I was interested by this report in this week’s Sunday Times (£) concerning John Hemming, a long-standing campaigner against overbearing child protection policies and practices and secretive family courts. I’ve seen enough instances in my time where social workers have made serious errors, causing horrendous distress, to make me glad that he’s on their case.
He’s tabled a Parliamentary Question asking the Government for guidance on the age at which a child can be left at home alone after being approached by a mother who was given a police caution some years ago for leaving her then 6 year old in the house while she went for a driving lesson. That caution has been held against her as she now wishes to train as a mental health nurse.
I have to say that I have absolutely zero sympathy with anyone who thinks that it’s ok to leave a 6 year old in the house rather than cancel a driving lesson. The last time ROSPA had the funding to collect statistics on home accidents, they found that 120 children died in a year as a result of an accident in the home. The whole list makes sobering reading. More recent research looks at the reasons behind child hospital admissions and deaths. So I think it was right that she received a police caution. Whether that should stop her becoming a nurse now, many years on, is a different matter. One stupid mistake shouldn’t automatically blight a whole career choice.
Hemming himself poses a question about something he’d done.
I sent my daughter, then aged 10, on the train from Birmingham to stay with my mother in Devon. There were no changes and she was met at the other end. Was that acceptable?
Well you might think it would be ok, so long as the child didn’t get sick on the train, or find herself in a situation she couldn’t handle. He might have thought twice had he seen the figures for sexual assaults on trains. But the reality of life is that many children do have to make that Friday night journey on public transport to other parts of the country to see parents.
I’m not entirely sure it’s a good idea to have definitive guidance giving an actual age when children are defined to be capable of looking after themselves. Children mature at different ages. The law at the moment takes individual circumstances into account, which is probably quite sensible if a little more subjective and imprecise than people might like. It’s worth noting that the Government website offers NSPCC guidance which states that under 12s shouldn’t be left at home for long periods and under 16s shouldn’t be left at home overnight. Young children and babies should never be left alone. My friend who left his sleeping four month old twins in the house while he nipped to the supermarket to get baby milk didn’t want to disturb them and was a bit non-plussed by his wife’s rage when she came home. What if he’d had an accident or the car had broken down? What if the house had gone on fire?
Way back in the 1970s, when I was about 10 or 11, there were some days when my mum was working that I ended up going home from school on my own. From what I can remember, the bus cost just 6p then. I was a latchkey child. It did me no harm but I look back now as a parent myself in a different world and think of what could have happened and shudder with horror. I felt very grown up. The reality was that I wasn’t but it was convenient for everybody to pretend that I was. My parents both worked and after-school childcare was not always available.
Perhaps a minimum age, which I would suggest has more than one figure in it, might be the right way to go, but with a strong warning that this doesn’t mean that all children above it are automatically deemed capable of looking after themselves. The law needs to reflect that parents generally know their own children best, but parents need to know that they may find themselves having to account for their actions to a Police Officer, social worker or judge. They might want to think about that before heading off to that driving lesson.
But back to my original question. Is John Hemming right to raise this? Absolutely. If it means that we talk about it and think about the issues around it, it’s a job well done. I’m not sure it should elicit the clarity he seeks though.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
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20 Comments
I am not actually sure you could put an actual age figure on it, looking at the matters of Gillick and Fraser Competent, it is all about the mindset of the child, is the child more advanced in their years and more responsible with other every day things.
With the work load placed upon parents these days and having to juggle the working life and that of the family never the two should meet in a happy medium, is that more of the bigger of questions here.
I do know that if we look at the laws surrounding the age for babysitting and the age when children can have paper rounds there was the article a few years ago where a parent was fined for allowing her 14 year old son babysitting their toddler, I know at that time there was an uproar by the NSPCC, their policies are from the Age of 13, however they tend to not take in all the variables when saying such and in most cases the NSPCC simply make off the cuff comments.
With the original question and EDM tabled by John hemming I do wholeheartedly support such and maybe there is a time now for the wider debate with much of emphasis of parents now having to work every hour god sends and in modern times things change year upon year and more and more pressures are put on the family unit. there is no real legislation on this and I know it would underpin the rights of the parents to do what they feel best in the situation for their children.
The Article I mention goes back to 2011 I did not think it was that far back
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12380329
*Correction – the mother was not fined, she received an official police caution*
I walked a short distance (10 mins) to school and home from about the age of 9 it did me no harm. Most children made their own way to secondary school and home from 11. I’m not supprised Car on fees afraid as a parent but fear is not a reason not to do something. Children have to grow up we have increasingly moved up certain milestones to higher and higher cliff edges (previously 16, now 18).
We can not eliminate risk for children. We must balance trying to insulate them from it and allowing them to take risk and learn. Both ultimately protect them but have other costs.
To me it feels we wrap them in cotton wool but don’t prepare them.
Hemming’s question is important as we need to set lines that are publically recorded. As an attempt to stop the upward drift which altimately leaves children unprepared for the world and it’s risks.
I would say leaving any 6 year old alone for the length of a driving lesson so not within easy few minutes to get back, is just wrong on many levels. Had it been an emergency then fair enough but it was not. Having said that I cannot say it should constitute a criminal offence if no physical harm came to the child. I would agree from 10 upwards should not really be questionable within “normal” circumstances and childs abilities based.
I often walked a couple of miles or so home from school in the mid-1950s aged 9-10. Sometimes I dallied on the way but I can’t recall my mother being overly concerned if I was particularly late home.
There was a lot less traffic than nowadays so the actual journey was less hazardous.
I was under strict instructions not to talk to strange men – Mira Hindley changed that….
Of course one didn’t have mobile phones then so a parent couldn’t make contact with their child in such circumstances.
I find myself agreeing with all Carons thoughts on this. I often think that my parents attitudes during my childhood in the 1960s would seem shocking now, I would often wander off into the hills for the day & they seemed very unfazed by that. I suppose they didnt have much choice, my dad worked long hours & my mum was disabled so there wasnt a lot they could do.
Nonconformistradical 11th Nov ’14 – 8:36pm
As a nine year old in the early 1960s I would regularly go off on a Saturday straight after breakfast (around 8am) and as long as I was home in time for tea (around 5pm) my parents did not worry. They usually did not have a clue where I was or what I was doing, although they probably would have had a idea of which friends I was likely to be with.
But that was then, a different world — more dangerous in many ways than today. Very few children in this country today die of polio, whooping cough, measles etc. Perhaps my parents were more fatalistic because they knew of those risks and because they had lived through the second world war.
I was not so relaxed about my own children when they were growing up.
As for mobile phones — in 2014 children are possibly more at risk from things they might see on their mobile phone than they would be looking after themselves for a few hours.
“It did me no harm but I look back now as a parent myself in a different world and think of what could have happened and shudder with horror.”
What is different now?
Surely it says more about what our society is becoming if, there is major concern here, unless other abuses are relevant to the matter. We seem to spend more time and effort on “could happens” than “actually did or is”. Is the question where does the nanny state stop and start?
My father got the train from Redcar to Oxford (which I reckon must have been a rather long journey back in 1949) when he was 8 years old.
People today would find that totally unacceptable – but I do wish we could find a way of rebelling against the overbearing saftey concerns. My boys have got a greater chance of being knocked off their bikes on our short journey to school every day, so let’s get these things in perspective.
As for the woman with the driving lesson – why couldn’t she borrow a child seat and ask the instructor to put up with a child in the back? What betteer to emulate a real driving environment during a lesson? No, I’m not being fatuous.
Michael
@Hywel I suppose the difference now is that 24 hour news and the tabloid press spends a lot of time covering rare tragic cases making parents a lot more paranoid than they need to be.
The question isn’t so much is whether John Hemming is right, but how have we got to a situation where the need to ask has come about?
This summer we met many helicopter parents in a panic because their child was going to secondary school and would be getting the bus etc. and hence this would be the first time that the parent hasn’t escorted the child on every venture beyond the front door.
john hemming is absolutely right in raising this issue—a grey area
he does lots of good work helping parents involved in wrongful child protection matters often where complex health issues are involved & misinterpreted by so called professionals
my wife who has a post grad dip in Child Development has a website –google Parents Protecting Children if you have an issue or are a councillor needing casework help
I had a meeting with the school psychologist when I was 9; I didn’t know what it was about until later, when I found people had been worried about whether it was OK for me to spend hours doing chemistry (unsupervised) in the shed at my grandmother’s house, about a mile away. (I was probably showing symptoms of Asperger syndrome too, but that wasn’t widely recognised in the UK back then.) My parents were told to let me carry on.
I’d started with a schoolboy chemistry set, but bought more from the local-ish Chemists shop, whose owner was happy to sell me moderately dangerous things like copper sulphate and dilute nitric acid, (but not the concentrated stuff which is really dangerous). Like John, I’d also go off on long walks across the fields. And all the older children at primary school (up to 11) walked or cycled to school by themselves. School buses were only for those travelling more than 3 miles.
If the risk of children walking to school alone is that they could run into someone physically stronger than themselves with bad intentions, at what age does this cease to be the case? 40?
Oh, and John Hemming has hero status in Slovakia for his ultimately successful work on a case which I assume is restricted information in the UK, but was widely reported and created a lot of anger and damage to Britain’s reputation in Slovakia.
Richard S
“John Hemming has hero status in Slovakia”
To some of us he is a hero here for raising illiberal actions by groups with power who beliieve their “good intentions” are sufficient.
For me, the question is, which do we prefer? On the on hand, the status quo, which leaves parents open to accusations of neglect by over-zealous authorities who like to make up the rules as they go along, but legally places the onus on parents to decide what’s best. On the other, legislation which whilst it would clarify the position would also remove discretion from parents who, one would hope, are best placed to judge what’s right for their children. My preference is for the latter. As in other areas of life, I fundamentally reject the idea that authorities should be able to dictate on minutiae like this.
I think you must mean “the former”, Nigel, not “the latter” – i.e. the status quo, not “clarifying” legislation. And I’d agree.
Oops! Major mistake in not checking before I press send in the above post. Clearly, my preference is NOT for the latter, but the former.