Straight Out Of "Home Alone"

I read this on Yahoo! News this morning.

In a mad dash to board a plane to Paris, an ultra-Orthodox Israeli couple forgot one of their five children at Ben Gurion airport. The child, a three-year-old girl, was found by airport personnel wandering around and crying for her mother. She was later flown to Paris, accompanied by airport staff, and reunited with her parents. The parents, whose names haven't been released, didn't know they were missing a child until they were informed in flight that their daughter had been found at Ben Gurion. They will be investigated for parental negligence when the family returns from their vacation.

Wow! I'm not quite sure what to make of this. On the surface it's easy to accuse those parents of neglect. How could they possibly not know their little girl was not with the family? Then again, airports are big, crowded, busy places and when you're trying to shuffle five little ones plus luggage through them it's easy to see how children and parents could get separated. This is especially true if they are running late and rushing to make it to the plane, as this family was. So I can cut the parents some slack on losing sight of their child in the airport. What gets me is how they didn't notice the three-year-old was missing once they got on the plane.

Airplanes, in sharp contrast to airports, are small, contained spaces where it should be fairly easy to do a head count. Why didn't the parents do such a head count? That's the first thing I would've done. What did they do to make sure each child was accounted for? Who did they think had their daughter, since she obviously wasn't with them? Were they depending on one of the older kids to look after the three-year-old? And if so, why didn't that child tell the parents that his/her little sister was missing? Was the older child scared of the parents? These are the questions that keep running through my mind.

I don't want to condemn these parents. It's not like they left their child in a hot car or some other life threatening place. And I understand how hard it can be to keep up with one child, let alone five. On the other hand, I also know that if you're supervising more than one child you must constantly count, count, count! Doing head counts and name checks, where each child says "Here!" when his name is called, is crucial to prevent losing a child or discovering early that a child has wandered off. I learned that trick from working in day care and I will always follow it because it works. This family should've tried it.

In the end I suppose we should just be thankful that the little Ben Gurion Girl was found unharmed and safely reunited with her family. I hope Israeli authorities won't be too hard on her parents. Everyone involved has, I'm sure, been through enough trauma.

Home Alone, indeed.