Wayward5oul
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Joined: 11/9/2014
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quote:
ORIGINAL: PeonForHer
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... I guarantee that anyone who has ever raised a child has at least one, if not more than one, story of being terrified for their child because the child managed to get out of their sight for more than 5 minutes, or got hurt accidentally while under supervision, or a hundred other things.
Oh god yes. I mean, I have no children, but the one time I took charge of my nephew, aged 6, while his mother was on holiday, I let him out of sight for two minutes while walking along the Thames. During that time he managed to fall in and get carried off. I caught him within seconds - before he'd even started bawling - but it frightened the wits out of me.
Children do that. *I* did it. When I was a kid, my parents caught me trying to climb out of my bedroom window. My dad nailed wooden slats into the window to stop me doing it again. And, once, at the zoo, I climbed over a barrier to see if I could get closer to a sloth bear, in order to stroke its head. (At the time, there was a low fence separating the visitors from the larger cage by about a yard. It was assumed that people wouldn't be bloody stupid. Unfortunately, as a five year old, I was both quite adventurous and quite stupid.). There were shouts and screams from everywhere; I was shocked into immobility - and some man grabbed me by the scruff and hoisted me up and out. All within seconds. He must have been strong - I damned near flew up into the air.
I wasn't even two years old when my dad was working on the roof of the house, and stopped for lunch. I was supposed to be napping in my room. An hour later my dad climbed the ladder back up to the roof, and found me up there crawling around, waving at our dog on the ground barking. My parents were dumbfounded as to how I got up there, as the rungs between the ladder were nearly as far apart as I was tall.
I managed to get myself into a float and out into the middle of a river one time, I was very young and couldn't swim yet. I was in the middle of the river, well beyond the 'do not go beyond this line' buoys, before any alarm was raised. This was with both my parents on the beach watching us, and my 4 brothers and sisters in the water with me, in charge of me. On a public beach, with lifeguards and lots of other swimmers and spectators.
Another time I was in San Fransisco and met a girl at a park I wanted to go play with. We went to her house and played all day. Problem was I didn't tell anyone I was going. We were there for a family reunion picnic, lots of people around, little cousins running amok all over the place. It wasn't until hours later that her dad was watching tv and saw a news story with an old woman crying about her missing granddaughter. It showed a pic, and her dad nearly had a heart attack recognizing the missing girl as the one playing in his daughter's room. I think I was four or five.
And I was the good kid, the one that never caused worries for my parents. My siblings' adventures would have gotten my family split up by DHR, if they happened today.
quote:
Kids do stupid things. I'm never going to blame a parent who lets his/her guard down for just a few minutes (which happen to be the *worst possible* few minutes). I know that parents very, very often just have to trust to luck. If there's some way in which a kid could, theoretically, come to grief, then some kid, somewhere, will find it. I think that, no how conscientious a parent you are, you spend a fair percentage of your mental energy just hoping that it won't be *your* kid. This, anyway, is one of my mother's mantras, after having brought up four sons and two daughters.
This is so freakin' true.
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RE: Should parents who do not keep an eye on their kid ... - 
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