Would you leave a nearly 16yo and a 13,yo alone overnight?

[Neolara]

I'm meant to be going away for work overnight in a week's time and my DH unexpectedly also has to now be out of the country for work on the same night.

I have two exceptionally sensible teens. One is 16 next month. The other is 13. They get on very well and won't argue. They are perfectly capable of cooking for themselves and having been scouts for years, are resourceful and resilient and don't really get freaked out when faced by challenges. They both know considerably more first aid than me. I completely trust that they won't do anything silly or invite anyone round. If anything happened, we have 3 families within 5 mins walk who would look after them and probably about 5 other families I could call on for back up who could be with them in 10 mins.

Initially, I'd assumed that I would try to find someone who the youngest could have a sleepover with. However, they are both telling me they would be completely fine staying for one mid-week night by themselves in the house. And now I'm wondering whether it would be ok to leave them by themselves after all. Your thoughts would be appreciated..

Fair point. It's the perception of risk for me.

NSPCC advise not leaving a child under 16 overnight alone. Also 16 is technically the age when the lines between them being a child or an adult become a bit blurry. It also comes back to the what happens if something goes wrong scenario and how it looks to others.

In truth though obviously there is little difference between a mature 15 year old and a recently turned 16. For me I preferred to stay within the lines - also we had no compelling necessity to go away overnight before DS was 16.

Also the overnight thing to me is how much help can you get quickly and also mentally how do you respond when woken up.
If there's something a bit worrying going on, it's a lot easier to get neighbours around or whatever during the day, than it is 3 am at night.

We did have an attempted break in a few years ago and first we knew about it was when police knocked on the door at 2am. I know statistically it's rare - we've lived in the property for 17 years and this has happened once - but it's not a situation I'd like to leave a 15 year old to handle alone.

I would but my kids sound very similar to yours. Very mature and perfectly able to survive a night without us. I moved in to my own house at 16 (family friend rented it to me but I made the full almost market rent myself by working.) so I couldn't really tell my almost 16 year old that she couldn't manage a single night in a fully stocked house, WITH company too.

My big thing would whether they would wake up if the fire alarm went off in the night?

Admittedly mine are younger (7,5,2) but our fire alarm went off a while ago one evening and took a while to get it to go off -badly burnt milk on the Aga - and none of my children woke up at all, evening with the smoke alarms going off full volume outside their bedrooms with the doors open.

You'd need to be confident that if, heaven forbid, there was a fire, then your children would wake up if the smoke alarm went off.

In a nutshell... NO

All those saying they have mature trustworthy teens, are all their friends mature and trustworthy as well? What about friends of their friends? Or random aquatainces? That's the real issue here. Most teenagers are perfectly capable of spending a night alone but are they also capable of not telling a single person that they are doing so and therfore not ending up with frineds/randoms taking advantage of the situation.

We have ring doorbells so would know straight away if they had anyone over that we hadn’t approved.

I think people know what set of friends their DCs have, I know it's a common horror story about parties getting out of hand, but it seems extremely unlikely in this scenario.

We have left DS alone for 1-2 nights since he was 16 on i think three occasions now. First time he was studying for exams - I had planned to get SIL to stay but he assured me he'd be fine alone and so he was.
Second time he had a few pals round - this was arranged with DH as I was away. I wasn't wild on the idea and sure enough a half empty bottle of JD was found at a later date, but DH came back in the morning and made them breakfast and the house wasn't trashed.

Third time was a school night that turned out not to be a school night because of the Queens funeral. For that one we explicitly told him no friends over and I asked a few neighbours to check up on him.

Anyway long saga, but how will they build up to be responsible adults if we don't trust them in their own in their late teens. I agree it needs to be built up - in the same way you would gradually build up a younger DCs independence - but not doing it at all doesn't seem like the right idea either.