To me, with my 3 and a half year old, supervised is within earshot.
He is not always with me and in my direct line of sight, in fact he often plays outside in the front (fenced in) yard while I am inside… with the door and curtains open so I can peek outside at him and hear him if he is calling for me (or opening the gate or talking to people, he is very friendly and says hello to everyone passing by, which can be a high number of people due to where we are situated). It also means I can hear if he is too quiet, which as any parent would tell you is often the first sign they have gotten into something you don’t want them to that has absorbed their attention (drawing on the wall, dropping small things down the radiator, climbing the cupboard to get cookies, taking the kid next door’s water pistol and shooting him with it to use personal examples from the last month).
Thus, 40m away in a seperate building with no baby monitor is, IMO, unsupervised.
I think the distance thing has been overplayed a bit. Sure, the precise distance is somewhat important, in that if you are 20 meters away from your kid when you see them starting to tip the bureau over, you can reach them more quickly than you can if you are 100 meters away.
But the real point is, can you see/hear your children (and the overall environment that they are in) enough to keep them safe? A dad in a drunken coma 1 meter from his kids is not taking care of them; someone 100 meters away with a baby monitor and line of sight is. Obviously, these parents could neither hear nor see their very young children.
People who say that “the kid would have been snatched anyway, so the parents weren’t negligent” are missing the point in three ways that I can see:
First, if the opportunities had been minimized, perhaps the child would not have been snatched. We’ll never know.
Second, from the unquestionable fact that “bad things can happen even when children are properly supervised” it does not follow that “we may as well not bother with proper supervision.”
Third, most of us who think the children were not given adequate supervision think so because children are a danger to themselves, not because we are insanely paranoid about strangers.
I remember the case quite well, but that is the first time I had heard that aspect. Not that it makes the crime any less horrendous. However I can understand the view of the media.
I can’t see the problem to be honest. I’d say leaving the kids alone while they’re asleep to go out for a meal a short distance away isn’t terribly uncommon.
I heard some interesting comments…another source, apparently…generally regarded…the info comes via someone who knows them from a doctor’s e-board thing…Anyway, it also appears that the…
Forgive me if I don’t find this terribly authorative (authoratative? autheratative?, whimper…why can’t I spel.~)
Or indeed to fashion a sentence that doesn’t involve that damned word.
This is what I was thinking too (also raised in the 1970s). And - Oh, dear Jeebus! – when my sister and I were babies, our parent’s didn’t even have a baby monitor! Egads! Shameful! What negligence!
I’m sorta surprised someone hasn’t beaten me to it, but anyone who thinks that leaving a toddler unsupervised is acceptable needs to link to [thread=421025]this thread[/thread] for an example of what can happen if your attention wanders for even a moment from a small child.
The parents screwed up. Once my SO was away on business and I was alone with the kids. When I walked the dog I stayed right in front of the house and when a neighbor came by to chat I said sorry I have to go back in to watch the kids. Now. Once my SO and I went to an antique store with a baby sleeping in the car seat. I parked the car practically touching the store and ran out to check on him every five minutes. And I’m getting nervous just thinking about those two times. And on one trip by my SO I dropped her at the airport, then came home in the rain with a baby and a toddler. Could have double parked for a few minutes and thrown them in bed, then drove several blocks to park the car. Instead I parked the car and carried the two of them back to the house in the rain, just so they wouldn’t be alone for 15 minutes or so. 100 meters? 30 minutes? No way.
Once again, with feeling…there’s a difference between a 12 year old (and a 10 year old and an 8 year old) than a 4 year old and two 18 month olds. I’m pretty sure no one in this thread said a child, up to age twelve, had to have a parent standing over them at all times. I would say for children this young, especially for the 18 month olds, a parent should be completely supervising them. Yes, that means even when they are sleeping, a parent should have some way of hearing when they wake up/leap out of their cribs/cry out in their sleep/throw up in their beds. Yes, it is sometimes hell on the parent’s sleep schedule and/or social life. No, I’m not saying the same level of supervision is necessary as a child gets older and their judgement and ability to attend to their own needs grows, and obviously that happens at different points for different children. I have never, however, seen a child under 2 who was capable of being alone for long periods of time.
And yet, I somehow suspect that they were still in the house with you and could hear when you hurt yourself or woke up sick.
My two cents (as a non-parent, so that might be all it is worth) is that there were BABIES in the room. I might - might - have given them the benefit of the doubt if the four year old was the only child. But, yes, someone needs to be constantly (day and night) within ear shot of a two year old. Hire a babysitter for your night out, it’s not that expensive, or if you can’t afford that, you eat a romantic dinner in your room.
Saying that the four year old would have still been kidnapped is a straw man. It might be true, but has nothing to do with it being bad parenting to have left the children alone.
That sounds, forgive me, nearly pathologically anxious to me, and I’ve been diagnosed with an Extreme Anxiety Disorder. I’m sure you’re not alone in it, don’t get me wrong. This thread shows you’re not alone, and I’m in fact in the minority (or the silent majority). It just gets me incredibly pissed off at the media and mommy magazines for convincing so many people that our children are At Substantial Risk asleep in their own beds inside a locked house, or snug and secure asleep locked in their car seats (assuming it wasn’t a hot day, of course). They are simply, statistically, not at great risk in those situations. They were probably more at risk of reducing their immunity to a cold virus by being chilled in the night rain than they were of anything happening to them warm and snug in their beds.
Risk management has two dimensions: one is probability. You are saying that the probability of something bad happening is extremely low. This is true enough. But you are forgetting the other dimension, which is: how good/bad would the consequences be if that low-probability event actually occurred?
Darn it all, caught out by a hasty click and the five-minute edit rule – here is what I MEANT to post:
I for one, and I’m sure many other posters who agree that the children under discussion were inadequately supervised, don’t think that children are “At Substantial Risk” when tucked into their own beds inside a locked house. I don’t think I’m “At Substantial Risk” if I drive three blocks on a quiet street to the grocery store without wearing a seatbelt either, but I still buckle it.
Risk management has several dimensions: one is the probability assigned to varying outcomes. You are saying that the probability of something bad happening is extremely low. This is true enough. But you are forgetting another dimension, which is: how good/bad would the consequences be if that low-probability event actually occurred? And yet another part of the equation is: what are the costs involved in changing the probabilities of each outcome?
It is a low-cost step to buckle a seatbelt or hire a babysitter in order to minimize the chance of being mangled in an auto accident or having something awful befall your child.
