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Teens babysitting is now illegal in Florida. Well, not technically, but practically so. A mother has been charged for leaving her 14 year old to watch her other kids (9, 11, 12) for a few days while she was on a work trip. She hired an adult babysitter to check on them twice a day too.
The youngest accidentally dropped a weight while working out, the type of accudent that can easily occur under adult supervision, they called 911 to get him medical help, and the cops proceeded to arrest the mom upon arriving back home. For the children's safety, they have now been placed with the father who is facing domestic abuse charges and has a restraining order against him, a very safe place indeed.
Here's another summary real quick of the important parts https://x.com/niah_x03/status/2115452369043652617
I've talked about this topic before here on themotte, how children and teens are now treated as completely incapable babies and this will be enforced not just socially but through the law. If it's not immediately clear I think this is ridiculous. When I was a teen, my older sister (15) was babysitting other people's kids. There's even a popular book story from the 80s about young teens and tweens (yes, some were 12!) in middle school babysitting children as part of the babysitters club. And it's not just fiction, people did that in real life. For the younger folk here, this hysteria about leaving a teenager to watch over younger children as neglect is very new and very modern.
I've talked before about how my parents and grandparents would play all around the neighborhood in their own childhood, and yet now even walking in a gated community is deemed too dangerous. At this point I can't even let my own children have independence even if I wanted to (which I do), they literally are not allowed to grow as normal human beings used to because the cops might show up cause they're out on the front yard!
It is just another part of the helicopter parent hysteria as I've talked about before as well. There are young adults now in college who need their parents to walk them through basic life, come visit to do the laundry, and clean for them! We need less "parenting" and more freedom so kids can actually be mature instead of still crying for their mommies in college! Tweens now aren't even allowed to go to another aisle in the grocery store
I once had a great 25-26 year old intern recent graduate who still had her mother trying to butt in once when something happened at my work. She's lucky I'm very forgiving and understanding of her situation and I know that she was embarrassed about it too (I even helped her find a better living situation) but it's another example of how a lot of parents are so crazy nowadays like that!
And again, it's legally enforced now. It's so legally enforced that they'll take your kids away and give them to an abuser with a restraining order! Is this really the society we're stuck with now, where our children are increasingly coddled in their teens, sometimes into their 20s and 30s, never expected to grow up or learn responsibility?
This article has an alternative take: https://nypost.com/2026/10/28/us-news/irene-miller-who-left-kids-for-vegas-trip-raged-at-them-for-calling-911-cops/
The mom hired a babysitter who lives in a totally different city? And the babysitter is driving 2 roundtrips each day, 2 hours each way? That adds up to 8 hours of driving per day. This doesn't really add up.
Power tripping cops are a bad thing but they're a fact of life in any society. Spit in their face and expect consequences.
Allegedly
In the end the pending charges don't affect his custody, he's still the parent and nothing has been decided. Irregardless of the mom being investigated, it seems generally sane that the cops dumped the kids on him.
My own 2c is that leaving kids alone for a full 5 days is pushing it. And if you're sending a babysitter or something as an alternative caregiver, as the amount of time the parents are away increases, the amount of care required by the alternative caregivers increases as well. It's probably fine to leave the kids for 1 night and just have a babysitter check in. But for a whole week, the babysitter better be there all day every day.
And that applies even when the kids can take care of smaller kids. A young teen may be able to watch a younger kid for a couple hours alone. But he himself may not be able to take care of himself for a full week alone.
I'd imagine if the babysitter story checks out, and the kids were really being checked on twice a day every day, the charges are probably gonna get dropped. But if it was a lie or something, then she'll be punished for it.
As my non-American $.02, I can see it as "pushing it" in the sense that I would probably not do it if I had kids that age (unless I found them unusually mature) and might advice likewise to people in my environment, but on the other hand it seems insane that this would result in police getting involved and the children being taken away. In that sense, I'm a bit taken aback by your comment on a meta level; it comes across to me like someone got arrested for their breakfast choice, and then you chime in that if they really did put honey on peanut butter then this does strike you as quite degenerate. The most important part of the argument, why your beliefs regarding what should be put on bread (or what kids may or may not be competent at) should have any bearing on whether police may use their mandate to punish unrelated people who act at odds with them, is conspicuously missing, as if if only enough representative salt-of-the-earth people thought likewise, jailing PB&J heretics would be the natural course of action. Is there no more liberal principle, that people may by default do whatever they want unless it impinges on one of a handful of predefined competing values like the integrity of the state or there is a compelling sense in which it conflicts with someone else's rights?
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