why yes, we do take child neglect seriously

[bainsidhe]

I may well complain about the noise in such a scenario ...


.... until I was told it was an attempt to find the parents of a lost child. Once I knew that, I'd be a LOT more forgiving.

Karma for you, this is what I was thinking. I'm supposing all this happened in the wee morning hours, which means 2 straight hours of noise and chaos is a bit much when I'm trying to sleep. I'd be ready to tear into the idiot parents, however.

[Kristev]

In most of the Supernanny episodes that I've seen, if a child insists on running out the door and the parent won't stop them, she installs a lock on the door that's too high for the kid to reach. It's just common sense. Why is it so rare?

[Sapphire Silk]

Because it makes sense.

[KatherineB]

See, I'm now imagining a scenario where the hotel lines up all the angry, sleep-deprived patrons against a wall and then shoves the parents of the child into the same room and walks away after having locked the door.

It's a rather nice scenario...

[Food Lady]

"At 2:30 I went to lunch, this apparently was a mistake."

For some reason, I found this all by itself to be hilarious.....

Me, too. [filler]

[smileyeagle1021]

As an update, what limited extra information that I can provide. The police obviously won't disclose any charges filed, or if there were any. Security is saying that it was a police matter so they can't discuss it. All we do know is that the room that was registered to the family checked out a day early, apparently at the guest's request (I'm not sure we'd have given them a choice in the matter if they hadn't requested the early check out though). As far as we know the child is safe. The theory that the desk clerks are going with, that we hope is right (we still have some faith in humanity, or at least want to) is that it was a young family and that the parents may have honestly not known better to use the security latch or had some well intentioned but flawed fear about using it (well, what if there is an emergency and paramedics/firefighters need to get into the room... we will cut the latch is what will happen), and the kid got up after they had all gone to sleep and started wandering and after making it out of the room got lost and panicked. It's still incredibly bad parenting, but at least a somewhat understandable mistake. Though knowing some of the crappy parent horror stories we have (I will actually be posting one separately) it could very easily be something worse.

"At 2:30 I went to lunch, this apparently was a mistake."

For some reason, I found this all by itself to be hilarious.....

Seriously, it feels like that sometimes, I have absolutely nothing go wrong before my lunch, I come back from lunch and we have a crisis.

[The Masked Tutor]

These parents are so lucky. When I first read this I thought of Madeleine McCann.

[bankworking]

Only situation I'd think would be acceptable would be if this were a recent check-in, family had travelled a long way from last rest stop, parents were asleep, and child let itself out of the room.

That's kind of what I was thinking, that maybe the parents were asleep and kid woke up and managed to open the door.

Happened to me when I was a kid. Mom had the big door open but the screen door closed and I was in the front room with my older brother (him 7, me 2). I somehow got the screen door open while mom was in the other room (really just around the corner, but just out of sight) and thought my brother was playing with me (and didn't realize I was capable of opening the door). I went wandering outside and the police got called when a neighbor saw me walking down the middle of the street. I wasn't able to point out my house or say my last name, so they had to wait until she discovered my absence and called them.