Expectations of a 13 year old…
Posted
August 7, 2007 at
11:59 am by
Jessica
I just read about a 2-year old baby in Texas, who drowned in her community pool while the mother went inside to get a diaper. Supposedly, the mother left the 2-year old with a 13-year-old sibling and when she came back, the baby was lying on the bottom of the pool.
I can’t imagine the guilt that poor 13-year-old and the mother is going through.
Can a mom really rely on a child of that age in such a dangerous situation? Do you think the parents blame the sibling?
I certainly hope that this young teen gets counseling.
Tags: Fort-Worth, News-&-Politics, Prodige-Miamba, Texas |
13 Responses to “Expectations of a 13 year old…”
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Leave a comment
Comments are moderated and may not appear immediately in an effort to remove commercial messages, irrelevancies, excessive foul language, racist/sexist/hateful comments, spoofed/cloaked IPs and/or personal attacks and will be edited/deleted at our discretion. Thank you for your patience.
1. Petulant Pixie said:
August 7, 2007 @ 1:49 pm
I would trust my 12 y.o. son with my 2 y.o. daughter in a pool. I would leave him with very specific instructions–keep her here with you, DON’T take your eyes off her for a second, etc.. But, I’d trust him to watch her so that she didn’t drown.
As far as holding the sibling responsible, well, that’s tough. Kind of like Map of the World, huh?
2. Jessica said:
August 7, 2007 @ 2:49 pm
Yeah, but in “Map of the World”, wasn’t it the mother, an adult, that lost track of the child?
3. Petulant Pixie said:
August 7, 2007 @ 3:11 pm
Yes. But, the friend forgave her. The adult did make a mistake, an honest mistake and the friend forgave her. I’d imagine the same would have to happen with a kid. You’d have a hard time NOT blaming the kid (or even an adult) if you truly deemed them responsible and they screwed up honestly, but you’d have to get over it. It would be very hard for everyone involved. But, the mistake that the 13 y.o. made could have been made by an aunt or a friend, too, if it was just that the responsible person was engrossed with something else. I don’t know exactly what happened.
Certainly you can’t hold a 13 y.o. LEGALLY responsible, but since this is a sibling, I doubt that’s an issue anyway. It’s just who was the ultimate responsible party. If the adult takes full blame for it, then she’s admitting she made a bad judgment call. Same could happen if she left the toddler with another adult.
A 13 y.o. SHOULD be responsible. There are 13 y.o. kids I wouldn’t leave my children with, but then again there are plenty of full grown people I wouldn’t leave my children with. So, at that point, it isn’t an age issue, it’s an individual trustworthyness issue, KWIM?
4. Jessica said:
August 7, 2007 @ 3:27 pm
A 13 y.o. SHOULD be responsible. There are 13 y.o. kids I wouldn’t leave my children with, but then again there are plenty of full grown people I wouldn’t leave my children with. So, at that point, it isn’t an age issue, it’s an individual trustworthyness issue, KWIM?[/quote]
I disagree.
13 years old may be old enough to watch their brother or sister at home or at the mall or make sure they don’t burn down the house, but at a pool, where it’s a dangerous situation to begin with, I don’t think you can hold the 13 year-old responsible.
If it were an adult, it would be another issue, because an adult should be able to stay focused on something that is so important. A 13-year old is still influenced by extraneous factors, like someone throwing a ball at him or the lure of being sidetracked by his/her own fun.
I hope the mother is telling the child over and over that it isn’t his/her fault. It really is the mother’s fault because she is was ultimately responsible for that baby. It is not the 13 year-old’s baby, IMO.
5. Allison said:
August 7, 2007 @ 4:27 pm
When I was 13, I was at a friend’s house. His parents had a maid and she had her 1 1/2-ish baby with her. We all went in the pool and she asked all of us “big kids” (all boys and myself) to watch the baby in the pool with us. She was in one of those yellow tubes with the leg holes. Well we really were watching her, then the play turned a little rough (waves and splashing) and I turned around, to see the baby’s tube had flipped over and her little legs were kicking in the air. I screamed for my friend as we turned the tube over. She came up caughing like mad and we screamed for her mom. It was so scary! I went home right away and told my mom. I kept telling her “It was only a second, I swear! How did she flip so quickly?!” My mom kept telling me all about never letting your eyes off a baby, that it probably was ‘just a second’, and etc.
I truly feel bad for the 13 yo. My hope is that he/she will seek counseling along with the parents. I pray this never happens to anyone again………
6. Jessica said:
August 8, 2007 @ 9:05 am
[/quote]
That’s why, IMO, you can’t count on a 13 yr. old to stay diligent in that situation. It does only take a second. That’s why 13 year olds are not allowed to drive, they don’t have that kind of judement or reflex yet.
7. Petulant Pixie said:
August 8, 2007 @ 10:24 am
I still disagree. I still think that MOST 13 y.o.s would be mature enough to handle watching a toddler in a pool for a few minutes. It isn’t like having the kid watch the toddler at the pool all day, or even a couple of hours. A 13 y.o. is able to focus on one thing and one thing only–the safety of the little being in their charge–for like 10-15 minutes. If not, then the parent should have known that and NOT trusted the teen with the toddler at all. We don’t know what happened–did the kid get distracted? Did the baby fall into the water and the teen actually didn’t know how to swim? It’s very odd that the baby was found lying at the bottom of the pool–did NOBODY try to get the baby? There’s a lot unanswered in that small article. I wouldn’t base my judgment of the entire population of 12/13 y.o’s ability to watch small children based on this one incident. I KNOW that if I left my 12 y.o. watching my 2 y.o. in a pool, he would be absolutely diligent in keeping her safe. Knowing him (and that’s just it, he’s my child, I live with him, I observe him on a daily basis), he’d probably pull a deck chair waaaay off away from the pool and command her to sit in the chair and sit across from her staring at her until I returned. That’s the kind of kid he is, he would want to eliminate ANY danger at all. But, there are other kids in the 12/13 y.o. range who I would trust, too, based on my observations of them interacting with my toddler and with other toddlers. They wouldn’t get distracted from such an important job, no matter what.
I do hope the teen gets counseling, just as I would hope that an adult would get counseling if some freak accident happened while they were on the job and the child they were watching died as a result.
8. Jessica said:
August 8, 2007 @ 11:42 am
9. Jill said:
August 8, 2007 @ 8:27 pm
Nope, woouldn’t do it. A 13 year old is still a kid. I would not leave my baby alone in a pool with a child that. age. To watch her out of the pool while I grab a diaper? Maybe, but not IN the pool.
10. Petulant Pixie said:
August 9, 2007 @ 8:31 am
Well, again, we don’t know whether this mom took the toddler out of the pool for the kid to watch either. By IN the pool, I meant in the pool area. I’d assume that if I left my toddler in the charge of my 12 y.o., they would be OUT of the pool, but sitting near it. I wouldn’t have her IN the water and just jump out and tell my son to watch her there. I wouldn’t do that with an adult, either. I’d take the baby out of the water, set her up in a towel and a drink in a chair by the pool, call the responisble party over and give directions to the person watching the baby.
11. Ann said:
August 9, 2007 @ 12:27 pm
Just a little insite:
This drowning happened in my neighborhood and my close friend was the one who administered CPR before the EMT’s got there. This was a community pool and it happend abour 10pm. Our pool closes at 9pm so I am not sure how they got into the pool unless they were there before the pool closed. My friend heard some screaming at the pool and he rushed over with our other friend. The girls (sisters) had the baby in the bathroom. Supposedly the girls were changing in the bathroom and one of them asked where is little brother. Thats when they discovered him in the pool. They didn’t know how long he had been in the pool, nor where the parents around. Maybe the mom did go for a diaper but she had to have been gone for 10-20mins??? She didn’t show up until when my friends where adminstering CPR on the baby in the bathroom. There was so much water coming out of the little boy that my friends figure that he had been in the water for awhile before the girls realized he was missing.
As a former teacher and as a mom to a baby I would not trust my child with a teenager in a pool situation. It isn’t worth the risk. A teenagers attention span is very small no matter how responsible one is. Please pray for this family.
Here is a link for the article:
http://www.star-telegram.com/news/story/194983.html
12. Jessica said:
August 9, 2007 @ 1:33 pm
As a former teacher and as a mom to a baby I would not trust my child with a teenager in a pool situation. It isn’t worth the risk. A teenagers attention span is very small no matter how responsible one is. Please pray for this family.
[/quote]
Especially a really young teenager.
Ann, thank you so much for the insight. Your comments are very much appreciate here.
It’s just heartbreaking. What a tragedy.
13. Allison said:
August 9, 2007 @ 8:30 pm
Ann, thank you to your friends for trying to help the poor little baby. Even though the outcome turned out tragically, they are heroes just for arriving and trying to save him…….