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.

Spero

Fair enough, I appreciate some of your comments.

If you do work in child protection and have ever been a social worker attached to a large hospital then I do find it odd you have never come across things like this before but there you go.

I got a bit het up about it as rightly or wrongly I perceived some of your comments in earlier posts to be mocking/sarcastic with the implication there is no risk at all (or in any event so miniscule as to be made fun of). I don't and can never accept this as I've had to pick up the pieces at the other end.

It just then didn't sit well with me your admission that you wouldn't do it yourself in other hotels which is a tacit admission that it is not safe.

I will continue to spout off about this as I honestly feel it should be discouraged. I would hate to think that anyone reading this thread is somehow made to feel as though they are over protective/lulled into a false sense of security based on sarcastic comments about risk and so changes their behaviour because of it.

I accept I am quite jaded/cynical/have trust issues as unfortunately it comes with the territory. Your experiences have led you to one conclusion, mine to another. I'm happy to agree to differ.

No I wouldn't do it at all. I think people just don't think when they are on holiday.

I was on holiday last week and eating lunch with DH and the DC in a seaside taverna. A car pulled up and parked on the sea road just outside the restaurant with lots of cars going up and down). A couple (brits, definitely a hire car) got out of the car and walked up the road and around the corner. I looked at the car and saw the rear window cranked down a couple of inches and that they had left their daughter about three asleep in the rear seat. No sign of the couple. They had left her like you wouldn't leave a dog in the back seat in 32 degree sunshine with just a couple of inches of air.

Over half an hour went by. After 10 mins DH and I kept checking her, we tried the doors, asked the restaurant owners if they knew the people (its a small place and locals generally know who is staying where)The little girl woke up screaming and i was trying to reassure the little girl, DH was just off to get the police when the couple came back yelling at me to get the fuck away from his car, DH came out explaining that we were concerned (perhaps not very politely)and got called a fucking paedo and threatened and told to mind our own business. They got in and drove off.

I still feel very uncomfortable about it and not sure what we should have done to handle it or whether we overreacted, but its not something I would have done with my DC.

I wouldn't risk my house on a business venture but plenty of people would. Peoples attitudes to risk vary significantly, but who is able to say who is right or wrong in this scenario?

Curlew,

Er because we all realised it would have been a bit fucking late to do anything about it if in fact there was an intruder in their room.

Just a personal thing I suppose, it put the shits up us all to think there was someone there - it was unanimous, no scaremongering - it's just how we all reacted.

Curlew

I replied and explained. I'm sorry you missed it, the broken record is tiresome.

""For the record I never said anything about silently, you are making presumptions about cases you know nothing about.

As to the accidents, please show me where I specified non mobile. Apologies of course if I did."

I assumed silently. Otherwise the parents would have been there as soon as they heard the door open over the monitor.

And we have been talking about babies, I thought?"

This is the post you didn't reply to.

Buffy

I understand what you are saying but in all honesty I do judge. We are all products of how life has shaped us. I accept that some others may have different opinions but I feel strongly that I have more insight than most in this area and as such I sought to share it.

I'm not questioning others experiences but I'm bloody well not going to apologise for outlining my own in case it makes others feel uncomfortable about their parenting.

Lambzig. If there is another time, carefully write down the car registration number. And tell the police.

Lambzig, that seems very different from leaving a baby/toddler sleeping in a hotel room.

Curlew

One case the parents said they heard nothing, cctv was primary evidence. The other was caught in the room, parent had returned by coincidence afaiaa and not prompted to by monitor.

Accidents have been all ages under the sun, babies up to teens. One 4 year old was left watching DVDs, baby woke up and she decided to bath him. The boy is alive to my knowledge but brain damaged. They said they had a monitor. I have no clue.

The biggest risk to children at the moment seems to be the hot weather. Driving teenagers to swim in unsafe water. I can see reports of three drownings in as many days.

I don't think any of us are keen, but at least we know our gut instincts are irrational.

I suppose your perception of risk can be influenced by what you come into contact with or your profession. I was brought up to be passionately anti-smoking. My dad was a radiologist. The stories he told about what lung cancer looks like....

I'm told that obstetricians have disproportionately more "unnatural" for want of a better word births (C-sections/epidurals/hospital births) because they only ever see the complicated cases and therefore are worried about the risks. I know my GP friend was insistent that the consultant team stay out the way when she had her kids and let the midwives get on with it (she did however have her kids in hospital), to reduce the likelihood of interventions.

Dad later became a paediatric radiologist. I thought that 2lb babies were big 'cos he would always be very positive if a news item about multiples mentioned weights. (No, we didn't have many friends with young babies! ). He (like my GP friend) would get quite irate about media scaremongering about child abusers on every corner, as the cases he came into contact with were almost exclusively within the family or someone close to the family. He often had to testify in court about NAI incidents.

Yeah, well, leaving a baby and a 4 year old together alone for any length of time is just plain dumb- and nothing at all to do with this thread.

My friend who's a GP is slightly OTT about healthy eating and snacks, in my opinion. She is horrified by snacks between meals, unless they are vegetables.

But it's because she sees so many very fat and unhealthy children in her surgery so I understand where she's coming from. She passionately believes good nutrition makes a big difference to health. I am less bothered by the risk of biscuits between meals. My everyday experience doesn't show me what hers shows her.

Abra1d what you said about water and the dangers of pools is very real and (if you wanted to get your list of risks out) much more risky I'm sure than leaving a baby sleeping peacefully with a monitor and going elsewhere in the building. Toddlers or even older children and water, not just abroad, but here in the UK do drown every year. I find this a difficult risk not to be neurotic about- on the beach in particular I always go where the lifeguards are now, and keep an eye, and have prioritised the children learning to swim and so on, but this does still give me the heebijeebies.

Hamilton - I am not a hospital social worker, I am a family lawyer who does 80% care proceedings work. But I have seen a lot of what hospital social workers do as I represent parents and LAs for EPOs for eg.

Just to clarify. I have never claimed anything is NO risk.

I have distinguished between different types of hotels because I think that does make a difference to the risk. My hotels both times were smallish, non chain ones and I felt comfortable with my decision.

Nothing I post is about trying to make me feel bad about my own decisions. just trying to stop others telling me I am 'delusional' because I think that is just wrong and unhelpful to others trying to make informed choices on a day to day basis.

We all have different perceptions of risk. What I think we have to agree on is that mostly they are 'perceptions' - there are rarely absolutes, apart from don't let children drink poison or play near water unsupervised if they can't swim etc.

I had a client whose daughter was taken into care because she left her for five minutes to go over the road to get some cigarettes from a garage. It was raining and child asleep. I thought then and think now that was ridiculous and suspect that if my client had been 30 something yummy mummy instead of angry teenager, there might have been a different outcome.

Sorry 'good' about my own decisions, not 'bad' that makes no sense.

OR was it a Freudian slip?

I thought my husband was obsessed with pool safety. Every time we went away he would send endless emails to villa house owners asking about pool fencing and locks. We were never allowed to stay at houses that had pools but no fences and locks. But he was right, so so right. Our children were very quick and could have run out of a door, chased one another and fallen into a pool in the time it took to unload shopping from the car.

Lambzig, not quite sure what your example is trying to show.

that people are fucking stupid idiots sometimes?
Or that leaving a child asleep in a cot in a room at 16 degrees is comparable to leaving a child in a car on a hot day?

Even I would probably notice that the latter is not a good idea.

Buffy, to clarify, there was of course a back story to this, my client had come to the attention of SW in the past, they didn't just storm in on the basis of that once incident.

But it was the trigger for removal which I thought was OTT. I don't know what happened there, if they ever were reunited.