Would you let 15 year old take your kids into DC?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You are in town this entire week right? And home every night? I think your day plan is ok.

Yes. Example day - I'll take all 3 on Metro into DC with me in morning. Send them to museum (short walk). Meet me for lunch downtown (short walk). I'll take my son to work for a few hours while babysitter takes daughter shopping. He hates shopping and missed out on 'Take your kids to work day'. Then babysitter takes them home (Metro and a bus from Bethesda Station). I'm home a few hours later.

I think this sounds completely reasonable.

I agree - very reasonable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

I think your idea sounds perfectly reasonable as your kids are choosing what they want to be doing with the sitter. You might consider also having a couple of alternate activities in the house set up such as board games, perhaps baking something simple if sitter does such things should it be really ugly and rainy out all week long.

The one caveat I would have is to maybe have metro fare on one of your kids as well as sitter just in case she happened to lose one of the cards or lost it somehow. The fact you will take the kids in and be meeting up for lunch if fine as you will also be able to judge how the day is going and suggest getting out of the city earlier if one seem a bit bored or exhausted. You are setting a good example by encouraging them to see the city they live so close to. Have you possibly considered a walking tour of one or more of the monuments if it turns out to be cooler.

This is very smart - if each kid has some extra money on them, just in case (in the unlikely event they get separated or lose cards), they'd have money to get at least a paper farecard (it'd have to be enough to cover trips on paper farecards, which are $1 more than SmartCard trips).

Also, it might be a good idea to talk through a couple scenarios with the sitter and your kids - for example, do they know that if they rush through a door that's closing on the train, they could get separated if someone gets on and someone is left on the other side of the door. So they should know thatn it is not a good idea to try to beat a closing door (and that they don't open like elevator doors), and also have a plan for what they do if they get separated (i.e. whoever was left behind would wait there while whoever is on the train would get off at the next stop and go in the other direction to meet them).

[Anonymous]

Completely reasonable and sounds like fun for the 15yr old too. When I babysat and nannied it was so much easier (and less sibling fighting) when you went on adventures.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OMG I'd let my 11 year old go from Bethesda to the zoo.

Yeah by the time my kid was 15, she'd been in all 8 wards of the city and practically every stop on the redline between Silver Spring and Bethesda. I suppose you have to look at the 15-year-old and decide if she is mature enough but there are lots of kids who go all over the place on metro and buses by the time they're 11, just like the pp's kid.

[Anonymous]

17: 11 again -- I will say, for the folks joking about national emergencies, that for a long time after 9/11, I made my kid give me a street address and a landline (because cell phones stop working) for any friend she was going to visit. It was weird to say "I need to know where you are because we know that a plane really could crash into the Pentagon" but I insisted. I'm not expecting a national emergency but it's not inconceivable that we could have another situation where people have to walk miles to get home and you want to know that your sitter and kids would be able to handle themselves.

But that still didn't keep me from letting my kid go off to visit her friends across the city when she was in middle school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:17: 11 again -- I will say, for the folks joking about national emergencies, that for a long time after 9/11, I made my kid give me a street address and a landline (because cell phones stop working) for any friend she was going to visit. It was weird to say "I need to know where you are because we know that a plane really could crash into the Pentagon" but I insisted. I'm not expecting a national emergency but it's not inconceivable that we could have another situation where people have to walk miles to get home and you want to know that your sitter and kids would be able to handle themselves.

But that still didn't keep me from letting my kid go off to visit her friends across the city when she was in middle school.

What if her friends don't have a landline? Would you forbid her from visiting?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:17: 11 again -- I will say, for the folks joking about national emergencies, that for a long time after 9/11, I made my kid give me a street address and a landline (because cell phones stop working) for any friend she was going to visit. It was weird to say "I need to know where you are because we know that a plane really could crash into the Pentagon" but I insisted. I'm not expecting a national emergency but it's not inconceivable that we could have another situation where people have to walk miles to get home and you want to know that your sitter and kids would be able to handle themselves.

But that still didn't keep me from letting my kid go off to visit her friends across the city when she was in middle school.

What if her friends don't have a landline? Would you forbid her from visiting?

This was a number of years ago when everyone still had a landline so it didn't come up.