Reply to Just got yelled at for leaving my kid alone in in the car while I went to the pharmacy

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Btw this is legal in many states. In California and Pennsylvania you can leave a child over age 6 alone in a car. In VA it's age 4. In Texas and Hawaii you can actually leave even younger kids in the car as long as you are not gone for more than 5 minutes. Some states allow it if there is an older child in the car.

So the blanket reprobation OP is receiving from many of you on this thread is no consistent with the legal landscape or social norms across the country. Ok if OP were in maryland she'd be violating the law (by a few months!). In WA state you can't leave kids in cars alone until age 12 (wow). But obviously in a lot of places in the US it is legal and acceptable to leave a 7 yr old in a car. So it's weird that some of you are acting like this is a horribly negligent behavior when it's pretty much in line with how much of the country thinks about child safety and the maturity level needed to leave a kid in a car alone.[/quote]

Only 20 states have laws against leaving kids alone in cars and in even many of those states a 7 year old is above the age where it is allowed: https://www.kidsandcars.org/laws/unattended-children-in-vehicle

I will note (I am an attorney who has worked on child abuse and neglect cases) that you could still violate the law if you left a kid alone in a car in a way that put them in obvious danger. But leaving the car running is actually unlikely to be viewed as neglect especially since in this case it was obviously done to keep the kid from getting too hot. I think it would have to be something like leaving the child for a long period of time or in a location where a car would be very likely to be hit (like the shoulder of a highway). I know a judge would also look critically at the reason the child was left. Running into a pharmacy for a few minutes would be seen by most as okay whereas leaving a kid outside a casino to go gamble would not. There are judgment calls here but unless you were in a state with a blanket ban on leaving a 7 yr old in a car (very few states) OP would be legally fine.

Y'all need to chill.[/quote]

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