to think it's wrong to leave a baby/toddler sleeping alone in a hotel room?

[strawberry34]

When you have a monitor and are still in the premises?my friend says she does it when on holiday, she goes to the bar/restaurant and responds to the monitor if her 2yo dd wakes, I was shocked and said I wouldn't ever want to, I stay in the room and read a book/have a bath. Aibu to think what she's doing is wrong? I don't want to refer to famous cases but to me there's too much risk.

It is rather hypocritical to say that you would rather not take any risk with your child if you don't have to (even if it is a small risk in leaving them in a hotel room with a monitor), when you take a risk everytime you get in the car!

skewed risk analysis and not rational

Ditto what pretty bird said.

Maybe the reason we get so worked up about these minor risks that we CAN control i.e. just don't go out to eat, means we deflect our worries about the more major risks that are less in our control, such as driving.

I accept I could do without a car, but it makes my life so much easier, I wouldn't want to. thus I take the risk to both me and my daughter of driving around quite a lot.

Actually years ago, I was paranoid about my children in car seats and I wouldn't move an inch before they were strapped in. Obviously now they do always wear a seatbelt but, looking back I was obsessed and felt almost panicky about it - as if the one time I may forget, that they would almost certainly be in an accident and die. I wasn't looking at it rationally and that the chances were they would be ok anyway. What I am trying to say is that society conditions you into a certain way of thinking and then we get an emotional gut response rather than thinking clearly. I lost my sense of perspective. I think that is what people have lost here.

I would never let my children ride an a car without a seatbelt as that is the obvious thing to do to mitigate the risks in driving a car, likewise I wouldn't leave an older child, or be far away, or not use a monitor - but really there is far less risk of leaving a baby and monitor in a hotel room, than there is driving a car.

Looking after babies is not just a risk/benefit exercise.

In general, we (in our culture usually accept that babies need their parents nearby, even if the risk of something terrible happening to them is very low. The lowness of the risk, and knowing they wouldn't wake up (how?), wouldn't justify going out for an hour and leaving a small baby at home alone, would it? So, it's not all about risk assessments in a purely statistical sense, it's about the (culturally normative) feeling that babies are better if there is an adult around them who is caring for them and can hear them most of the time/checking on them. You feel that is accomplished in a hotel by leaving the room, locking it and going down with a baby monitor, I wouldn't.

And yes- there will be a point at which a parent's judgement of the relative risks might be quite 'sensible' (risks minimally low) but society/the law still deems it neglectful to have left a child, for example, if they left the building for a period of time. Parents on here have reported people doing the school run leaving a baby on their own for half an hour during nap time. No, this is not generally acceptable even though the risks are low!

Ranking risks in some type of probabilistic table with driving at the top doesn't tell you how to parent - and if you know the risks of driving are high, piling on other risks because they are not as bad as driving is even more nonsensical.

I'm not sure where to start here. I suppose that I should start by saying that we did leave DS1 alone in a hotel room when he was a baby while we were downstairs at my cousin's wedding. There was a listening service and DS1 is a very heavy sleeper once he is asleep so we felt very secure in leaving him.
Once DS2 came on the scene then our attitude changed as DS2 is not a heavy sleeper.
This worked for us and I would never presume to judge others for their choices. If someone said to me that they would never do it because it made them feel uncomfortable then I would understand (especially if they have anxiety issues). If someone said that they do it because they feel comfortable doing it then I would understand that too.
There have been some horrible things said on this thread about parents that have left their children alone, in fact the first reply to the OP used the term "fucking moron" to describe the OP's friend, followed with "her selfish ass". Completely uncalled for in my opinion. As has been said by others on here about a million times (and yes, I'm exaggerating), it comes down to assessing lots of different factors (age of child, how well they sleep, etc etc) and then making a reasoned decision, you can't just write off everyone who has done it as being a moron , or idiotic, or any of the other names that have been called on this thread.

There is no one size fits all answer to this:

Different children will react in different ways to waking up in a strange room with nobody there.

A very young baby will not climb out of the cot and grab the kettle flex but a toddler might.

A baby monitor will alert parents to goings on in the room but ability to do something quickly depends on proximity.

There is a big difference between leaving a baby sleeping in a bedroom of a small guest house room whilst parents are relaxing in the adjacent lounge and leaving a toddler in a room at a large hotel whilst parents are at the opposite end of the complex getting drunk.

I agree, parenting is not just about risk analysis, how grim and boring that would be.

I don't stride about in my hard hat with a clip board in my dealings with my daughter. I appreciate that little babies need their carers close.

BUT when she is fast asleep and oblivious to whether I am there or not, when I get the chance to go out for a few hours and chat to another adult and get some brief respite from nappies and feeding etc, so I come back to my baby revitalised and happy - that is also for her benefit.

The absolute worst that could realistically have happened is that she woke up and was scared and unhappy I wasn't there. No doubt she would have got a cuddle from the woman on reception who was listening on the monitor, and if that didn't work, she would have phoned me and I would have come back.

I do not see how that is going to harm my child in the grand scheme of things.

The risks of fire, abduction, strangulation etc during the two hours I was away, I thought about and discounted as minimal.

In absolutely no way am I suggesting to people that they shouldn't drive. I'm just attempting to point it that some risks we as individuals deem to be acceptable, others not. It's not always logical - precisely because we don't approach parenting as a risk-benefit analysis - any more than we approach it as a cost-benefit exercise in which case we definitely wouldn't do it !

If people genuinely feel that it is wrong for anyone to leave a child in a hotel room, then, as someone posted earlier, they should be campaigning to make it illegal for hotels to offer such services .

There are lots of things we do or don't do in this country that other societies find strange and/or dangerous. Someone earlier mentioned that in another country, they've noticed that people are comfortable leaving a sleeping baby while they do the school run. Other countries expect children to be walking to and from school on their own from kindergarten age. The EU wanted to make it a requirement that children use booster seats till they were 150cm - the UK chose to make it 135cm. (Now I recognise the degree to which individual countries actually follow the law is a whole different issue! ).

When I was young, people used to leave babies in prams outside shops. There weren't that many supermarkets and it wasn't so easy to get a pram into a small local shop. Buggies didn't really exist. Things change - although I'm not sure always for the better.

My mum deviated from the norm in her society by choosing to breastfeed her children. It's what felt right for her. Her contemporaries though it was "better" to formula feed". She got judged (not by her true friends) for not doing the "best" thing for her children .

Anyway, I'm comfortable with my decisions. I know I'm a good mum (even though I often joke that according to MN standards I am a baaad mum as ds was given fruit shoots amongst other heinous crimes! ). Dh and I love ds (most of the time - it is nearly 2 weeks in to the school holidays, so there have been times I could throttle the little tyke darling!) and he loves us. I will be influencing ds and hope that when he becomes a parent (in many years to come ), he will take a similar relaxed approach to parenting.

But I am not forcing anyone to leave their child in a room (any room) if they are not comfortable with it.

Well said prettybird.

Given the surprising amount of rage expressed by some posters about this issue, it is a wonder they have any emotion left for those children who are maimed or killed by their parents.

Prettybird

Why the need to rewrite my post? that's my opinion and I'm entitled to it. I don't understand why anyone would take issue with a poster pointing out that in her opinion there is a small risk based on her experiences.

Furthermore I don't really accept that argument as you could rewrite pretty much any scenario into that or a similar type of sentence and use it as justification for choices. It doesn't negate my experiences.

FWIW driving may not be strictly necessary to some people but its a damn sight more of a necessity to the vast majority of people than leaving young children alone in hotel rooms so you can dine out. Its not comparable.

Buffy, not that I am not tempted mind...

Ignoring my post again, I see hamilton75.

And me curlew! and me! don't try and claim all the Ignoring for yourself.

One of my perhaps less proud moments as a parent was denouncing my then 4 year old's cruel treatment of the cat in bellowing lawyer's tones, demanding if she thought this was 'appropriate'.

She replied, in tears that she didn't know as she didn't know what 'appropriate' meant.

There are much worse things I have done than go out for two hours, believe me.

SiL did this with her then 6 and 7 year olds on hols years ago, left a walkie talkie in the room for them to call if they were worried.

We all nearly died from the panic when we heard a foreign voice talking on the thing and she rushed to the room - turns out it was a taxi driver on the same frequency - but was enough of a scare that she and the rest of us decided not to try it again.

Hamilton - your post was a good example of how it is our perception of risk that can be challenged. It was the most recent one of that type at the time that I posted - no other reason for choosing it. Is there anything that in my re-writing that is wrong or libellous?

The fact that it could be re-written for all sorts of different scenarios and that I could have chosen other posts to do the same thing to just illustrates how much of this is about perception of risk - - and that we absolutely should not judge others for taking different attitudes to risk.

But I think on that we'll have to agree to differ.

An old friend of DH's left his 3 DCs in his house whilst his wife and him did some gardening.

It was a hot evening, windows were open and they checked on the kids every so often. He was moving the lawn and his DW was weeding. He turned off the mower when he smelt smoke (he actually thought it was coming from the mower). Then he heard a faint alarm and presumed that a neighbours house was on fire. He strolled back into his house to put on a shirt and go and help then realisead that it was his own house on fire. The tumble drier in the basement had caught fire. He managed to get his two DCs from their first floor bedrooms, he was unable to go back in his house to get his DS from his attic bedroom as the fire had spread that quickly. Thankfully fire crews were there within minutes, they rescued his DS from his attic room and no one was seriously hurt.

Their house is not that big and neither is their garden. They are bright and level headed people. I was really shocked when DH told me what had happened. Fire spreads so so quickly. Won't be leaving my DCs in a hotel alone.

"We all nearly died from the panic when we heard a foreign voice talking on the thing and she rushed to the room - turns out it was a taxi driver on the same frequency - but was enough of a scare that she and the rest of us decided not to try it again."

Struggling to see why this would scare you into not doing it again- didn't it sort of show that it worked?

It is because fire spreads so quickly and is so dangerous that there are such stringent building regulations concerning houses in multiple occupation. A hotel would be a much safer place to be in than your average family home if a fire did break out.

Hah! I knew there was a chink in your reasonable armour Buffy.

that poor child. How can you live with yourself. I would never.

Etc, etc.