Family think I'm bad for leaving child at school 10mins before door opens

[pointbla]

I take my year 4 child early 10 mins before the school doors open and leave him there. I have another child to take to another school. He's 9 , I see no problem with it , other children are there too. Also, I don't regularly do that just occasionally.
My family seem to think this is very bad and I am putting my child at risk as the kids mess about. AIBU?

Hercule
If you haven't any self awareness , please let me assist if it helps you at al. Enough has been said by others.
There is nothing you can post now that can ameliorate what you have made obvious about your approach. I would suggest you make change as people remember.

*name change

😁😁

Child is in year 4 and not 4. So child is 9 years old. Just to clarify.

At my kids school, once they get to year 3 (8 years old) you're allowed to leave them on the yard to play from 8.40am onwards until the bell goes at 9am. A couple of teachers are present to supervise. I'm assuming your child is left in similar circumstances as mine and is under supervision of the school staff which I find absolutely fine imo.

WillLokiReturn

I don’t get the logic behind your approach at all. If you want an exchange to stop, stop participating in it, rather than carrying on with your disingenuous whining about not wanting it to continue, whilst ensuring that it does by keeping on. It makes no sense.

And if they remember your name Hercule , if they have negative connotations, you may struggle to be heard on other posts.
I don't personally understand why you have been so bullying on this thread. I hope you enjoy the summer break and stop feeling that you have to double down and be so unkind. Nameste.

WillLokireturn

I’m not shopping for your good opinion. You have been every bit as obdurate on this thread as you claim I have been (probably fairly - I am a stubborn one). Yet you insist I am solely at fault. I don’t accept that. I don’t care whether you or others “remember my name”. I don’t like hypocrites and don’t seek them out.

Wow how times have changed. Went to primary school in 90s. Myself and loads of kids would wait in the playground before school opened. No breakfast clubs around then. I don't see this as a good thing but my god. It's ten minutes. How have kids become so Molly coddled.

Hercule since you are convinced there is a plot against you of "cronies" .
😆 Maybe you ought understand numerous individuals /professionals throughout this thread have challenged you but you haven't listened and many have also expressed concern about your dogmatic bullying of OP or anyone that disagrees with your rigid assumptive views.

Anyway, it sounds like you are throwing out imagined insults. I really don't want to add to any issues you have in life.
Nameste

WillLokireturn

And you’re still at it. You really do want to carry on, don’t you?

No bullying has taken place. The OP was under no coercion to reply to me. It was simply noted that her refusal to do so was telling.

You have accused me of “badgering” and “bullying”, but you yourself have continued this exchange and been as rude as anyone else. It’s not edifying.

But I will let you have the last words, as they seem to be such a comfort to you, and this is - as you have pointed out many, many times - boring.

But like any real bully Hercule you don't. You won't stop and ought stop.

I would think that's fine as I walked to School on my own at 7, it took far longer than 10 minutes. However, these days people are so precious about it that kids never get the opportunity to learn any kind of sense of being responsible. If they are bothered, would they like to drop him off?

I'll bite one last time. I think the difference in opinion on this thread is quite symptomatic of more a general division on mumsnet (and in the world at large) between rule-followers and rule-breakers. For the former, the key immovable fact is that they think legal responsibility is with the school. Nothing can budge them from the primacy of what would happen in the ultimate 'what if' disaster scenario, in which the OP sues the school because her son broke his leg in the last 30 seconds before the bell rang and was somehow dissatisfied with the school's response (in what way is unspecified). The actual practicalities - that the OP has another child to get to school, that nobody in their right mind would pay for 10 minutes of breakfast club (in our school breakfast club is packing up by then, a child turning up 10 mins before school would be sent straight to the playground to line up), that children in schools up and down the land do this without any issue whatsoever, that nobody has yet sued a school in this scenario, that the chances of a 9yo coming to serious grief in the ten minutes before school starts are practically non-existent, and that even if no teacher was present one of the dozens of parents who probably know the 9yo would very certainly and willingly intervene to help. All of those things add up to a vanishingly tiny probability of problems. The OP's child would probably be more at risk if the OP spent those extra ten minutes in the car. But that all comes to nought because The Rules are The Rules, and anyone seeking to apply common sense is just an entitled fucker wanting to take advantage of others.

I suspect the extreme rule-followers congregate in much larger proportions on mumsnet than elsewhere, possibly because they find real-life social interaction fraught with frustration because the vast majority of people do not think in such rigid black-and-white terms. Most people think that rules are there ultimately to keep us safe and for society to function, but at the same time need to be tempered with common sense and an awareness of relative risks.

I'm certainly glad they are in the majority. Ultimately, I'm an optimist. Civil society functions pretty well by and large and while some people clearly take advantage, I am baffled by the apparent desire by some on here to seek out, find and condemn 'entitleness' in every nook and cranny of their lives. I rarely find people entitled - mostly they are considerate and helpful - but I guess people will tend to see whatever they look for.

@frogsoup 👏👏👏

Children are vulnerable. Is there not someone who you can share the time with? Let me tell you what happened to my almost 9 year old. He did not come home from school at the usual time so I went looking for him. You could almost see the house from the school path. I came to the football field opposite the school gate and just looked in the ungated entrance. There was a pile of sand - and my son. His eyes, ears nose and mouth had been filled with sand by bullies. He could not see, hear or cry for help. It will stick in my memory for ever. I carried him into the school to wash him and the head said he would get to the bottom of it, so I did not go to the police. I wish I had because nothing was done and I took him away from that school.

That was a long time ago but children are still vulnerable and should be handed over to a responsible adult prepared to look after him.

@llizzie that is awful. Thank you for sharing your experience.

frogsoup - to an extent I agree with you. I have no problem whatsoever with the notion that a parent leaves their child on the playground at their own risk and should accept any of the consequences without trying to pass the blame onto anyone else. However, believe me, many parents are only too ready to leap in and complain if their children are injured at school. And despite what you think, parents have been known to complain to schools about injuries that happened on school premises before school had even opened for the day, not just, eg, at the hands of another child during school playtimes, because some parents really are massive piss takers.

This is really about a group of parents relying on the goodwill of other parents to keep an eye on their kids for them and stop bad behaviour from other children getting out of control. After all, it is generally accepted that letting large numbers of children out to play at breaktimes without any adult supervision is a massive safeguarding fail and likely to result in a few fights, damage to property and injuries (all these things happen with supervision...), so it is not really reasonable to assume that large numbers of children on a school playground are safe because school has not opened for the day, yet. What is really going on here is an expectation that other people will look after your child without being asked.

And from a school's perspective, it is also a massive pisstake, because it is possible that anything bad that happens is the school's responsibility if it was letting parents and children onto the school playground before school started - even if that should be safer than forcing everyone to crowd around a locked gate next to a busy road.

pointblank, I thank you. I sent my boys to boarding school after that because the bullying did not stop. I just could not risk it happening again. It was not a cheap option.