Toddler watch

The British news is dominated now with stories of a three-year old Madeleine McCann who was taken from her parents' hotel room at a resort in Portugal.

Her parents were eating in a restaurant 150 yards away or a few hundred yards away, depending on sources. According to the parents, they checked on her and her sleeping siblings (twins, aged 2) every half hour.

These parents are middle class, Dad's a cardiologist, Mum's a GP. And there has been a complete absence of criticism of their decision to leave their children unattended - despite the fact that evening childcare was apparently on offer - a free evening nursery or baby-sitting for an additional fee.

Now, everyone makes mistakes and I don't think that anyone could have anticipated that a child would be stolen. Despite kidnapping being the stuff on nightmares, your child is much more likely to choke or fall or wander off or simply wake up in a strange place and be terrified than be taken. And that's why you don't leave them alone. Sure, everyone turns their back "only for a moment" and kids do abscond themselves in that moment only to be found playing (as I was once) in a median strip. Kids will zero in on danger in a way that makes you marvel at the survival of the human race. They have NO sense of self preservation. And that's why you don't leave the very young children alone for an evening.

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My in-laws took a trip to Amsterdam once when my husband and his sister were very small. Pretty much the ages of the McCann children. My father-in-law told me (in a tone that implied they deserved extra credit) that they had booked a hotel specifically for its child-minding services, but when they arrived they found that the services were temporarily unavailable. Disappointing, I'm sure. But the ViL's dad said that this did not stop them from taking that "much deserved" evening out alone. Apparently the hotel would offer a "baby listening" service - where parents leave their phone off the hook and reception staff "listen in". To me, this doesn't sound adequate, but I suppose it would be ok if your kid is a good sleeper and you just want to have a beer on the hotel terrace where reception staff can find you.

But no, my in-laws took the phone off the hook and then went out to dinner in Amsterdam and then took a walking tour of Amsterdam's red light district before one of them (and there is some disagreement about which one) decided that maybe they'd better head back to check on the kids.

The kids were, apparently, screaming their heads off. And the hotel reception staff hadn't noticed. But a German hotel guest had noticed- and had checked on them. And as my father-in-law recounted "that German woman looked at me with eyes like daggers at breakfast the next morning," implying that he was somehow the injured party. Bloody Germans, they just have no human sympathy.

My father-in-law told me this as an amusing story of childhood foibles of the young Vol-in-Law. I wasn't laughing. You see, I'd already heard this story. From my husband. He didn't recount it as a gentle anecdote, but as a real horror story. An indelible early memory of abandonment and terror.

As he remembers it, the room got very hot and he and his toddler sister woke up uncomfortable and very, very thirsty. They wanted some water and so toddled into the bathroom to help themselves. But the taps were too tight and they couldn't turn them and their thirst became overwhelming and their parents weren't there and they were scared and they cried and cried and no one came, which only made their terror and thirst that much the worse. And what if they had managed to turn the taps and instead of cold water it was hot, and they'd scalded themselves? What if they'd managed much worse?

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I do think there are times depending on age and individual personality and circumstance when you might leave a kid alone. By the time I was 9 or 10 I was one of those latch-key kids, and I cherished my time alone in the house. On the other hand, when VolBro was once left alone around this age - my grandfather's house caught on fire (he still denies involvement) resulting in expensive cosmetic damage.

I can remember a couple of stories of British parents being arrested in Florida for leaving their children alone in their hotel rooms while they ate in the hotel restaurant or took in a fireworks show on the resort premises. So maybe there's some kind of cross-cultural difference. But I just find it a little bit odd that folks here seem to think it's ok to leave very small children on their own in strange places.