Left alone in a park

or she could be encouraged to run instead?

Of course a 10yo can be alone 30 minutes, at daytime, in a park full of runners and families.

I wouldn’t be doing this, no.
Two reasons she is on her own
and there could be predators around so she would be pretty defenceless alone.
Secondly it’s not very nice for her being left there. Miserable in fact,

This.

Thing is, I'm not arguing with you at all. It sounds like you've made a very sane assessment.

Also, I'm always in favour of there being a 'all the kids hang out here' house, and I've always tried to provide ours as an option.

And there we have it

The answer is to stick her in a room on a screen, connected to the internet no doubt

How healthy. How safe.

I agree it’s also probably okay as long as she was comfortable and ideally if she had a phone.

You would despair at the parenting I had back in the 80s. My mum used to bring me to the office with her on a Saturday to catch up on work. 9/10/11 years old. I used to walk myself maybe 10 minutes through the city centre to the big library to read books and the newspaper all day. Literally do you remember when the daily papers hung on those wooden rails. I’d sit at the big table and read the paper. 😂 And at closing time, I’d shuffle back through the city centre and some kind security man would let me back in the building. No mobile phones! I could have been trafficked to god knows where before she had her 2nd cup of rank office instant coffee and she would have had no idea!

But she’s not going to explore a whole city’s she’s going to hang out at the swings for 30minutes whilst her sister goes for a run. She could have run too which would have been better but she didn’t want to and her dad was juggling the needs of two kids.

Is it not also shit to prevent your child from doing a good sporting activity?

If she is okay with it I would be too. Lots of people do this at the parkrun we went to over Christmas - I saw one kid sitting at the top of the rope pyramid eating sweets and watching the run.

Thts not what the poster said or implied, more that there are plenty of hi vis type people around to approach if she needs dad to come back

This would be ok at home in a familiar party near her house but in a strange city the adult should be within earshot at least

The youngest is ten.
old enough to go to school independently.
To walk to local shops and to friends houses.
at this age I think she is old enough to know not to leave with anyone.
so I’d say, if she felt comfortable then it’s ok.
I think it’s great that your eldest wants to do parkrun. And that her dad facilitates this.
if your daughter felt frightened or pressured into being alone then there’s an issue.
if you were in charge how would you have enabled your eldest to do park run?

I wish I could link you to my local facebook community group.

I don’t live in a safe place. There’s a lot of young girls who are harassed by groups of men who hang around. There are many parents here who arrange to chaperone girls especially, to school.

We have had a few alerts from the school over the last few years of people trying to entice school kids to get into cars.

And no, I didn’t let my son hang around the streets. We had a house he had friends to everyday, they were all welcome. I didn’t want him getting cauhhht up in the massive drug problems here.

Do what you want with your children. I’ll do what I want to keep mine safe.

He didn’t go out to shops alone until he was 14/15...

Horrifying. I was pretty sheltered but I was definitely walking into the local town to mooch around the pound shops with a friend who lived in the opposite direction at 12. And I'm from Ireland where we go to secondary school a year later than in the UK, and so I'm assuming a lot of these milestones happen a year later.

I meant to reply to that PP.

As long as the play park has others in it so oif there was an accident someone would see I really can't see an issue here. My daughter is a similar age and is quite capable of going to the playground if we are elsewhere in the park.

My dad was a copper. Coppers have terrible stories about things happening to people.

But I was still allowed out to play at the park, and I went to school on my own at 10 - or more accurately, shepherded my younger siblings to school. Because my dad, despite the terrible stories, knew that the terribleness was very, very rare. He and mum reckoned that restricting our lives was more likely to harm us than letting us out on our own.

So it appears to come down to a parent's capacity to cope with risk. If the chances of something happening are, for instance, one in a million, then some parents will say., 'no, no - why take any risk at all' and others will say 'that's really not a risk, is it?'

Thing is, nothing has no risk. And the maths are not helpful in practice. So what we actually react with is our ability to handle anxiety.

Ten is old enough to be in a park unsupervised for half an hour, provided your DD is a sensible girl and knows what to do if she's approached by a strange adult or some crisis happens. There would have been lots of families around and people to help if she had some problem.

Bloody hell.

Genuine answer: Zero 🤣🤣

I was replying to the PP who had some sort of crime novel written out in her head, when I said I'd be happy to leave my 10 year old in the park with a phone!

Well, I’ve got a wonderful 23 year old who didn’t grow up weird or suffocated.

He's also a police officer and some of the things he’s told me make my blood run cold. So I don’t give a shit if a random person on the internet thinks I’m being weird and suffocating.

I live in an absolute shithole of a place where I don’t even feel safe as a grown arse 45 year old walking my dog.

At age 10, she was probably better off staying in the hotel room with an ipad or a book for an hour while they popped out, did the run, then came back to pick her up and head out for brunch. A 10 year old is sensible enough not to open the door... if they're not, then they're not safe to stay put in a strange park either.
If she'd wandered off looking for a loo, it might be easy to get lost. As pp have said, muggers and people who hurt kids are opportunistic, an obviously-lone pre-teen girl is easy prey. Not worth the risk IMO.

What did I just read? 14/15???? Walking a secondary age child to a bus stop and back?

Jesus Christ. All I can say is, I'm so glad I grew up in Europe and none of the parents there were, are or will ever be like this.

This is weird and suffocating