.. to think this would blow some minds?

Jeez.

I've told the story many times on here about my friend's mum and DP who lived in a similar area, assumed not locking the door was fine - until thugs burst in, beat them up, tied them up and robbed them. Police: "They target houses they suspect will be unlocked - remote, rural areas and old people's bungalows are favourites."

As I said earlier, it takes a second or two to lock your door - and what does anyone actually gain from not doing so?

🤣 I probably did the same!

Very common in the Netherlands- Dutch reform.

I think it's great there are places left where the story in the OP can happen.

I often leave my door unlocked, even at night...

To be fair, I think it would be pretty safe to do this in the place where my parents moved after retirement. They bought the house off plan the year before they moved and as the building work was being finalised they were asked to choose which kitchen worktops and cupboards they wanted, finish of bathroom fixtures and other minor variants from standard. They asked for a burglar alarm to be installed. The builder was very surprised but complied. It's never been used once. The house stood unlocked from morning till bedtime while they were in. Out of habit it gets locked overnight. It's the kind of place where the local paper reports the police attending reports of public drunkenness. Not too long since they reported every outing made by the fire engine.

Where we live (Inner London) things are somewhat different.

Similar happened to me. I was manning an activity stall at a fete & this guy came over with 2 very young girls. They started colouring etc. I thought i heard him say 'I'm just getting a coffee' but thought I'd misheard. He then strode off leaving them! I couldn't leave the stall to go after him. After about 10 mins he came back. I did tell him that we weren't a childcare facility!

Apart from the kids, I do pretty much all of those things and have done for years.

I think you need to reread. She didn’t hand over the keys. She left them in the car with the children unattended

Indeed

but was it the absolutely reckless parenting of the mum
Or the all the other stuff about the van drivers moving the car and how wonderful France is?

Don't you think it's quite unusual to hand over keys to your car to strangers whilst you pop out and 2 kids are in the car?

Omg she was so lucky! There was definitely a case in the news not that long ago where a father left the car running to pop to a shop with the baby sleeping in the back and the car was stolen and baby killed.

I’m not clear what part of the “story” the OP is so confident will “blow our minds”

That's a really bad thing to do. What was she thinking?

I never close my sitting room curtains! I live in a quiet cul-de-sac, have lamps on timers, so whether I am in, out, or even on holiday, no-one would be any the wiser. It helps that the driveway and road slopes away, so my windows are a bit higher for ‘seeing in’. I can always tell when several of my neighbours are away, as they leave their curtains closed halfway. A dead giveaway for burglars, imho.

Outrageous - I have lived in France for 15 years - I would still find this wrong on many levels..

Totally normal. I came out of a local shop one day and got halfway down the street before it dawned on me that I’d left the pram and baby outside the shop. 😱

Ha - x-posted, @Bjorkdidit!

Used to be perfectly normal in the UK too. My mum always left my sister and me outside shops (SE London, early 70s) - nobody thought twice about it and other shoppers would stop and chat to us. The shops were too small to take prams into (plus the pram we were in was enormous by today’s standards!). By the time I had my own kids this had become unthinkable.

It was lovely to live in a community safe enough to assume other people would look out for your children while you ran an errand, and so much easier for busy mothers. It’s incredibly sad that there are almost no places left in the world where this would be considered anything other than madness, and would likely lead to child abduction or social service intervention.

When I had my children (late 60’s/early 70’s), leaving the pram outside shops was normal. Prams were big, and shops were smaller, so it wasn’t physically possible to take them in. I always made sure that the babies were strapped in, so if an attempt was made to snatch them from the pram, the kidnapper would at least be slowed down. This was England.

I used to live accross the road from a laundrette. I once saw a mother leave 2 DC in the car with the car running while she went into the laundrette to do her washing. The mind boggles.

This happened to me at Legoland about 15 years ago - a Japanese man was at the top of a waterslide with two small children. The smaller one wanted to go and the other outright refused to go without him (it was a 1 or 2 person at a time ride). So he asked the rest of the immediate queue (group of random women) to look after Child 2 while he went down, left child 1 with mum who was waving from the bottom, then ran back up. Some of the other women were huffing and saying 'well, we could be anyone - we could be paedophiles'. I thought they were bonkers - it was a public place and perfectly reasonable for the sake of 3 minutes or so.

I live near but not in a seaside village in Ireland and this is regular occurrence at school pick up time. Parents abandon cars left, right and centre, with keys in, occasionally babies in car seats, in the local community centre car park.
A woman attempted to park in front of me when I was going into a fitness class, offering me her keys in case I needed to move her car.
its an odd dynamic as apparently ‘ we all trust in each other in our little middle class cute seaside community’

My DP actually does this, he lives in a tiny village. It scares the hell out of me

A workmate leaves her car keys in her car at work. Quite safe as the carpark is in a secure area, random members of the public can't access it, but another colleague decided to play a prank on her and moved her car to the other side of the building, which was harmless except he put her keys in his own pocket out of habit and left work before her so she was stuck

Someone else I know never locks his car. Asked why his car has no radio - "got stolen"