Yesterday, i babysat for my DD1's best friends, twins aged 4 whilst their parents went to a funeral. The funeral was a long way away, so we had the twins all day, from 9am - 9pm, which was fine.
Thing is, one of the twins fell asleep in the afternoon, quite literally; one minute she as playing on a tricycle, the next she had half fallen off, head in hands and was asleep. I took her off the trike and lay her on the sofa, poppped a blanket over her and she slept for a while. I guessed she must have been exhausted, with a death in the family, perhaps their normal routine has understandably been thrown out of kilter and being without her parents on short notice for a whole day was probably taking its toll. So I let her sleep.
In the evening, when the father came to collect, I gave him a quick synopsis of their day, what they had eaten, what they had done, and mentioned that X had had a little sleep.
He looked at me askance and said "what? for how long?" in a very narky way.
I explained the circumstances (ie that she was asleep on a trike and that there was not much for it but let her have a snooze.
But he was obviously narked and started going on about how she would not sleep that night and how long exactly had she slept etc.
AIBU to think if you are caring for a child who is obviously exhausted, it is ok to let them sleep? Or should I (shakes head in disbelief) woken her up and tried to keep her awake?
Durely the first rule of ad hoc babysitters is that they do the best they can (food, sleep, telly etc) but that the rules put in place by parents can be suspended, because the babysitter (not a childminder, just a friend doing a favour) is not the parent?