Bad Mommies

Gosh, a lot has changed since I was twelve years old.

Bridget Kevane, a professor of Latin American and Latino literature at Montana State University, drove her three kids and two of their friends — two 12-year-old girls, and three younger kids, age 8, 7 and 3 — to a mall near their home in Bozeman. She put the 12-year-olds in charge, and told them not to leave the younger kids alone. She ordered that the 3-year-old remain in her stroller. She told them to call her on their cell phone if they needed her.

And then she drove home for some rest.

About an hour later, she was summoned back to the mall by the police, who charged her with endangering the welfare of her children.

When I was twelve, the lady down the street knocked on our front door and said, "I see you have a girl about baby-sitting age. Can she come over on Thursday?"

We didn't know this family; they'd moved in a couple of months earlier. Their kids were three, four and six. The three-year old was adopted, after having been removed from an abusive home. She was recovering from some sort of accident involving Drano, and its corrosive effects on two-year-old intestinal tracts.

All I remember about my first twelve-year-old babysitting experience was that at least one of the kids climbed a tree, that paying attention to three kids at once was a challenge, and that everything was fine. I became their favorite baby-sitter, because I played. The girl down the street just talked on the phone and ignored them. "She didn't last," the kids informed me.

I got paid $1.25 an hour. By senior year in high school, I topped out at a whopping $2/hr., except for the H---ls, who paid me twenty bucks an evening, even though their toddler went to bed before I got there and never woke up. Mr. H. drank Scotch while driving me home and made passes at me, which I did not notice as such, because married men with children must leave their wives before dating seventeen-year-olds, and I was no home-wrecker.

BTW, the mall-dropping-off incident happened in Bozeman, Montana.

An outsider, or someone used to a bigger, more crowded way of living, might be shocked to know that I left children that young in the care of two twelve-year-olds. But these kids were a pack. They grew up together in a neighborhood full of children. They walk to and from their local schools together, play together, and frequently spend time at each other’s homes.

My brother got paid $10/hr for mowing lawns. When I started applying for Real Jobs at the age of sixteen, four years of babysitting wasn't considered actual work experience.

According to the majority of commenters on Judith Warner's column, leaving five kids at the mall in Bozeman is 'child abuse and abandonment.'

Sigh.

Judith Warner thinks that this incident illustrates pervasive societal hatred of educated women. I think it illustrates a backlash in parenting philosophy since the laissez-faire seventies, plus an unhealthy dose of mass-media-induced paranoia. Plus a bad case of the butt-inskis.