Boy Lives Because Mum Let Him Sleep

The old adage, never wake a sleeping baby never sounded so good to a parent. A mum in Yonkers, NY, left her son asleep in their basement rather than wake him and send him up to bed – only to have a violent storm rip through their neighborhood and destroy the boy’s bedroom.

If she’d sent him to bed, chances are, the seven-year-old would be dead.

The chimney on the family’s home had crumbled in on Trent Crespo’s bed itself – right where he would have been sleeping if mum Jennifer had decided to rouse him from where he’d fallen asleep.

It a freak storm, so there’s no major lesson here for parents. But it made me wonder what age most parents are comfortable leaving their kids asleep in a place other than their bedroom. Is it four? Five? Seven, like Trent Crespo?

My daughter’s four, and I’m still uneasy about her waking up in a place where she doesn’t expect to be. A writer for a local newspaper, I covered the horrific story last winter of a little girl who got outside the family’s home in the middle of the night and froze to death because she was disoriented. Even in summer, it sticks with me – what could happen if she woke up in the living room and couldn’t find us? Would she try outside because our bedroom is upstairs, and the front door is around the corner from the couch? If our house was set up differently, with the bedrooms on the same level as the general living space, I might be less cautious now that we’ve hit four. Old enough to use the bathroom by herself means old enough to roam around the house alone, right?

What age did you start letting your kids fall asleep on the couch and leave them there for the duration?

Image: NY Daily News