Parents worry about their children’s safety all the time. Well, most of them. However, it’s easy to become complacent in your own home, where you often feel that your children are the most secure.

Unfortunately, as one mom recently learned, it only takes a moment of distraction for a child to find themselves in a potentially dangerous situation. The concerned woman recently turned to Reddit to share a troubling experience she had with her 3-year-old son. According to her post on ‘True Off My Chest‘, the child managed to escape from the family’s house in Florida and was later found naked and close to a busy road.

What’s even more troubling is the fact that she had left the little one (and his sister) with their dad, who at the time of his “quest” was busy playing computer games.

Continue scrolling to learn what happened and check out the talk we had about toddlers with Talya Stone, a former public relations specialist turned blogger and the woman behind online journals Motherhood: The Real Deal and 40 Now What.

This man’s obsession with video games is putting his children in danger

Image source: RODNAE Productions (not the actual photo)

And might also push his wife to file for divorce

Image source: Emma Frances Logan (not the actual photo)

Image source: DontMarryGamers902

Between the ages of 1 and 3, toddlers are scooting away from babyhood in search of new adventures. In search of greater independence, they’re learning to talk, walk, and run and for many in this age group, “outside” and “play” are becoming common desires. Exploring the inside and the outside world is important for their emotional, social, and physical development. It’s one thing to see a cat through the window, but it’s another to hear it purr and feel its fur, maybe even play with it.

“Although not as drastic as this situation, my partner and I had once thought our daughter had come home with us to the house and then realized she was out of the house unsupervised by us as she hadn’t come back with either of us,” parenting writer Talya Stone told Bored Panda. “Cue me running down our street crying out her name like a lunatic. I found her at the bottom of the road with a kind neighbor. Obviously not the proudest moment of my life but thankfully nothing like that has ever happened since.”

But while parents need to step back a bit to allow their children some freedom, they still need to supervise the little ones. Toddlers can’t properly evaluate risk and differentiate safe situations from threatening ones.

“Toddlers are little daredevils, who love to challenge us and push boundaries,” Stone said. “They also have pretty much next to no clue of how what is safe and unsafe. You can encourage independence in small ways by giving them little tasks to complete on their own, giving them choices, and letting them have small wins and mini adventures which that make them think are they a superhero. Although it can be tempting to watch over your toddler all the time, it’s important to give them plenty of time for independent play and discovery whilst communicating in an age-appropriate way what their expected boundaries are.”

Maybe the man the author of the post is married to really loves his kids, but judging from the woman’s confession, it sounds like he isn’t suited to be a father just yet.

“I think the main point [to keep track of your toddler’s whereabouts when you’re at home and they’re not in a playpen or crib] is to make your home a safe and secure place for a toddler so that you don’t have to!” Talya Stone said. “Just like parents have to baby-proof their homes, they should also toddler-proof their homes, too. When my daughter was a toddler, she had free rein of the house although I was always mindful of her whereabouts. It’s always a good idea to keep an ear out for any mischief they may get up to, but then you also need to give them the space to do their thing also (within reason and as age-appropriate).”

According to neuropsychiatrist Dr. Esmina Avdibegović and psychotherapist Dr. Maja Brkić, child neglect can happen for a number of reasons. They said that social isolation, negative experiences of parents in childhood, lack of parental knowledge and skills, the use of psychoactive substances, criminal activities, and gambling problems are just some of the risk factors.

While we don’t know why the man is escaping into the virtual world to the point where he puts his children in danger, it can lead to huge problems. “The consequences of neglect are multiple and long-term,” Avdibegović and Brkić noted. “The period from birth to adulthood is characterized by progressive physical, emotional, cognitive, and social development … The growth and development of the child [are] followed by changes in brain maturation. During the first years of life, there is significant brain growth that occurs sequentially and hierarchically, organizing the development of brain functions from the least to the most complex. The brain develops through the organization and creation of pathways that connect different parts of the brain and through the distinction between functions. Creating these pathways is a characteristic of brain development that is most experientially sensitive.”

How all of this will shape up depends on the environment in which the child is growing up and the interactions they have within it.

“Children [who] experienced neglect often have less developed parts of the brain responsible for cognition and emotions,” Avdibegović and Brkić explained. “It [also] results in the excessive development of areas of the brain responsible for survival which leads to anxiety, impulsiveness, poor affect regulation, and hyperactivity.”

Compared to their peers, neglected children are usually more withdrawn, apathetic, less involved in their social and physical environment, exhibit more helplessness when under stress, and show significant developmental delays. It is believed that these children internalize the message of their worthlessness and assume that they will not succeed in acquiring friends, achieving success at school, or being noticed.

Parenting is hard and scary. Every decision moms and dads make can cause something wrong. But that doesn’t give them the excuse to not even try.

As the post went viral, people had a lot to say about the ordeal and the original poster (OP) shared a few more insights into her family life

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