To leave a 2 year old for 10 mins

[BlueSuedeStiletto]

2 year old asleep in a cot they can't get out of. Needed to pop to the shops. 10 minutes away if that, child asleep the whole time, doors locked etc. Friend is horrified. WIBU?

Nope, not ok. People will always say ‘oh but it’s only the same as being in a different room/the garden’ but it just isn’t. There you can literally be with them in seconds if you hear them cry, you can’t do that if you’re down the road at the shop.

Two year old’s can be real Houdini’s, they can certainly attempt to leave the cot and potentially hurt themselves.

The fact that I’m most cases the child won’t come to harm does not make this acceptable. Something could happen, however unlikely and you would then not be available to help and absolutely be responsible for serious consequences. How can you even consider bearing that risk - it isn’t the high chance of nothing happening to consider but the small chance it could. Your thinking about it is wrong.

It isn’t possible to prevent every incident arising and accidents will happen but a parents job is to protect the child and minimise risk - and leaving a child alone in a house is an unacceptable risk and negligent.
Yes a child can have an accident in another room, but they can shout and someone can come running. Yes, very occasionally a child will die silently in another room while their parent is in the house and that is a tragedy and terrible but vv occasionally unavoidable. If you aren’t actually in the house though there is no way to know an incident is occurring and you would never forgive yourself.

A key job of parents is to risk assess. As kids get older they are given more responsibility and we give it understanding accepting the risks. It is an error of parental judgement about risk level to leave a 2 year old in a house alone. Anyone considering it needs some lessons in risk and small children and appropriateness.

Difference lockheart is that in the shops scenario there is far more scope for some adverse event to happen to you while you're out, leaving your kid alone at home for far longer than intended.

NO FRIGGING WAY!!!!

Many 2yo are in beds so could get up and end up in all sorts of trouble like falling down the stairs looking for mum, wetting/spoiling themselves as mum hasn't come up help them go to the loo, wake up distressed because they were sick, fallen out of bed etc...

If you really need something, it's much better to get someone to bring it to you or wait until morning as most 2yo are awake very early.

Just read the thread and I see it’s not you OP but at least you know now if you have children that is vv U. Btw, those who say yes but what if you’re in the garden- take the monitor - same as being downstairs. You’re not going to be run over in your garden!
There are always risks. A mum could collapse at home with only her baby, etc but to actually take a big risk is ridiculous.
A baby could have an accident at home - but then you’re there to deal with it. And DD did climb out of cot and hurt her arm - thankfully just sprained but it did hurt for a long time. She was under 2 as went into a bed a few months after DS was born.

I never said it was sensible or indeed the right thing to do @VoteJadot (personally I have quite extreme anxiety so I could never bring myself to do this because I'd be assuming every single extreme example).

What I am saying is that in the circumstances that the OP describes in their short post it is not illegal, nor would social services be interested, as many other posters seem to think.

YABU

I've done it. Ds was around 18 months old asleep in his cot and it was time to pick his sister up from school,which was literally 2 minutes away.After much humming and harring I thought it kinder to just go myself rather than wake him (because that boy sure did love his sleep, still does in fact) but although he was perfectly fine when I returned,it was the longest 5 minutes of my life as I waited in the playground for my Dd to come out of that classroom door. Never did it again for fear of giving myself a stroke more than anything!

So if you put out the recycling and take the bin to the kerb and it takes 10 minutes, is it grossly negligent to leave your 2 year old in her cot? Genuine question- not goady, honestly!

@Aridane - How long is your drive for it to take 10 mins? 😂

@Lockheart

What is the difference if (for example) your child, who has no record of any medical problems, has a seizure and dies whilst you're asleep in the next room, you're downstairs on the phone for 10 mins, you're outside in the garden for 10mins, or whilst you're at the corner shop for 10 mins? What makes the final one illegal neglect and the others not? Are they all illegal neglect? In none of the circumstances could you have prevented it.

The difference would be whether I was charged with neglect or manslaughter. I wouldn’t necessarily be charged with manslaughter unless prosecutors could reasonably show I could have prevented the death by being home and obtaining medical help. I still maybe charged with neglect for leaving them home alone and that would depend on the age of the child, time I was gone and potential dangers of the environment.

Although the case study was over turned, the Father was still prosecuted and it took well over a year for the over turn to happen. There were 105 arrests, 30 were released without charge, 24 accepted a caution and 19 were charged. So just over 18% of people were charged just under 23% accepted a police caution.

The police would not be cautioning or charging parents if it were legal to leave children home alone. The law is written in a very ambiguous way and the judgement of whether or not the child is safe or not is down to the the police not the parent or carer, however your original statement that it is not illegal to leave a child alone and social services would not be interested is not correct.

I am however putting my hands up to say that it is not strictly illegal either.

It’s like speeding,

If you speed a bit but never caught= nothing will happen
Leaving 2 year old home alone but no harm comes to them, no one reports the incident=Nothing will happen
If you speed and are caught= fine and points
Leave 2 year old home alone, child is fine but someone reports=police caution/social services involved
If you speed and an accident occurs which results in injury=you maybe prosecuted depending on circumstances
Leave 2 year old home alone, something happens child becomes distressed/or injured= you maybe prosecuted depending circumstances

Aridane I assume you can hear the child because your front door might be slightly ajar because you're in the house and some of that 10 mins is in the house collecting bits and pieces. That would obviously be fine.

If your house is massive and there's 5 minutes between house and kerb (and 5 minutes back) then you might want to take a baby monitor with you.

If you're in the garden, you could use a baby monitor and know if your child wakes up/falls out of bed etc

TowerRingInferno

Is this a reverse thread? You did not have any children back in January but did have a 2yo niece

Hmm interesting

The worst stuff thats happened to my kids has generally been when i've been doing the washing up

Nope you should never do this. You can be prosecuted if caught. Check GOV UK and they advise babies, toddlers and very young children should never be left alone

Parents can be prosecuted if they leave a child unsupervised ‘in a manner likely to cause unnecessary suffering or injury to health’.

Don't do it.

Hmm interesting

Not really given the OP has said she has no children and reiterated that she was discussing this with a friend.

Nothing much may happen to the sleeping toddler but what if something happens to delay the parent who left the child? An accident or something else. The child would probably be alone a long time before anyone realised.

Part of being a parent is that you are effectively held hostage by a sleeping child . That's life. Get used to it.

I've only just started leaving my just turned 11 year old home alone for short periods. It's petrifying. I think I'd have a nervous breakdown if I'd left a two year old at home by themselves.

There is never a situation where you can 100% protect a child from harm. They could have a silent accident in the same room as you and die.....although vv unlikely and therefore a risk we all have to live with.

By leaving the room or going into the garden, risk increases, but we take this as reasonable risk because the risks are still vv low, most incidents can be heard and we weigh the risk against the necessaries of life continuing.

But by the time we get to going out and leaving 2 year old alone the risk is higher. An incident cannot be heard and stoped, delays can happen giving more time for incidents to occur or reach critical stage. Whilst we need to be in other rooms of the house and leave our babies in earshot, there are alternative plans which can be made so we don’t have to leave them in the house alone. It might be a sin to wake a sleeping toddler but it’s much worse to return and find them dead, maimed or harmed in another way.

So we always have to consider risk and also the rest of life. The rest of life has to go on, but babies don’t ever need to be left in the house alone.....there is always another option. And this option needs taking even if inconvenient because the risk for a 2 year old of being left, whilst not frequent is very high. You can not rely on your baby being the 98% who slept whilst you were out and if they were the 2% who were harmed, the fact you had an alternative to leaving them and didn’t choose it would make you responsible because that incident was avoidable.

I meant a pain not a sin to wake. Toddler.

Weigh that nuisance of waking them and taking them with you, against the risk of tragedy.

I couldn't see the issue as it's a lot of "what ifs", many of which are very much worst case scenarios.

Turn it around and look at a (supposedly) positive scenario. Millions of people in the UK spend several pounds every week on buying lottery tickets. Everybody knows that your chances of winning the jackpot are infinitesimal, but they still think it's worth a punt. The vast majority of them will never win anything more than maybe a thousand or so in their whole lives, but the fact is that, most weeks, somebody does win the jackpot.

If you compare the chances of the child dying in a fire to those of winning the jackpot (and the odds are in no way comparable), what about the risk of the child waking and getting terribly upset? Much higher even than winning a tenner in the previous scenario, I'd say. If you as an adult can't get in touch with somebody for a little while, you don't usually worry about it. A 2yo doesn't have the capacity to know the difference between a few minutes' separation and permanent abandonment. 10 minutes can seem like forever to one so young.

Moreover, there are any number of maybe non-fatal but still very serious mishaps that could happen whilst you're away. Even if the baby eventually managed to get over whatever had happened to them, the police and social services might not take such a positive view about not pressing charges or letting you keep the child.

As PPs have said, the McCanns would now do absolutely anything if they could turn back the clock, but they presumably thought the chances of any harm coming to their children by leaving them without adult supervision were so low as to be virtually non-existent. Tragically, as they are now so painfully aware, they were very, very wrong. The last 12 years of their lives - and quite probably the rest until they die - have been consumed with the horror that no parent would ever want to go through (and the younger twins' lives will also have been seriously negatively impacted by it all).

I did this, 20 odd years ago. My DS was asleep in his cot, he had a cold and was exhausted after a bad night. I had to pick up my DD from school, it was about a 2 minute walk from my house, I didn't even have to cross a road, in fact I could see the back of my house the whole time. I don't think I would do it now though, especially if I had to drive.

I wouldn’t leave a 2 year old alone for ten seconds. If I knew someone was leaving a toddler alone I’d have no qualms in reporting her for child neglect to social services.
You should be ashamed of your parenting! In fact, it’s not even parenting to leave a toddler in his cot whilst you go out.
What if a fire, a car crashes into your home, a nutter bursts in or something which involves a police cordon? You happy to say “oops, my bad, I popped to the shops”
Don’t fucking have children if they will be such a massive inconvenience that you can’t even wait for them to wake before you “pop to the shops”