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Parenting

29th Mar 2017

Was this mum wrong for leaving her baby unattended in a hotel room?

Amanda Cassidy

A mum has written an anonymous column in the Telegraph asking if what she did was wrong.

Frequent Crier wrote that she, her husband and her 11-month-old checked into a hotel room while visiting friends.

She wrote: “It was with some excitement then, that on Friday night, my husband and I put our daughter carefully in her deep-sided travel cot, flipped the switch on the video monitor and tiptoed out of our hotel room to dinner.

We ate, we drank and we were back in the room, brushing our teeth and undressing with the stealth of ninjas, by 10pm.

It was only the next day that I realised I may have made a serious error of judgment. Casually describing the previous night to our friends, I was met with concerned looks.”

She began to realise that it was probably, in hindsight, the wrong thing to do and not worth the risk and she asked the readers opinion on what they thought.

They were not slow to come forward with their thoughts.

One person described her as a ‘sicko’ while another pointed out that being in close proximity to your baby is more important than popping out for a meal

I have often been in situations where it would have been so much handier if I could just pop off when they were in their cots or asleep in the car seat but ultimately I felt the risk was just not worth it.

I once left the baby asleep in the car while I ran into my local spar for milk and spent the entire time sweating and panic breathing convinced she would not be there when I came back to the car circa 35 seconds later.

When I told my mum, later on, she laughed at me and reminded me that on holidays in Mosney as children there was one babysitter who walked up and down the corridor of the hotel listening for crying babies and escaping children. Times have changed she laughed.

What is your take on this? Do you think it is an over-reaction or would you never dream of leaving your child unattended? 

Topics:

opinion