Another Maryland Mom Arrested: She Let Daughter, 10, Wait in Car with Baby Sister for 10 Mins

Sorry, I generally agree with the views here, but I think this goes beyond my comfort zone. It is one thing to leave your children in the car while you walk up to an ATM or to pick up drycleaning – and you can still see the car or can easily check out the window. It is another to leave an infant with no adult supervision whatsoever while you wander deep into a supermarket.

That being said, I would think police and CPS have better things to do. But to be fair they draw the line harshly for a reason – far too many children die in overheated locked vehicles.

Emily – She wasn’t charged for leaving her 10 year old unsupervised. She was charged for leaving her infant in the care of her 10 year old. I don’t think she should be charged for this either, but it appears that the issue was the infant, not the 10 year old.

Does anyone know what the actual law is in Maryland? I’d love to see a summary of this type of law for all 50 states.

I think the bigger problem is that CPS immediately makes this a criminal act. If CPS was so concerned about child safety, why not a nice chat with the parents to see if there is something seriously wrong, instead of immediately charging the parents.

The biggest cause of death in children is cars (CDC). But lets look at how MoCo treats drivers

You can kill someone with your car and get a fine of a few hundred dollars. We don’t even fine you for going 10mph over the speed limit, let alone arrest you and impound your car.

Yet MoCo will charge you with a serious misdemeanor and “impound” your children if it sees them alone for a few minutes.

How is this sound public policy? Or is it just easier to pick on parents?

Lenore: If the store were so concerned about kids, they could have broadcast something over the store PA instead of calling the police. Can we get the name of the store? It might be hard to get change at MoCo government, but I am sure that the store manager might be more interested if parents with kids stop shopping there.

Boraxo, what can a 1 year old do in a car that would require “adult supervision” that a 10 year old could not handle? She was strapped in. As others have pointed out, if the car gets too hot, the 10 year old is capable of dealing with that.

Wow. I was babysitting infants at 12. I was just telling someone today how our Mom used to leave the 4 of us in the car while she went in the store to shop and always said “back in a flash!”, which we knew actually meant “back in 2 hours!”. We were all two years apart and this was in the years where the oldest of us was anywhere from 8-12. This world is pegging the insanity meter.

And as with all if this type of case what are the relative safety merits of leaving a sleeping infant in a car with a responsible older sibling for ten minutes vs walking them across the typical 5-acre suburban supermarket parking lot?

My older two kids tease each other by racing one another across lots no matter how firm the tone of my voice or follow-up punishment and my infants are small and prone to wander. If someone sped through a lot and ran over the kid would they be charged, yet this is a much greater risk.

Yes, Andrew, that is why the law is so complicated. That situation is something I consider a grey area as I’ve never found out what the actual answer is. I was also unaware of the “confined in a dwelling” condition mentioned in a recent article on Slate regarding the Meitiv family and their experience after their children were picked up by police for walking in public alone.

I’m kind of freaked out…I do that often. Wonder what GA law is.

I live in Maryland and I have an 8 year old and a 10 year old. No one has been able to tell me for sure that the way the law is written, I can leave my younger child alone by herself, but not two of them together. I would also love to know what part of MD this happened in.

Buffy, I agree with you that bringing up hot cars in this context is silly and irrelevant, but just for the record, Maryland summers are very very hot, and quite a few infant hot car deaths have actually happened in Maryland and Virginia, which might explain why well-meaning (though misguided) busybodies there would report on the parent.

Let’s see. This perfectly normal mother is deemed a criminal by the legal fiction that a young’un in the company of a 10-year-old sister is being “neglected”.

Meanwhile, in my small town, a vicious murder was just committed by 15- and 16-year-olds with previous “juvie” records long enough to stretch across an ocean. By the same legal fiction, they couldn’t have been “real” criminals because they’re not 18 yet. They should have been locked up and the key thrown away a long time ago.

Oh, yeah. One of the kids moved here to Pennsylvania from (you guessed it) Maryland, where most of his juvie record was compiled.

(We rarely have serious crime around here.)

Well, her name is Charon, and that’s the ferryman (or in this case ferrywoman) who takes souls across the river Styx to hell. I guess the cop figured she was evil. Might as well make her a criminal as well.

Just got back from some errands after leaving my responsible 9 year old girl alone at home for an hour.

Oh, she was designing a new model for our 3D printer. Real danger there.

I wonder how old the Maryland law is? Because I earned a Red Cross babysitting certificate at age 11 (1983) and was babysitting half the neighborhood soon after. And, of course, we were left in the car all the time, with me in charge of my sisters…

I, too was babysitting infants at age 10. Usually in my own home, babysitting my mom’s friend’s 9 month old daughter – I clearly remember this and I can’t believe that all of our parents back then were also just making these same “egregious parenting errors.”

Warren’s right – the War on Parenting is on, led by the US for sure but it’s crawling it’s way up here to Canada as well. Fear mongering: it’s the new… well, everything.

Here’s a link to the legal age a child can stay home alone in all 50 states. Some states do not have a law in place, but many do. I thought this might be helpful, even though it doesn’t deal with leaving kids alone in vehicles.

http://blogs.babycenter.com/mom_stories/11042014-the-legal-age-you-can-leave-your-child-home-alone-by-state/

@Donna–The infant sister was fast asleep. What if the mother was at home with her baby, the older siblings were all at school, and her partner was at work, or out on an errand? Suppose the mother put her baby down for a nap, started baking something, and had to go to the neighbour’s house to borrow a cup of sugar? Or, suppose she just went outside to get the mail at the end of the driveway? Or, suppose she was just in another room on the other side of the house, so, technically in the same building, but if it’s a large house (which I’d imagine it would be, since they have five kids), the mother could be further away from the baby than she was when she left the child in the car with her older sister. Should that be considered neglect as well?

Donna,
The reasons and reasoning you stated for callers is spot on. And that is why again I say, that all 911 callers should have to identify themselves, stay and wait, and be recorded on the incident report by the police.

If you don’t want that level of involvement, stay off the damn phone.

The babycenter chart isn’t accurate for illinois. The ggweather page provides a better description of illinois law. Here are some good links for the state of Lincoln:
http://www.state.il.us/dcfs/docs/prepar_Kids.pdf

http://www.illinoislegalaid.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.dsp_content&contentID=5701

To be clear, Maryland is one of the few states with a law that does clearly give ages – 8 to be alone and 13 to supervise another child. There is some ambiguity because the law says specifically in a building or confined space and police have been using it against children at parks and walking on streets, which seems very odd. So this is not like in most states where it’s up to police/CPS discretion and they tell you you’ve broken the law but it’s a vague law and just their take on it. It’s spelled out. In fact, some of the officials may want to use discretion the other way in favor of free range kids, but they can’t.

I don’t understand how she could be unaware there was a law like this. There are laws in most states for how young a child can be left alone. I’ve known this for years and I’m not even a parent. Use Google and find out.

Parenting is hard. Sometimes things suck. Either don’t go to the store or take the 1 yr old in with you. The kid is 1 yr old. You’ll be dragging him around for many years yet. Parenting is not about convenience. I have been in this situation with my nieces. I’m sure many single mothers drag their kids everywhere when they are young. Sure it can suck doing all that work for a short shopping trip. But it is your responsibility as a mother.

Not all of us ran all around town with no rules, even in the 70s. It’s ok to be a responsible parent. I am not for helicopter parenting either. But why isn’t there a middle of the road? Is the only reaction to helicoptering thinking that you can just leave a 1 yr old in the car?

Re, the confusion about the Maryland law. It says:

“A person who is charged with the care of a child under the age of 8 years may not allow the child to be locked or confined in a dwelling, building, enclosure, or motor vehicle while the person charged is absent and the dwelling, building, enclosure, or motor vehicle is out of the sight of the person charged unless the person charged provides a reliable person at least 13 years old to remain with the child to protect the child.”

That’s a lot less confusing than what some have said in the comments here. There’s no ambiguity about whether an 8 year old and a 10 year old can be left alone together (they can). It’s also very similar to the law in Texas, which says you can’t leave a child under 7 alone in the car for longer than 5 minutes unless they are accompanied by someone who is at least 14.

Shyla, actually, there’s a lot of rumor and misunderstanding about laws like this. A lot of people believe that their state has a “law,” when no such law exists (or it’s different from what they think). For example, I know people who will insist that Texas has a law requiring babysitters, or kids left home alone, to be 12. I also have a friend who was told by a social worker that kids legally must be 12 to play outside alone. In reality, Texas has NO LAW regarding the ages for kids to play outside alone, or be left home alone, or babysit. The only similar law is the one requiring a child to be 7 — SEVEN — before you can leave him alone in a car for longer than 5 minutes.

Personally, I still think that’s pretty ridiculous, considering that the in vast majority of cases where kids are overheating in cars, the parents did NOT leave them there on purpose. They are either forgotten, or climbed into the car on their own while playing. And the vast majority of those kids are MUCH younger than 7.

“Parenting is hard. Sometimes things suck. Either don’t go to the store or take the 1 yr old in with you. The kid is 1 yr old. You’ll be dragging him around for many years yet. Parenting is not about convenience. I have been in this situation with my nieces. I’m sure many single mothers drag their kids everywhere when they are young. Sure it can suck doing all that work for a short shopping trip. But it is your responsibility as a mother.”

Parenting isn’t about convenience, but it’s not about intentionally making things harder for no purpose, either! Your responsibility is to keep your child SAFE, so if your 1 year old is SAFE sleeping in her car seat for 10 minutes under the watchful eye of a 10 year old sibling, then you have fulfilled your responsibility. If waking your baby and dragging both kids into the grocery store for a quick 10 minute errand will not keep your children safer, if it serves no purpose other than proving that you are a GOOD MOTHER who does things EVEN THOUGH IT’S INCONVENIENT, I don’t even know what that is. It sounds to me like it’s more about what the neighbors will think than what’s good for the kids.

PS, I ROUTINELY leave my 1 year old alone in the car for trips taking less than 5 minutes (like paying for gas), or longer if she is accompanied by one of teenagers (like yesterday when I ran into the grocery store to buy lunch for all the kids on the way to the Children’s Museum). And I’m not gonna stop. My 1 year old barely tolerates being in the car, and she HATES getting out for a quick errand and then having to get right back in. Once I get her settled in, I’m not going to disrupt her and then have to listen to her screaming bloody murder for the next half hour just because some busybody might look down on me for leaving her safe and sound and happy while I pay for gas.

“Not all of us ran all around town with no rules, even in the 70s. It’s ok to be a responsible parent. I am not for helicopter parenting either. But why isn’t there a middle of the road? Is the only reaction to helicoptering thinking that you can just leave a 1 yr old in the car?”

This parent did go middle of the road. She left the 1 year old in the care of the 10 year-old. The child was not “unattended”. As a parent of an 11 year-old who gets paid babysitting jobs almost every weekend, I can only imagine how INSULTING this is to the 10 year-old. My daughter is in the kitchen now making a breakfast for her siblings, she’s testing a recipe she plans to cook for the 3 kids she is watching tonight. (She’s making whole wheat english muffins with peanut butter and sliced apples on top, baked in the toaster oven and sprinkled with cinnamon…my house smells heavenly right now.)
Yet if we lived in Maryland, this confident, self-reliant, resourceful 11 year-old could get me arrested.
That is bat shit crazy.

My sister lives in a super nice, expensive, ultra-safe suburb. I used to put “the Club” steering wheel lock on my car when I visited her–just to drive down the property values! 😛

Monnette’s comment have me an idea for a new prank. When I visit my sister, I’ll park my car, grab all three kids in my arms, run as fast as I can to her house, slam the door, and peer through the curtains. The neighbors will think there is a car thief hiding in the bushes!

Monnette, the purpose of this website is to encourage parents that you *don’t* have to think that way, and that it is in fact detrimental.

We call it Worst First Thinking: imagining the worst possible outcome, and proceeding as though it’s likely. The problem with it is two-fold. First, situations like the one you describe are vanishingly rare. The vast majority of car thieves have no desire to take on the huge extra risk involved in stealing a car with a kid inside, not to mention that most people have no desire to hurt a child, when they could simply steal a different car. Yes, occasionally it does happen. But occasionally children are killed in school bus crashes. Occasionally kids get sick and die from eating cheese. Occasionally otherwise healthy and athletic children suddenly drop dead from undetected heart problems while playing sports. You just can’t plan your life around avoiding every possible-but-extremely-unlikely cause of death, or you’d never do anything. (No busses! No cheese! No sports!)

The second problem is that every precaution we take to avoid a risk, has in itself risks and drawbacks. Some trade offs are worth it, like the inconvenience of buckling your seat belt for the added safety in a crash. But many of us here do not feel it’s worth it to trade our kids’ independence, self-reliance, and important learning opportunities to protect them from imaginary risks.

@Monnette: a car thief is out to steal a car, you know, this inanimate valuable object sitting on a parking lot or driveway, preferably without witnesses. He knows people who’ll give him money for stolen cars – again, valuable objects.
A car thief is NOT out to steal someone else’s 10-year-old, as they can scream, call 911, draw the attention of other people, and be a general PITA when he’s just trying to do his eh, ‘job’.
Given that we’re talking about a car culture pur sang, I can’t imagine any car thief would ever have no other option than to steal a family car with kids in it.

Flurry – If you re-read my comment, you’ll see I agree with you 100%. As I said, hot car death was irrelevant to this case.

About cases in the DC area, the Washington Post Magazine had an interesting article by Gene Weingarten in 2010 (it won a Pulitzer, I think) about the phenomenon of infants forgotten in cars; many of the cases he discusses were in Virginia, where prosecutors appear to be particularly aggressive about this. I was just saying that probably makes people in the area a bit obsessed with it. But as I said, I agree with you that’s irrelevant to leaving a child in the car for a short errand, and all the more irrelevant when a ten-year-old is there too.

By the way, there’s another free-range point that could be made here about hot car death, which is that turning infant seats to be rear-facing – intended as a safety measure – had the unintended consequence of causing an epidemic of hot car death that didn’t exist before. Yet another case where trying eliminate one risk creates another.

The problem, I think, it’s that in the United States your child is the property of the state.

That is why they can charge you for how they “feel” about something or “interpret” a specific situation.

It’s completely up to them, because your child… isn’t yours.

@Chris: “The problem, I think, it’s that in the United States your child is the property of the state. That is why they can charge you for how they “feel” about something or “interpret” a specific situation. It’s completely up to them, because your child… isn’t yours.”

A child cannot be property of anyone: not of the state nor of anyone else *including the parents*. It’s true that parents get to decide for they children, but limitations do apply: if the state finds that the decision is severely against the child’s best interest it can and must intervene. Note that this is definitely not something specific of the US.

The problem is not the principle: I’m fine with the state intervening against irresponsible parents actually endangering their children with irresponsible decisions. The problem is setting the standard straight about what should actually be considered “irresponsible” in the first place.

I do not understand the people here saying that the Maryland law is confusing. It is very clear that children aged 12 and under can not be in charge of children under the age of 8.

I’ve lived in Maryland almost my entire 40 years and I’ve known since I was 11 that the law stated I could not watch my little brother since I was not 13.

Of the cases where kids die in hot cars, there many are due to parents whop completely spaced out from exhaustion caring for children.

Perhaps this a result of laws that criminalize parents having a nap. After all, if society expects parents to be always on guard for their children until they are 8, when can the parents sleep?

I see no harm in his either and laws should err on the side of parental discretion. But I have asked my wife not to leave our 10 year old in the car watching his younger brothers (7 & 3) for fear of the “good samaritan”. Better to send the 10 year old into the store and she wait. 😉

I’m sure someone will give us trouble about it, but it’s a little easier to deal with just the 10 yo on his own. He happened to skip a grade, so I would focus on him being in middle school.

We shouldn’t have to think this way, but I try to minimize the problems I can.

@Kim, the key part of what you cite is the following:

“NEGLECT is “the leaving of a child unattended or other failure to give proper care and attention to a child by any parent or other person who has permanent or temporary care or custody or responsibility for supervision *under circumstances that indicate: that the child’s health or welfare is harmed or placed at substantial risk of harm*.”

There is no question that the child was left unattended: what I question is whether that “harmed the child’s health or welfare or placed it at substantial risk of harm”, which is a necessary condition to configure neglect.

The standard should be placed with as much objectivity as possible and I bet that taking statistics into account it would be easy to demonstrate that leaving a child in a car unattended for a few minutes in the situation described in the article does not constitute “substantial risk”, so according to the law it should not constitute neglect.

Sadly objective judgement is often replaced by gut feelings and negativity bias.

“Who decides what is neglect or abuse? the government, your nosy neighbour, that lady you have never seen before but pulls out her cell phone when you leave your child outside a store for 5 mminutes.”

And how on earth has it been determined in our society that the nosy neighbor, the lady, and the government love and care about a child more than its parents do?

“But what if a car thief decided to steal the car? What would he/she do with the children?”

What would *I* do if a car thief decided to steal a car I’m sitting in? I’m 49 years old and I can’t fight off any adult male and probably not most females. Should I not be left alone in a car with a baby?

Maryland Law, section 5-701(r) defines neglect as “leaving of a child unattended or other failure to give proper care and attention …under circumstances that indicate:
(1) that the child’s health or welfare is harmed or placed at substantial risk of harm; or
(2) mental injury to the child or a substantial risk of mental injury.”

I fail to see how the above circumstances indicate that the child was at “substantial risk of harm”

I’d also question the prosecution of the parents for this one incident. Section 5 generally speaks extensively of investigation and assistance, not immediate prosecution or probation (e.g. 5-706, 5-710). Thus, it could be argued that State Law limits Montgomery County.

OMG! Where do I turn myself in?

“What I question is that the discussion cannot be framed with concepts such as “property”, nor dismissed with the idea that “the parent is the one who has the right to decide” period.”

Yes,granted, but what is the solution?

Who should be given the authority to decide? In theory, by default the decision should go to the parents, always – but what about bad parents? Again who decides?

You said: The standard should be placed with as much objectivity as possible and I bet that taking statistics into account it would be easy to demonstrate that leaving a child in a car unattended for a few minutes in the situation described in the article does not constitute “substantial risk”, so according to the law it should not constitute neglect.

What if the lawmakers or enforcers are not reasonable people? This must be the case because this story proves it happened anyway, despite the “logical” definition of neglect.

Bad laws encroaching on family lives with far more desctruction than prevention or detection of abuses.

@Tamara: “Who should be given the authority to decide?”

A judge, obviously. Hopefully a sane one, but ultimately a judge can only act within the limits of the law, which brings us the second point:

“Bad laws encroaching on family lives with far more desctruction than prevention or detection of abuses.”

Bad laws are made by bad lawmakers which, at least in democratic countries, are chosen by the people. “Every democratic country has the government it deserves”. So try to elect lawmakers with principles you agree with and if the constitution of your country allows it, try to repel bad laws or force the government to write good laws.

Basically, the solution is to win a cultural battle. I never promised something easy. 🙂

bsolar, I didn’t mean to imply it couldn’t happen. But that’s what I had in mind — they really didn’t want to deal with the kid, and found a relatively safe way of “dumping” the kid immediately. It’s not like car thieves and murderous predators are the same profile.

PS: Also, the way MD law reads, two kids under the age of 13 can never be alone together. Not at the park, not riding bikes, not walking along a sidewalk. Because they are considered “under the care of” each other, I guess.

Also, last fall, my husband and I went to a wedding many states away. We left our 17-year-old and 14-year-old alone. For 4 days and 3 nights. They got up, went to school, came home, went out to dinner, saw a movie, went to their music lessons. Watched TV and played video games, too. The 17-year-old turned 18 two days after we got back. ARREST ME

Okay let’s get one thing straight. Car thieves do not want anything to do with kids.
Look at this way. Two identical vehicles, one empty the other has a child in it. One won’t warrant much attention while the other will instigate an Amber Alert.

And all this debate about how the law is written is nonsense. The law was written to avoid having babysitters at that young an age. I was not written to prevent siblings from playing in the park. But now the paranoid public demands it does.

My 10yo still gets the experience of grocery shopping in his own.

But i agree, until we stop letting the busy bodies change our behavior, this kind of thing won’t get better. However, without enough money for a good lawyer, I still have to minimize my risk.

We agree on parental discretion, I’m just not ready to push my luck (but I’m happy others are and they will get moral support from me).

absurd. A responsible 10 year old is perfectly capable of watching a sleeping baby in a car for a few minutes. My mother used to leave me in the car at that age with the keys to run the radio or ac or heat and the door locks and sometimes would even leave the kids she babysat in there with me to watch out for them too.

In a safe neighborhood in broad daylight in a grocery store parking lot there was nothing going to happen to us. Kids are more likely to get hit by a car in a parking lot than be kidnapped or shot or something sitting in a car.

You think that’s bad? From the Washington State code: “leaving a minor child or children under the age of sixteen years unattended in the vehicle.”

SIXTEEN years old!

But then again, what do I know? I’ve never smoked crack before, but by their logic I could start smoking it any minute now. *rolleyes*

I wonder who these people commenting on here would call if one of their children was missing? Surely not one of the busybody governmet organizations that tried to proactively set up some reasonable protections in the society? I guess they would just get online and ask their cohorts to help out. Right?

Shyla, Why would a chicken stand in the middle of the road when it can roam around the range? If you keep acting like you don’t agree with the flock, we might have to peck at you!

“I wonder who these people commenting on here would call if one of their children was missing? Surely not one of the busybody governmet organizations that tried to proactively set up some reasonable protections in the society? I guess they would just get online and ask their cohorts to help out. Right?”

Oh, Ally, how funny. Yes, of course, I would immediately draw on the free range kids crowd to find my missing child. I’m sure we could set up an e-trap wide enough

What point are you trying to make here? Are you accusing some of us of armchair activism?

If my child went missing I can tell you I would certainly not *only* sit back on my ass and rely on the police to find them.

Tamara, Here’s some sources that can say it better than I can:
http://www.crime-safety-security.com/Free-Range-Kids.html

or Dylan in “Subterranean Homesick Blues” “I’m on the pavement..Thinking about the government…”
“Look out kid, You’re gonna get hit, But losers, cheaters, six-time users, Hang around the theatres, Girl by the whirlpool, Lookin for the new tool, Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters…”

Sure, if the car gets hot a 10 year old can open the door.

Now how about if a mentally ill person approaches the car? Lots of mentally ill homeless in pretty much every city. Or someone high as a kite on drugs? Plenty of those, too.

Can a 10 year old handle that? Did the kid have a phone to call 911 (as if they could get there in time)? No?

A ten year old might be okay to babysit at home. Behind a locked door. In a car? No. Just….no. Oh, waking the baby and taking the kids in to the store is a lot of work? Yeah, that’s called parenting.

I wonder if the cops are so uptight because they deal with the reality of the “what ifs” frequently? Why gamble with your children’s live? What if this site posted some stories about parents who left their kids unsupervised and they were harmed? It happens. It only has to happen to your child once. It is not good parenting to leave kids in public unsupervised. It is a parents primary job to keep kids safe, not to dash into a store for 10 minutes. Or is 10 minutes safe and 30 minutes isn’t?How long is too long?

I live in Maryland. Maryland law explicitly states that children need to be 13 before they can watch other children. So, the mom broke the law. Here is a link to more on the law. At the link there is a brief synopsis and then a link to the actual law.

http://www.peoples-law.org/unattended-children

This is stupid. At 6yrd old Id walk over a mile to school and back home. By 7 or 8 my two younger brothers and I would dissapear for the whole day on our bicycles (under my “supervision”) and not return home until dark. We’d come home scraped and banged up from 4hrs or horseplay, but otherwise perfectly fine. What’s wrong with this country? I fully intend to raise my child the way I was. Free to discover himself and grow as a person without oppressive over protection. The “law” can bite me! I will decide what’s best for my child. Not some random over protective judge.

@El Beau–What if the mother took both children into the store? What if the one-year-old screamed the place down because she’d been woken up? What if this made everyone else in the store think, “What a horrible mother, taking her child shopping when she’s all overtired?” That outcome is much more likely than someone swooping into a grocery store parking lot in broad daylight, and kidnapping a baby and a ten-year-old from a parked car. People complain all the time about screaming children in public places, and they say that parents shouldn’t put their kids in situations that they aren’t developmentally ready for. A one-year-old isn’t going to handle being woken up and taken into a grocery store full of stimuli–bright lights, bright colours, Muzak, beeping cash registers, other people–and is likely going to cry. Some people might figure that that’s forgivable at one year old, but how old would the child have to be before it’s no longer forgivable? Two? Three? Four? Five? Nobody knows. So, the mother decided that her ten-year-old daughter WAS developmentally ready to watch her baby sister for ten minutes while she ran into the store to grab something quickly. Maybe she didn’t even know about the law, because, as previous posters said, it’s not very well publicized, and most people don’t Google the law for something as seemingly trivial as this–instead, they think “Can my child handle this?” THAT’s called parenting, El Beau–making a judgement call based on your own child.

I would rather have people complain about my child screaming in the store than return to the car and find my child harmed or missing.

So what, then, small not very strong women shouldn’t be allowed to be alone with their kids, either? Or take them anywhere in public?

Or maybe, that is SUCH an unlikely prospect that we don’t worry about it happening, so I’m free to go out with my kids. And it’s unlikely enough that it’s safe to leave the 10 year old, too.

As for the 911 thing, before 1990-something almost nobody had a phone to call 911 either. And yet, people who were not necessary capable of single-handedly taking down crazy people left the house. But of course, maybe the marauding crazies problem has just increased so much that it’s different now, right?

Dude in a safe neighborhood in broad daylight in a crowded parking lot if someone approached a locked car and tried to mess with the kids inside, all they would have to do is honk the horn repeatedly and set off the panic button on the keys and voila- many passersby would come help.

Plus last time I checked unless you have a brick or a gun to take out a car window a locked car is quite hard to get into.

Someone mentioned the whole lay saying you can’t leave kids 12 and up alone all day or overnight. LOL when I was in school in the 80s and 90s all the parents that worked left the kids alone at home during the day in the summer. I spent many a summer days at my friend’s house with her and her older brother while her parents were at work. There was my mom and other neighbors we could go to for help if we needed to. It was a nice neighborhood in broad daylight. We even went outside and rode bikes. We did not even stay cooped up in the house.

Her grandparents lived downstairs in a separate apartment but we never heard a peep out of them. They never actually checked on us so much as once. We forgot they were even down there.

My parents started leaving me alone overnight at 16 once I could drive. They figured since I had a car (not a very good one but a car) that if I needed something I could go get it myself. I had neighbors I could go to if need be.

What if? What if? What if?

What if an asteroid landed on the car? What if there was a tornado? What if a drunk driver came barreling through the parking lot and smashed the car? What if a drunk, high, mentally ill child-molesting carjacking alien swooped down and kidnapped the kids?

Oh wait, an adult couldn’t do much in any of those scenarios, either. Guess I should have been arrested last night as I waited in the car with the kids while my husband bought the beer (does buying beer make us unfit parents?).

Regarding the ages kids can be left alone, I went to college at 17+1 month. My best friend was still 16 when she went off to college. So was my great-grandfather. Then he falsified his papers to join the army at 16. I traveled Europe with just my friend at 17. Why do people think kids are incompetent?

What if she took the children into the store, and they walked into or ended up as victims because an armed robber was inside at the time? Or a bomb was planted in the store, and went off? Or a confused or impaired driver drove right through the front window of the store, and injured (or worse) several people including the children?

See? We can play “what if” for inside the store too.

“I’ve lived in Maryland almost my entire 40 years and I’ve known since I was 11 that the law stated I could not watch my little brother since I was not 13.”

So instead of a parent determining the unique skill set of their child’s maturity, responsibility, and capability as a suitable babysitter for siblings, parents must defer to an arbitrary number determined by the state?
What other milestones do you let the state determine for you?
Personally, my 11 year-old is more responsible than my 13 year-old and gets more babysitting jobs (though the 13 yo has all the dog sitting jobs on the block). Parents tell her the kids request her because she actually plays with them (she likes crafts) and isn’t glued to a smart phone like the teenage sitters they’ve had.

Between 10 and 13 is a GREAT age to start babysitting.
Maturity is not determined by birthdays. It is slowly cultivated with incremental responsibilities and parental guidance. Please don’t tell me “It’s the Law!” as a reason to not parent my kids.
Here are other laws in Maryland you can also refer to:

http://www.dumblaws.com/laws/united-states/maryland

“Sorry Honey, No BJ for you! It’s the LAW.”

Don’t worry. I won’t post here any more. It is useless trying to suggest there are other sides to an issue to people invested in shoring up their points of view. Enjoy buying Lenore’s books. I am sure she appreciates it.

This is just absurd.

I have read the book. I actually agree with some of it, but I happen to think a lot of this is dangerous thinking. Whatever. This is obviously not a place where one can disagree with the general sentiment without being cast out. Good bye.

There was another option for the person who observed the children in the car and reported them. If that person was concerned that the children were in danger, he or she could have waited nearby, in an unobtrusive place so as to not frighten the 10-year-old, until the parent returned. Then, if something untoward happened, the observer could have taken action. If the parent returned and all was well, the good Samaritan could have faded away. As a nation, we have become so afraid of “getting involved” that we call authorities to deal with any issue we see.

I am a farmer who sells at a farmers market. One day a toddler escaped from his apparently neglectful mother and was making a bee-line toward the street. It was very gratifying to see multiple farmers start to sprint out of their stands to intercept the child. It turned out that the child was heading toward another adult who was standing near the street and that the mother was not being neglectful at all. But even if this was not so, he would have never made it to the street with all the farmers in pursuit.

Ally, anyone who believes in following a strict rule rather than examining and judging the situation logically must stand by that belief no matter what. According to that view, a child struck by a car in a parking lot is still better off than the child left for 10 minutes in a car.

“… than having them run over in a parking lot while trying to get them into the store — which is vastly more likely.”

By rights, if that happened, you should be able to charge the lawmakers with child neglect.

Needless to say, you’d have no success doing that.

Ally,
It must be very hard to live with all that constant fear. Have you ever sought out professional help? I mean to come up with some of the “what ifs” that you did, you are either in need of mental help, or watch way too many crime shows.

“Free range, does that mean adhering strictly to the hot new parenting fad?”

“Oh how I yearn for the good ole days when Ma left me at home with her boyfriend while she went off to church. Hallaluah! And the boyfriend got my brother a job as a night custodian with some gay guys.”

Just two examples of comments that are not opinions, but are intended to stir things up, not to mention that it looks like you’re homophobic as well. Don’t give us the poor me act.

The fact is that that happened, and I mentioed it because there were no busy bodies to protect us from sexual pedator. I am not homophobic, but pedophobic with good reason. You all really ought to take a good look at your mob mentality. I don’t feel like “poor me, ” I feel shocked at how comments are being directed at me, even after I said I did not intend to insult anyone.

My husband’s brother drowned in a pond. My uncle molested me as a toddler. A close friend has lost 2 babies to health problems.

Bad things happen to children. But denying them the skills and experience to face life does not change the equation.

We recognize bad things happen. But we do not blow up some statistics and ignore others.

Significantly more kids are hurt or killed in parking lots than kids left in cars.

My brother-in-law broke his femur before leaving for a religious mission. The joke became we could have bubble – wrapped him on the couch and the roof would have just fallen on him.

You want a middle ground to child raising? Present an alternative to raise independent and self-reliant kids.

And one more thing: none of us support placing kids in the path of real danger. We just think the definition of real danger is getting diluted and this creates bad consequences.

We are not against watching our kids. A well-raised 10 year old is responsible enough to watch a baby for a short time, and appropriate opportunity helps the kid grow in responsibility and confidence. Life skills. Telling a kid he is incapable at an age when kids do start babysitting helps no one. Plus, the chances of anything happen are minuscule. I’d say they were safer in a car than a house. And please don’t use the “stuff happens” line, because by doing so you would flat-out ignore the fact things could always happen. As has been said, danger is more likely to strike in the parking lot.

@Ally- I cannot fathom the idea that a ten year old is incapable of looking after a baby anywhere for a short period of time, and a stationary car in a parking lot in broad daylight is a very safe place. I work with primary school kids, and almost all of the older kids (10-11) would be capable of doing this, even many of the naughty ones. They rise to the occasion when given responsibility.

Maybe the children in your area are developmentally delayed, but a neuro-typical child of this age is capable of looking after others for short periods of time.

There is an organization that would disagree with you on this. And with very good reason.

http://www.kidsandcars.org
http://www.facebook.com/KidsAndCars.org

The mother was not trying to teach anything to the daughter. She just did not want to be inconvenienced.

@Supporter of KidsandCars, the site you mention has no valid statistics whatsoever to back up its arguments: the statistics they provide are explicitly stated by the site itself to be grossly incomplete. This makes them completely worthless for any serious risk assessment.

I think we seriously have to consider just what the “new” ten actually is, in the eyes of the law, and industrial protectors.
That, combined with the difference between how this is assessed by the state, and how it is percieved by the parent who spent 10 years getting to know and understand that ten year-old every day of her life.
Perhaps there’s ten, and then there’s ten…
My immediate response to all this concerns the constant erosion of age-applied reason…..a sort of deflation of values.
The “new” ten has lost about half its number since I was a kid. In other words, the age of five qualified – then.

I work in a university library, and once in awhile I encounter the kind of contempt hurled at college students that reminds me of high school, or even middle school.
And yet when my father was their age, he had earned a degree, was married, and had a child of his own. Perspective.
This was completely normal at the time.
(all by the age of 22)

Parental authority is a fundamental and integrally instituional backbone of society. Without it, the weak and spineless jellyfish we would encounter then, would not stand up to the rigors of child-raising.
The state is going to provide this? I think not.
Still, it has to come from somewhere. The kids depend on it.

Parental authority never did fit nicely into a one-size-fits-all neat and tidy compartment.
Every neighborhood had its pendulum swings…the strict, the liberal, the busybodies, every flavor and style and fashion of applied practices and beliefs.
Somehow, we all used to manage to get along and get it done without driving ourselves, our kids….crazy.
The business of life was for other kinder, better more noble pursuits.

The ones who truly went off the rails were few and far between, and for the freedom of the many (most) the occasional sacrificial lambs were visited by various calamities.
This was integral to our collective concept of what freedom was supposed to be….as we came to understand it.

But I think that backbone has been constantly eroding, from a kind of liquefaction of the very density and marrow that was the requirement for a healthy social environment – the very one necessary for children to grow up and prosper.
Those who doubted this would have had to admit that it was nevertheless probably true enough.

I recall the occasions when, as a young adult, I would encounter kids on their own, and the old spidey sense would tick off a vague notion that perhaps something wasn’t quite all tickety-boo. What would I do then? Call the cops?
Of course not.
I’d sorta just stick around for a moment or two, until I was pretty sure things were all right.
Imagine the concept.
I was a responsible adult. That’s all.

I get the impression some supreme and insidious hatreds are seething their way across the landscape out there, sliding into the lives of normal people, like anaconondas, constricting the very breath of freedom out of what used to be normal adult behavior.
I say we kick that snake back to the jungle where it belongs. Otherwise the cruelties of mean-spirited short-sightedness remove every shred of the very safeties so obsessed over. The kids are all right.
And when they are, that has something to do with parental authority.

No Warren, I don’t. But many abused people have PTSD. Do you mock them too?

Ally, this isn’t a set the pace sort of thing. We are just saying most 10 year Olds can watch a baby for a short time. Don’t mask the subject.

From the Kids and Cars site:

On average, 38 children die in hot cars each year from heat-related deaths after being trapped inside motor vehicles.

38 children per year. 38. In the US. How many are struck by lightening – twice?

I looked at the pictures of the victims. None looked 10. The reason is probably that 10 year olds can open car doors.

No, the 10 year old didn’t learn any life lessons from watching her sister – she was capable of watching her sister because of past life lessons. Also, she had her competence reinforced – something I believe is worth doing often.

And yes, the 10 year old did have her competence reinforced. There are numerous ways of doing this during a child’s lifetime. Of course only “FREE_RANGE” parents have ever thought of that concept. (The rest of of are dithering around in the dark.) It’s terrible that a mean police officer questioned her mother’s competence in front of her. Her mother was demonstrating good parenting as a role model for her daughter who was a surrogate parent for the infant, and the mean law had to step in like some overzealous authority figure and say “no, no!” How outrageous that he took his job too seriously and didn’t take the woman’s job seriously enough. In fact, it is so logical, I just can’t understand how ANYONE in their right mind, and of course someone who is NEUROTYPICAL (not developmentally delayed) and Mentally stable (not overwrought with paranoia) and acting out of all that is good and true and honest in the world, could not possible agree! You’ve made a convert!

Good heavens, Ally, I go back to my original, maybe not worded correctly point. Do you seriously think a 10 year old is incapable of sitting in a car for a few minutes with a baby? I don’t care what label you want to give the parent, I can’t believe an adult really has such little faith in kids.

hineata – So if you have them yourself, Ally, then why are you unable to compare them to the neuro-typical children around them and see what such children are capable of? Also, have worked with several ASD kids, medium to high functioning, and they were capable of a lot. Apologies to you if your children are at the other end of the spectrum.” ….

Your original comment was ” Maybe the children in your area are developmentally delayed…” You except me to think you were just making a comment about what neurotypical children are capable of? No, you were making a nasty comment. I don’t care what colour or color or cooler you are, and I feel sorry for the kids you have worked with that had to put up with your snide and condescending attitude towards them.

hineata, OI consider my kids extraordinary.

Emily – I am not trying to mask anything. hineata is the one who brought up developmentally delayed children, though she was just doing it to put me down.

Yes, absolutely, I agree a 10 year old can watch an infant in a car for 10 minutes. No problem.
They do it all the time with no bad consequences. And since we don’t allow “What Ifs” on this site, I am unable to restate me original point. But I signed off long ago, and why I keep returning to be insulted, I have no idea. I must be a masochist on top of all the other names I have been called. Good day.

Really, Ally, you consider your kids extraordinary? So what? I assume this is an attempt to insult me, because I consider my children ordinary. Great kids, very capable because they have been expected to be capable (something I expect of my students too), but, like 99.999999% of the human race, including you and me, utterly ordinary. I can play the disabled kid card too – as I write, my developmentally delayed kid is pushing her own plasma replacement into her leg – but I won’t let that stop me from expecting appropriate actions from my kids. And that includes, for heaven sake, being able to watch a baby in a parked car for a period of ten minutes.

Which is what the post was about. Not how insulting you think I’ve been, or how extraordinary you might happen to think your kids are.

Ally,

PTSD? Really? So you expect all of us to parent in the same fashion as someone with diagnosed mental/emotional disorder? Well hell ya that is definitely worth mocking.

You can have all the excuses in the world, but paranoid is paranoid and it does not matter how or why you got that way, paranoid is still not healthy for you or you kids.

We had something similar happen to us in New Jersey almost 20-years ago. The policeman asked us to sign a report regarding our son, who was being checked on by us every 5-minutes from our perch at a small cafe with clear view of our car 20-feet away. It was a warm summer day and the van was parked under a pine tree. As a biologist, I was keenly aware of heat stress concerns in children. Fortunately, I refused to sign the report and the policeman after insisting over and over finally gave up. I thanked him and his fellow officer for a fine job and very worthwhile if the child’s parents were not so watchful and very aware of the science relating to heat stress. The whole situation was terrible and made us feel like criminals.

We feel for you and truly wonder what the policeman would do in a similar situation, but that is another story.

Best of luck,
Peter

I was in Iceland on a job walking through downtown Reykavik. it was 30 ° and snowing lightly. three baby carriages in a row we’re out front of a café. all three carriages had newborns sound asleep. The mothers were all inside having coffee together. they would’ve been arrested here in United States.

My goodness, Ally, what the heck is your agenda here? In my experience most of the folks here are awesome in a debate about any subject and that is because they are all willing to have a discussion and are in fact willing to have their minds changed – that’s why it is an interesting debate. If you want to come in here all bad attitude and only interested in hearing your own voice, this is what you get.

Give us facts, give us a new idea we hadn’t thought of before and we are willing to listen. But there is no way you are going to convince every one of us that your way is the best way, hon. it’s a waste of energy.

At first, I came here occasionally for some a “sanity check” after hearing about some ridiculous story about gov’t overreach into parenting…. Then, I had a CPS intrusion into my life (on day 1 of my 1st child’s life – yes, you read that correctly). It rocked my world and my wife’s much more. We wanted to get the story out there, but it takes energy and time and exposure to the public comment’o’sphere. I’m sure a high percentage of people would criticize our decisions and that wouldn’t be healthy for my wife especially. Sooooo – I came hear again for a sanity check today. Unfortunately, I still see comments that “question” this mother’s decision, which drives me crazy!

ive become convinced that cps investigations are like rape..there is a great deal shame involved where there shouldn’t in the victims..this allows the problem to continue because people don’t want to admit that they were considered bad parents[most times NOT].if all this were transparent and open and reported maybe questions would be raised about cps over reach by more .