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[quote=Anonymous]I'm in MD, and my child is only a few months past her 6th birthday, so haven't considered this, and don't have much "need" to do it, but... Now that I think about it, once we get a landline, I *would* do this, if it were legal, with explicit instructions, "soon."

That is, if it were legal, I'd feel confident (okay, you can never be 100%) that my kid would be totally fine either now or by 6.5 or 7 at the absolute latest. But my kid is very mature about these sorts of things. I wouldn't exactly call her a "rule follower," because she'll challenge ones she finds unfair, but once she's bought into them, she admonishes US about following the rules, LOL. She's pretty level-headed, in general. The most likely Bad Thing That Could Happen would be her getting out our pets from their cage and one of them getting lost, but she's not really that impulsive, so if I told her "no" and only left her for 30 minutes, it probably wouldn't happen. All of the other things that could happen are so unlikely, and I'd have drilled her on them... I honestly would leave her for <1 hour if it were legal.

When she was 5.5, I did leave her sick on the couch and listening to an audiobook while I got medicine for her at CVS and her father was napping upstairs. It was about 20 minutes.     Obviously she wasn't technically alone, but she was "unsupervised" and her dad didn't know I was leaving (I didn't want to wake him up to tell him, because he was sick, too). Obviously a different circumstance, but she was younger and she was fine (her dad never woke up while I was gone).

So my TL;DR answer is that I will discuss all the rules and emergency situations with her and happily leave her alone the minute she turns 8. And I will not hesitate to do it sooner if it's an urgent or emergent situation, legal or not. [/quote]

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