Excited at the thought of dinner and a glass of wine with her husband, a new mum admits she put her 11-month-old baby to sleep in her travel cot in the hotel room, turned the video monitor on and slipped downstairs for a quick dinner.
Back in their room and in bed by ten pm, it wasn’t until the next day that she wondered if what she did was wrong.
Asking the question in an article published in The Telegraph, London, the mum said none of her friends agreed with her and her husband’s actions.
“There was rapid and wholehearted agreement around the table: we were the only parents prepared to leave our baby sleeping in a hotel room on her own,” she writes.
She added: “Other parents that I spoke to this week agreed that we had done a terrible, reckless thing, expressing everything from outright disbelief at our actions to a more empathetic acknowledgement that this was the one issue that divided even the most united of parenting teams."
Despite her friends’ opinions, this mum doesn’t agree.
“I'm sorry, but if you think that, you are letting a fear of the unknown - or at least the highly unlikely - run your lives.
“Is it really the case today that parents who do as I have done might be accused of neglect? Could the hotel staff, all smiles to our faces, be complaining that we were bad parents behind our backs?”
What do you think?
This article was first published on Practical Parenting.