I think the fact that they are a young, presentable, professional couple hasn’t hurt either. If they were Wayne and Waynetta from some estate…I don’t have a high opinion of the press either, obviously.
Yes. As I say, it was normal within society at the time.
Anyone remember that Norwegian woman who got prosecuted for neglect in the US a few years ago for leaving her baby in a stroller outside a store while she went in to buy something? It was normal for her too.
Both.
Although I’d go with just “lax” rather than “astonishingly lax.”
When the oldest child is 4, leaving them alone (and in another building) for 30 minutes at a time is a bit much, IMO. When my kids were that age I would never leave them alone for more than about 5 minutes on the outside, and that only if I absolutely had no choice.
OTOH, the notion that an 8- or 10-YO cannot be left alone for 2 minutes (as I sometimes have seen posted about American-centric cases) strikes me as going too far in the other direction.
Regardless, I just hope she’s OK, and that she will be found 
I must be a terrible parent
When my kids were two and three, I’d put them to bed - and then I’d go to sleep for 7 or 8 hours. They were unsupervised. No-one was watching them. And I don’t wake easily - I certainly don’t hear much over the sound of my own snoring.
The point is, the McCanns know their own children, and whether or not they would stay asleep. They knew the resort, and they were not very far away, and checking regularly. The apartment was conventionally secure. In most situations, it would have been perfectly safe. But it would appear that Madeline was probably targeted, so there would have been little more that the parents could do. Even if the parents were in the apartment, the child could have been taken, and the loss may not have been noted till much later - probably the next morning.
So, I don’t believe that the parents did anything wrong at all.
Si
When I was about 10 or 11 my parents would leave me with my 4-year-old brother in a hotel bedroom while they went to have a meal in the hotel restaurant. I think the differences are relevant, though: they were in the same building; there was a baby monitor in the room which was constantly listened to by the hotel reception; the door to the room was secure and the window was almost impossible to reach from the outside, being on the second floor. The fact that the room Madeleine was in was apparently not secure is the key factor, I think. Given that, I’d say the parents were somewhat negligent.
In general, that was the only time I or my brother were left alone until the age of about 13 - until then it was either a babysitter or tag along with them. But I agree one can be over-protective of one’s children.
jjimm:Maybe it is the same as it always was, it’s just that these days there is more focus on it than before.
Was I serious? you betcha
I mentioned on another thread on this topic that the British mothers on a parenting board I belong to are shocked that these kids were left alone. To me personally, it’s not so much the fear of predators but the fear of the kids (especially the younger ones) seriously injuring themselves. I don’t even leave my kids alone in our apartment to go get the mail (our mailbox is about the same distance from our apartment as that restaurant was from their hotel room). I’m not worried about someone grabbing them; I’m worried that they’ll pull furniture onto themselves, fall off the couch, stick their head into the toilet, etc. Those kids could have easily woken up and gotten into serious trouble in an unfamiliar, presumably non-childproofed hotel room.
This is very nasty of me, but I think the parents are in some way involved.
I wonder how they got on to this guy. The article says he was assisting with translations, but not what suddenly made him a suspect.
No shit. I would have brought a baby monitor with me to the table, but that’s the only thing I’d have done differently. They were asleep! I’ve never been to that country but here hotel rooms are very sparse and I travel with outlet caps - there’s no more babyproofing to be done once I close the bathroom door. Not to mention my 2 year old can’t climb out of a crib.
I suspect so, too, unfortunately. I always do in such cases.
You could be 100m away from your kids in the same house, so no, I don’t think it negligent.
Or opened the door and wandered off looking for their parents. My son is about Madeleine’s age and is a little monkey, as most kids are at that age. In a strange place, I wouldn’t put it past them to wake up and wander off. Velociraptor woke up and came looking for me every night we were away from home last Christmas, even the last couple nights where by now it was a familiar place (Dad’s house). I’d think he was asleep and 10 minutes later I’d hear ‘Mooommy’ from up the stairs.
It’s also been noted elsewhere that the resort had a place you could drop off the kids in their PJ’s and pick them up after your supper. I would’ve used that, I mean… why disturb your supper every half hour to check on them when you can just sit and enjoy your supper while your children are supervised? Much more relaxing.
ETA: I wouldn’t mind seeing pictures of the apartment from the bar. The diagrams give us an idea of distance but are there trees or anything that could block the view from the restaurant/where they were sitting?
Our parents would leave us AWAKE (prolly 7 or 8 years old) and would go to the neighbor’s 10 houses down. That was in the 60s. No one thought anything of it.
There’s a huge difference between leaving a 7-8 year old in a known environment, versus a 4 year old and two 18 month olds in an unknown environment that has public access.
I grew up with Eastern European immigrant parents who were fairly old-fashioned in their child-rearing approach (spankings, belting if you’re really bad, letting us cry out crying fits, no choice when to eat and what to eat, etc.), but I cannot ever recall them leaving me or my brother alone before the age of maybe 10 or 11.
I’m not a parent, but leaving a 4-year-old and two 18-month-olds strikes me as something in the “not a good idea” category.
I haven’t read a whole lot about this case, but what I have read seems to indicate that it’s quite possible that someone was just waiting for a chance to grab one of these kids, so the parents could indeed have been there in the apartment and still have had this tragic thing happen.
There’s several cases here in the U.S. that I can think of just off the top of my head where children were taken from their homes, with a parent or grandparent present in the home - Polly Klaas, Jessica Lunsford, and Elizabeth Smart, for instance. I know there are more. Only Elizabeth survived her ordeal.
I don’t think the parents that are the subject of the OP were particularly negligent - if someone is determined to take your kid, then unless you never let that kid out of your sight they have a good chance of being successful, unfortunately.
Yes, growing up in the 70s my parents didn’t leave us alone until I was 11. Old enough in their minds to watch my younger siblings.
I can not fathom leaving toddlers in a hotel room and going to dinner. Even if the restaurant was on the other side of the hallway. Young children need to be supervised.
Another ‘me too’, and that was the 80s.
For those saying the parents were negligent in leaving the child in a situation where an abduction was possible, what about the case in the north-east a year or two ago where a kid was taken from the bathroom while the parents were elsewhere in the house? Were those parents to blame, too?
See jjimm’s earlier post. This wasn’t ‘public access’, it was breaking & entering.
First, I wouldn’t say these parents are “to blame”…obviously the person who took the little girl is to blame, unless the parents were complicit in the abduction. I would say, and so would the legal system in many jurisdictions, that leaving children that young, unsupervised, is negligent. And, yeah, I don’t think that was very smart of your parents and, IMO, they got lucky that nothing happened. Saying, “Well, my parents did that and I’m fine” is akin to a person born before child seats saying the same thing. It doesn’t mean having free reign of the backseat while barrelling 70 mph down the highway was a good idea. Just because there was a case of abduction where the parents were home does not negate the fact that you’re putting your child at less risk by supervising than by not.
Let me reiterate that I don’t think the threat of abduction is what they should have been worried about. The chance of a child injuring himself when unsupervised is huge. That an abduction happened is horrific, but it would have been less likely to have happened if they had been there.
Per “public access” - a hotel has public access. Anyone can generally walk through it, many people have keys to any given hotel room (hotel employees), strange people coming and going are not notable. A totally different situation than someone’s house. Also, is it known that access was gained through the window or is that speculation?
Can we clarify what you really mean by ‘supervised’, if it’s not being in the same room? Next door? Within earshot? Something else? It’s certainly my opinion that it’s crazy to insist children should be under constant supervision.
By supervised, I mean that you know what they are doing. So, if you’re in the same house, you can hear them or see them. If you can’t, you’re checking on them frequently enough that they’re not going to have much chance of getting in trouble. As they get older and their judgement develops, obviously the supervision lessens. What’s key in this story, though, is that these were very little kids. Four years old…maybe a little less supervision is needed. The two eighteen-month olds, though? They are babies. Even if there was no risk of abduction, what could happen? The four year old could decide to lift the babies out of the crib and drop them, the babies could awaken and decide to jump out of the crib (even if a child has never done this before, there’s going to be a first time), the four year old could go to the bathroom and leave the door open long enough for the baby to get in trouble (it doesn’t take long for a baby to drown in the toilet), the kids could awaken and decide to go looking for Mommy & Daddy…the possibilities are numerous. My fourteen month old is adept at dragging stuff over in order to scale furniture. Even in our own house, where I have tried to minimize dangers, there are a thousand ways a very small child with a few minutes on his hands could seriously injure himself. A child does not need to be constantly supervised until they are eighteen, but babies and toddlers absolutely do.