At what age would you leave children alone ?

JC9297

skintchick wrote: »

Too late for that I reckon.

I have a 17 month old who is, shall we say, spirited, and into everything, and I am happy to leave her while I shower. THe stairgate is on (although we are working on her stairsense so I can remove them soon and I would trust her on the stairs it is just me who panics) and she just wanders around upstairs until I'm done. Often she pops in to see me.

downstairs, same applies, I will take bins out, do cooking and hoovering, and she potters around too.

Outside, she will walk round hte garden while I'm out there and she could get onto the front road if she walked out there, but she knows not to and I don;t leave her out there alone (will do when she is a bit older and we get a gate though).

I also let her walk into town with me with no reins and not holding my hand (except for crossing roads).

Am I a bad mum? I think I'm just letting her have enough responsibility for herself.

However, I wouldn;t go for a proper sleep leaving her on her own.

On a side note it saddens me to hear people calls their children 'terrors'. Some children are more intelligent and spirited than others and need more stimulation. It's up to us as parents to provide the stimulation they need. That's our job. Not to label them with horrible names.

Yes, you're probably right. I just felt the posts came across as a bit know-it-all for someone who has one child under one, and the poster wasn't considering that things aren't always so easy. To be honest I find it rather extreme that some people don't feel able to go for a shower or whatever if their children are normal healthy children, but that is up to them. I personally have one child that I was happy to leave unsupervised for short periods from an early age, and another disabled child who I couldn't take my eyes or ears off for a second without him causing mayhem!

Spendless

JC9297 wrote: »

I don't want to appear patronising

skintchick wrote: »

Too late for that I reckon.



On a side note it saddens me to hear people calls their children 'terrors'. Some children are more intelligent and spirited than others and need more stimulation. It's up to us as parents to provide the stimulation they need. That's our job. Not to label them with horrible names.

Spendless wrote: »

My baby one was the terror.

Some people need to practice what they preach! Or perhaps accept that just like others do differently when they come to what they aloow, other people use words that mean something to them that mean differently to others.

skintchick

Spendless wrote: »

Some people need to practice what they preach! Or perhaps accept that just like others do differently when they come to what they aloow, other people use words that mean something to them that mean differently to others.

That may be so (although I struggle to come up with an alternative meaning for 'terror'), but if you read WHy Love Matters you'd understand that it doesn;t matter what the parent means by it, it is what the child will take from it that is most important. And I really don't think calling a child a 'terror' is ambiguous - it is not a term of endearment and certainly hasn;t been used as so in the posts here. It's been used as a negative description of behaviour that labels the child as being that behaviour and only that behaviour. Parents might not really mean these things, but children don;t know that.