Would you leave a 2 year old with older siblings for hours?

[Wouldcou]

Would you leave 4 children age 16, 15, 11 and 2 alone to go to the gym. It will take 3-4 hours due to public transport?

Mostly the issue is with the 2 year old I have left the other three together before to go shopping. Have never left the 2 year old.

what kind of 16yo do people know who can't manage a toddler for a few hours? If there's an emergency, they can call respective emergency services, can't they?

4 hours to go to gym is unreasonable though, you'll never keep it up consistently.

Isn’t this normal? I babysat for the family next door when I was 16 (often until the early hours). The kids were 9,7 and 9 months. The older two were always up when the parents left and I had to put them to bed. All my friends were babysitting at that age. When did this become unacceptable?

I was babysitting 3 children at 16 as well @ColesCorner7814.
They should be well able to mind a 2 year old.

My DM used to leave me to look after my brother when he was that age, and I would only have been 12 or 13 and he never came to any harm. She did it because he was a complete fucking nightmare in shops and hated being in a pushchair. The nearest proper supremarket was a 40 minute bus ride away, so it took a good couple of hours.

This was in the 1960s though, loads of things that were considered acceptable then would give people conniptions these days.

A 16 y old can't babysit a toddler? Seriously? I babysay my 2 y old brother when I was 10! Is the 16 y old disabled in any way?

The Ops situation is completely different to have a situation where a 16 year old has expressly been employed for the purpose of babysitting for a family next door.

Firstly your parents were presumably next door so you had an immediate point of contact if something went wrong. Secondly babysitting and being paid for it is a situation where all of your focus is 100% on the child you are babysitting and this is not the case for a 16 year old in their own home, particularly when they are also in charge of an 11 year old. Thirdly this scenario envisaged this happening very regularly not just as an occasional situation and during the day when they are active and not mainly sleeping, and fourthly the OP would not have been able to get back quickly in case of any issue due to the multiple buses and hours of travel situation.

Nobody is saying the 16 year old couldn't watch the toddler for 20 minutes whilst the OP popped to the shop.

As a one off it would probably be fine, but making this a weekly responsibility for your 16 year old is just unfair. She didn't choose to have a child.

No decent parent would let a 14 Yr old from outside their home babysit their kids though.