What age would you feel happy leaving your kids by themselves?

That stuff from the NSPCC is extreme, to be polite.  Can’t trust a 15 year old to do one night alone?

8 and 5 is crazy talk. 99% chance of it being fine but if the 8 year old has any sort of accident what are the chances of the 5 year old helping that to a good outcome.

We live less than a minutes walk from the shops so from about 8 or 9 years old we would leave the eldest along for the 5 mins it would take to go to the shops and back.

I think being left on their own for say an hour or so was probably 11 – post secondary school start, covid means there was no chance earlier.

At 15 the eldest babysits a 10 year old who has 90 mins between finishing school and his mum getting home.

I think we may have left her home alone overnight once or twice very recently, with the grandparents living within 10 mins drive, and her knowing all of the neighbours

I don’t know. They can be surprisingly resourceful. Our oldest persuaded her 18m sister to wipe her bottom when she was 3. I was in the house but she evidently didn’t think this was worth bothering an adult for.

I was put on a train in Abergavenny aged 11 and told to change in Newport to get the Intercity 125 to London Paddington where a family friend would meet me. No problem at all as far as I recall. Return journey a week later just as uneventful.

This was back in 1978!

Can’t trust a 15 year old to do one night alone?

House party!!!!!!

But seriously, it depends on the kid and how well you know thier social circle…

There’s no way I would consider a kid old enough to stay home alone if I didn’t already trust that kid with access/.use of a telephone.

And there’s no way I’d leave them alone without it below the age of about 15

We didn’t have a phone in the house until my mum remarried and we moved to my stepdad’s house, in 1973 by which time I was 17…

My dad died when I was 13, I was often left alone from around 11, and I would bugger-off out to play over the fields on my own at 8-9, walking home from school at that age.
Chippenham was a much smaller town in the early sixties, you could buy a book in Smiths with every road in the town and everyone in each road listed. Few people owned cars, kids could play in the road all afternoon, with the very rare shout of ‘CAR’ stopping whatever game it was for all of a minute.

The past is a different country, they did things different there…

Given the high school here finishes at 1pm on a Wednesday and Friday and the youngest kids there will be 11, I reckon that’s round about the age where it is socially acceptable for a kid to be in the house on their own.

Accordingly my 11yo has started being left on his own, occasionally, for half an hour or so beginning a couple of months ago.