the gas station and you can see your child from the pay booth (like our gas stations) I don’t define that as “leaving a child alone”. You can see them, they’re not “alone” in the car.
What I, (and I suspect some of the other people here) define as “leaving a child alone” is NOT letting them sit in the parking lot of a 7-11 for a few minutes, where you can easily see them by looking out of the windows or door of the store, but leaving them and blithely going in shopping or banking somewhere, where you have NO way of seeing what’s going on.
And where, if you DID, for some reason get nervous and decide to return to the car, where it would take you much longer than a few seconds to walk from the door of the business to the car.
I don’t know if that’s something you agree with or something you are just quoting. However, I gotta say I feel that’s too high a standard, or at least a standard that is being arbitrarily applied to one potentially hazardous situation, given that so many other risks are tolerated by most or all of us without interference.
I make this point because I don’t think that a person who leaves their kid in the car unattended is necessarily a shit parent who deserves to be arrested (although in 11 states my opinion would be moot legally). Rather, in my mind, that person is a parent who has a different risk tolerance than you and I. At some point, their risk tolerance may be downright stupid and negligent (such as on a hot day, or with a small child who has access to the windows, or a dozen other factors already discussed). But this new standard that has been proposed-- that a decent parent must avoid doing something that poses ANY risk, no matter how infinitessimal–who can live that way? I sure don’t. I don’t have scald guards installed on my faucets. I didn’t trade my car in for a Volvo. I don’t refuse to ever let my son enjoy non-mylar balloons. Each of those decisions increases the risk of danger and even death to my child.
Which is also why I find people’s outrage and self-righteousness about this a little inconsistent and insincere. I don’t quite get where it comes from. It doesn’t seem that productive to me, nor does it seem fair or consistent. Concern, that I understand. Contempt and rage, no.
I see your point, CrankyAsAnOldMan - my six year-old has a very short left pinkie from cutting it off in a doorjamb and a manly scar on his eyebrow from falling off the bed onto the corner of the nightstand a few years ago. No, you cannot protect them from all the hazards out there!
But Baker was talking about leaving small children in a car, and that is very real risk that shouldn’t be taken by parents. In Texas, there’s a heat danger about 10 months out of the year, and let’s not forget that the Amber Alert System was activated due to the abduction and murder of a little girl in my state.
I, for one, don’t feel that I’m being inconsistent or insincere in stating my opinion. Contempt and rage for someone who puts their children in danger - you betcha.
[CrankyAsAnOldMan, I was trying to point out to him that he was nitpicking her statistics when, in fact, she had not GIVEN any.
She said (paraphrased) “IF it was 95% safe, and only 5% unsafe…”
He then took that on and said something to the effect of “it Is NOT 95% not even close, no matter what Oprah says”.
When she had NOT stated that it was, she had just picked an arbitrary number to illustrate her point.
Same with my post, I had NOT said “10 year olds do thus and such PERIOD”.
I picked an arbitrary age, and my sentence “Say 10 year olds, etc” showed that. He was kindof going off on mini-nitpicks, and missing the points we were making.
Again, I wasn’t cranky at him, just trying to steer him toward what we were actually saying. Which, if he’d read our entire posts, he would have discovered were similar to his own thoughts, while perhaps a bit more protective.
(warning slight generalization)
Our slightly differing viewpoints aren’t really that surprising since we’re moms, and he’s a dad.
NOT that there’s anything wrong with that, dad’s can tend to be a bit more “rough and tumble” and moms can tend to be a bit more protective . USUAL DISCLAIMER APPLIES!!, not ALL moms feel more protective and not ALL dads are a little easier going…etc…So don’t anyone get all up in arms thinking I’m saying moms watch kids better than dads.
You (and the other people here) might not define “leaving a child alone” to include situations where you are a few seconds away and where the child is in sight , but how is anyone to know that until you make your definition explicit? Way back in my first post, I asked if it made a difference whether I was walking five feet to a mailbox. Other people have mentioned paying at a gas station. We were pretty obviously reading “leave a child” alone to include those situations, or we wouldn’t have brought up them up.
It depends on how overprotective you are- it probably won’t be detrimental to your child if you never leave him alone in the car, even to pay for gas. But I know a child who was never allowed to do anything without her mother or grandmother being present. The mother’s reason was always " She might be sexually abused" .She couldn’t go to a birthday party where the parents weren’t expected to stay, she never slept over a friends house or even spent a couple of hours at a friends house, she couldn’t go on a school trip if her mother wasn’t chosen to chaperone, she couldn’t go down the block for pizza with her classmates when school was dismissed early unless grandma came. Her grandmother even stayed at Girl Scout meetings and choir practice. She was finally allowed to walk the two blocks to and from school in eighth grade. With almost no experience in operating independently in a familiar neighborhood, she was sent off to high school in an unfamiliar neighborhood which required traveling. Must have been quite a shock. I wonder what she though all those years about not being allowed to do what all of her classmates could do.
I let my 8-y-o, 5-y-o, and 4-y-o run all over the yard and sometimes all over the street (the yards on it, not in the street itself, duh) while I’m in the house. I don’t let the 4-y-o go out by himself and the 5-y-o has to have her brother or an older friend (a 9-y-o) go with her if she wants to visit a friend who lives on another street.
I’m sure to some people this makes me the Worst Parent Ever. They could be hit by a car! Snatched off the street! Poisoned!
If one of those things happened, obviously I’d be devastated.
But…they have a great time. They spend most of their time outdoors. They don’t watch TV in the afternoons. They don’t play video games during the week. They are asleep by 8:30 almost every night because they’re so tired from running around and having a good time. They are making friends. My daughter can almost ride her bike without training wheels now.
When I go to the gas station for cigarettes, I leave them in the car. Worst parent EVER.
I refuse to jump at shadows and wrap them in cotton in case some sociopathic idiot makes his way into my neighborhood.
Not to be snide, but in the context of the conversation we were having she IS painting an overexxagerrated picture. It may be nitpicky to you, but to me painting the chances of a child getting kidnapped by a child molesting sociopath as 1 out of 20 as opposed to the more correct 1 in 10,000,000 (or the more accurate 1 in a billion that it would happen on any given day to any given child, in the 5 minutes it takes to run into a gas station and pay for gas) is not just wrong, it borders on clinical paranoia.
Despite your protests to the contrary, if a person is painting an exaggerrated risk in their head, and using it as a statement within a debate, whether or not they say ‘IF’ is pointless. They are still basing their thesis on incorrect information.
And please understand, I read your post, and aside from the under 10 comment, pretty much aggreed with you. But, as someone who can’t seem to grasp a parent not allowing their kid at least some leway to be themselves and experience risk by the time they get into grade school; I can’t comprehend how anyone would consider 10 a small child the same way one would consider a toddler a small child. I am just trying to point out the FREAKING DIFFERENCE.
By the time I was 8, I was staying home alone if it was for less than an hour or 2. I even cooked my own dinner (not because mom or dad wouldn’t, but because I was picky and always refused to eat what they cooked) and did my own laundry half the time. I was also riding bikes around the neighborhood, mowing the lawn, and going back and forth to friends houses, and certainly as all hell staying in the car for a couple minutes while mom ran inside to get something all without ever managing to run into any child molestors or other ‘evil’ people. Same with my sister. It wasn’t true for my brother mind you, but his ADD is so bad he practically can’t take care of himself at 20. So again, I am just trying to point out that every situation is different.
I grew up with kids at school and friends whose parents were over-protective. All of them had problems. The more overprotective the parents, the more problems they had. Some of them lashed out and rebelled the second their parents turned their backs. Some were chronically deppressed. Some just couldn’t handle it the minute they moved out of the house. Some are still sitting in their parents house at 25 or 35 and are just too scared to leave.
Protecting your children from every little thing, isn’t healthy. Eventually, they HAVE to learn to protect themselves. I’m not saying they should be thrown to the wolves at 2 and hope for the best, but if you can’t start letting go at least a little at a time when they are young, they will have issues when they are older.
Not trying to say you shouldn’t protect them from the serious stuff that you can. Just saying there is a point (that is different for every child) beyond which protection ceases to provide any benefit and may in fact be detrimental.
Every child is different. When I was five I could be handed a toy and set somewhere, and I would be there four or five hours later still playing and having a good time with that toy. When my brother was 5 he had to be checked on every minute and a half or so just to make sure he hadn’t shucked all his clothes and ran down the street. My little sister was somewhere in the middle, and could be trusted to play their quietly for at least 10 or 15 minutes before she would start looking for something else to do, but it was almost always just another toy in the same area. Most of my nephews are the same way. Yes they are roudy and rambunctious, and you need to check on them frequently to make sure they aren’t burning the dogs or whatever, but if you sit one of them down and tell him to wait there til you get back and come back in 5 minutes, he will still be there waiting.
In any debate, if you are using a arbitrary number to illustrate your point, that is not only inaccurate, but a gross exaggeration, you should be expected to be called on it. Her number was a gross misrepresentation of fact and bordered on what can only be considered paranoia.
My reply, especially the oprah part, may have been snippy, but I am about fed up with parents who won’t let their kids play at the neighbors house or local playground because they could get molested. And yes, half of them quote the latest expose on oprah or cnn where they intentionally send decoys to playgrounds to illustrate that it “Only takes a second!” or whatever. Jesus, that’s got to be healthy for a child. Teach them from an early age to be distrustful of everyone but mommy and daddy, then wonder why they are afraid to leave the nest when they make it to 30.
And people call me a ‘Cynic’!?!?!?!
stick monkey and Hamadryad - Amen!
'Though I still think the original pittee in the OP was WAAAY out of line, leaving a toddler in the car for any extended length of time.
Just as you (correctly) argue that total protectiveness is too extreme, and you can’t get hot under the collar every time a minor is seen on his/her own, the reverse also holds - not all cases of “leaving a kid alone for a short time” can be excused.
Shades of grey.
Dan Abarbanel