You’d be surprised how much some parents take having family available for babysitting for granted.

Professional babysitters cost an arm and a leg, good ones are hard to come by, and there’s always a risk to the kid’s well-being with a babysitter because there is only so much information that you can rely on. Among other things…

But then there are disrespectful parents like this one mom who agreed with a cousin to have her kid stay with them for 5 days, and then vanished for nearly two weeks. Well, the cousin didn’t take any guff from her and did what she thought was right.

More Info: Reddit

Needing a break from parenting is understandable, and there are ways to tackle this. However, going so far as to abandon your kid is not, and should never be, an option

Image credits: Yan Krukau (not the actual photo)

A Redditor sought validation online on whether it was a smart move to leave her nephew with the police after his mom failed to pick him up at the agreed time

Image credits: u/Horror_Pie_4973

The mother ended up coming back from wherever nearly a week after what was originally agreed upon, i.e. 5 days

Image credits: Polesie Toys (not the actual photo) 

A Redditor by the nickname of u/Horror_Pie_4973 shared a conundrum they recently had with their cousin. OP is 24 years old, child-free, studies, has a job and is going through some medical problems, so this is their stressful context.

They agreed to watch their 3-year-old nephew while the cousin, the kid’s mother, did… something. Somewhere. She was gone. The kid was supposed to be with OP for 5 days. But on the last day, the mother stopped responding to calls. Meanwhile, she was seen snapping pictures of herself and sharing them on social media, so it’s not like she didn’t see it.

Two more days passed—at this point, OP has commitments and can’t babysit the kid any more. The mom’s ignoring them, her parents live 8 hours away, OP’s own parents couldn’t do it either, OP can’t drive, nor are they willing to afford an Uber and flight because it’s an unreasonable amount of money there, and we later find out that the mom’s other suggestion was to put the kid up for daycare for $300 a week. Nope, thanks. The police station it is!

OP had no other choice than to drop the kid off with the cousin’s contact location at the local police station. And, needless to say, the mom wasn’t all that thrilled to find that one out. Nearly a week after she was supposed to pick the kid up. I repeat, nearly a week after she had originally said she’d pick the kid up. “I was only supposed to watch him [for] 5 days, I had him for 7. She lied and didn’t come back for 4 more days.” You can do the math. Oh, and mom’s suggested daycare solution was $300 a week. Again, no, thank you.

Image credits: Alesia Gritcuk (not the actual photo) 

Stories like these usually find themselves on r/AITA, but this one was posted on r/TrueOffMyChest, where it got nearly 10,000 upvotes (with a 95% positivity rating). OP passed the question of what would you do? to the community, and everyone and their mother pointed at child abandonment.

Folks said that, given the circumstances, OP did the right thing. The kid definitely deserves more and involving the authorities (the police, who quite likely involved child protective services) was a way that would solve the problem efficiently. Otherwise, this would mean enabling this sort of behavior and putting the kid at even greater risk because it’s likely this isn’t the first time.

Among all of this, there was one Redditor who shared a very similar story. Their mother was asked by her cousin to watch her 9-month-old baby for a day. That one day, however, turned into two weeks. Of partying. “Her baby was sick, there were no diapers, and no baby food.” Imagine the stress levels. Oh, OP’s mother was pregnant too. The cousin denies any of this happened.

Image credits: Ethan Wilkinson (not the actual photo) 

Child abandonment and neglect is taken extremely seriously. There is even a UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), Article 7, that guarantees kids the right to know and to be cared for by their parents.

The Daphne Programme defines two types of child abandonment: open and secret. The former is when a parent abandons their kids with someone they know, being fully aware of this and leaving ways to be identified and found. The latter is when the parent makes sure they can’t be found once they have abandoned their kid anonymously.

In places like the UK, it is illegal to do so secretly, but both it, and a number of other European countries don’t have a fully developed legal basis for realistically controlling and tackling this issue. However, it is reported that Western European countries have a 4% abandonment rate for kids under the age of three compared to a whopping 32% in a number of Eastern European countries.

The main reason for this is poverty and financial struggles. Other major causes of child abandonment include post-natal depression and mental illness, lack of sex ed and poor knowledge of family planning, child disability and conception following rape.

Fortunately, there are ways of fighting child abandonment. Quite a few, actually: parent training and education centers, family planning services, designation of social workers and assistance for pre-birth, and mother-baby units, counseling services, helplines and support programs and even financial support for after birth. There’s more.

And while we as a society do have solutions, there’s a lot of work to be done. And so the debates continue, which you can add to with your thoughts and opinions in the comment section below.

Folks online think the Redditor did the right thing because it’s child abandonment and the kid most certainly deserves better

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