Mum Leaves Child Alone With Tutor Who Calls Police When She’s Late Arriving Home

A tutor found themselves in a tricky situation recently after having to call the police to look after a young child when their mother was late returning home. Now he’s wondering if he over reacted. Did he?

Here’s what he wrote on discussion forum Reddit:

I am an after school tutor. Homework help and co-curricular support mostly, test prep sometimes.

I am pretty adamant and clear that you cannot leave the house while I’m working with your child because I am not childcare and I cannot be made responsible if something like a medical episode happens. I also don’t want there to be the appearance of impropriety.

I don’t need them in the room or anything, just in the house.

Even still, parents occasionally try and use me as an excuse to run a child free errand or run to the office or whatever else they do. Usually after the first warning it stops, and there’s also a financial penalty.

Recently I had a family where the mum evidently left during our session. This was the first time that it had happened.

Eventually I needed to leave for my next appointment. I texted and called her, but no response. I was not comfortable leaving the child (8) alone without an adult present.

Now this is where a decision had to be made. Clearly at 8 years old, the child was too young to be left alone so after waiting for a while the tutor decided to call the police so he could leave to attend his next appointment.

After 15 minutes of waiting and becoming late for the next child, I got nervous and called the police non-emergency line to ask what I should do next. They said they’d send someone over.

The police arrived and said they’d wait with her. Of course, I have many angry calls and a negative review from this mother now, saying I’ve created a huge problem for her and the police think she’s some kind of bad mother now and a social services agent asked her all kinds of questions and how dare, etc.

She claims she didn’t realise the session was only thirty minutes and thought it would be ok to quickly leave around the corner because I would still be there when she returned.

I was comfortable with the decision at first, but she seemed genuinely shaken up by her interactions with the social agent or officer she spoke to (unclear which from her message). And a friend of mine says this was an uncalled for escalation that could have actually placed the child in more jeopardy than my leaving after the appointment (or that I should have waited for the mum to return and spoken with her first as a warning.)

Now the tutor is wondering if he should’ve just waited rather than get the mother in trouble with the authorities. In fact in an updated post, he writes: “The reason I think I may be the a**hole is because  I might have caused more problems by calling authorities than there would have been if I had just left or if I had waited for her to return and dropped the client.”

Comments on the post were varied, with most of them agreeing that he ultimately did the right thing as the child’s safety should always be first priority.

“What were you supposed to do, just leave the 8 year old on their own? For all you knew the mum had just gotten in a horrific accident and was unconscious or something. Someone needed to be contacted and if she didn’t leave you an emergency contact other than herself, you had no choice,” said one person.

“If she was okay with leaving her kid with you for “a few minutes”, what’s to say she would be okay if something actually DID happen and you were there? What’s stopping her from blaming it on you? Probably not a whole lot. This person needs to know that leaving their child alone with their tutor in a non-school environment is not okay. What you did was fine since you had made it clear, as made evident by this action happening with other families, with a financial penalty in what I’m assuming is included in your contract. Once, maybe, is fine and as long as they didn’t do it on purpose, but it sounds like maybe she needed a little something more to pull her head out of her ass. You are DEFINITELY NTA,” another person offered.

“Seriously. Who would leave their child with a person you hardly know without saying goodbye first and also not answer their phone? If my sitter calls, I answer NO MATTER WHAT,” said one commenter.

“This definitely sounds like she was gone longer than “a few minutes”. It’s not clear when the mum snuck out. In that time OP tried to contact mum, then add on contacting the police and waiting for the officer to arrive, etc. Unless OP wasn’t clear that it was a half hour session mum would have known that they are paying for a half hour. OP is NTA and mum put them in a really horrible position and they did the exact right thing,” posted another person.

Do you agree with the comments above? What would you have done?

Images: Pixabay