To say you don’t leave a 7yr old home alone?

[PsychoPumpkin]

So as not to drip feed, here’s the brief history between my DD1s Dad & I.

I had DD when I was 18 & he was 20, he left us when she was 6 months old.
She is 7 now and he has had her EOW since the split.
He has a long term GF, i’m Married & have had two more children.
We all get along & communicate well.

The issue is that I have picked our DD up from his house this evening & she has told me that he left her home alone while he picked his GF up from work. She couldn’t give me a length of time more specific than ‘about a quarter to a half of a Harry Potter film’.

She said she was fine and ‘entertained herself’ But was left with no way to contact him if she was in any trouble. She’s a sensible girl but I wouldn’t leave her home alone, she’s accident prone.

I haven’t asked her dad about it yet because I know that no harm came to her, but I’m annoyed because I know that it could have done. I feel it was seriously poor judgement.

How do I handle this?

Tornado, ‘alone’ is the operative word.

A child at home alone while you’re out driving a car has no backup if anything goes wrong. A child in a pool changing room is highly unlikely to actually be alone. And presumably you will be a few metres away and in to check on them if they take too long.

Put it this way: if my child was going to slip over and bang their head, I’d rather they did it in a public change room than alone in a locked house.

It's more about the lack of means to communicate. If he'd got stuck in traffic, been delayed, or worse still had an accident, he wouldn't have been able to let her know. She had no means of letting anyone else know that she was alone, either. It's not ideal to start with, but the fact that there was no phone accessible AT ALL would make me go nuts. Leaving her for half an hour plus (it won't have been 15 mins) with clear instructions to call him/you/999 if anything happened, and him saying I'll be 30 mins max and if I'm at all later I will call and you must pick up the phone - that's a world away from leaving her alone with no means of communication. If he'd had an accident and been incapacitated, NO ONE would have known she was alone and she would have, eventually, just had to go looking for help alone once it got dark and she got scared enough. Yes, totally tiny chance that would happen, but perfectly possible so you DON'T take that chance. That's what I'd be fuming at.

Say this to him. What the hell does he think would have happened in an emergency? He put no safety plan in place and left her vulnerable. What would have been his first thought if he'd woken up 24 hours later in hospital?

When you have care of a 7 year old or even a ten year old, yes, deciding on levels of responsibility is one thing, but he didn't do that. He left her trapped, with no means of getting help or instructions of what to do if things didn't go to plan.

This is what you don't 'leave' - yep say fair enough it won't happen again BUT this highlights that we absolutely have to talk about risk assessing as she does get to the age where we will both be giving her more freedom. It sounds as if his awareness of risk is severely lacking and you need to talk about that for her to be a safe older child in his care.

I've never seen a 4 year old walking the streets alone that's all. Here people would report it to the police.