One day, I made a comment to my 14 year old about the kids being here all the time. “Don’t their parents miss them?” I was kidding, but my fun loving son became very serious and he said, “Mom, most of their parents just don’t care where they are as long as they aren’t home.”

Incredible. I nearly cried. I can’t imagine feeling that way about my kids even though I joke about it (and blog about it).

Not every kid who comes to my house is an angel. I’ve had to tell kids the rules to hang out at my house and if they don’t follow them, they have to leave and they aren’t welcome to come back. I’ve also had to take kids home and tell their parents who I am, what their kid was doing, and why they can’t come to my house again until they straighten up. I haven’t had one yet who didn’t get the chance to come back.

I don’t even do it to raise them. I do it to protect my own. If they learn something along the way, so be it.

And for the record, I think Beckett is a totally cool name.

I don’t have babies although I have tried to give birth on several occasions. No luck. My neighbours however do have babies and they let them roam outside all night long. I personally think people should be forced to keep their babies in at night. But that’s mostly because I get tired of them going through my garbage cans and peeing all over my shed to mark their territory. Damn babies.
Dedicated this last time to Toots.

I have no further advice.

It appears you may be screwed. Sort of like sitting behind a 6′7″ 280-lb bodybuilder who talks on his cellphone throughout the entire movie.

Only this movie is your life. And the bodybuilder is a wee child.

Social services? (This may transfer the nickname from the meandering child to yourself, however.)

I’m not much for tiptoeing around feelings, except I don’t want the kid to suffer and that’s all that would happen. He would still be wandering around the neighborhood unsupervised.

I’m pretty sure this family is on welfare. Maybe the feds will pay for the popsicles.

My guess would be that a direct conversation needs to be held with the child’s parent(s). Something along the lines of, “I have my own children to take care of all day long. Yours likes to take my child across the street when not doing constructive activities like gluing the dog or landscaping my porch.

If he is going to continue to be over here, I will be deciding when he returns to your house. If you’d like to make sure he returns there, perhaps you could stop over and retrieve him or at least look out the window now and then.

You also owe me (some ridiculous amount of money) for the day care.”

More or less those words. Sort of feel it out as you go along. There are so many parents out there who refuse to take responsibility for their children or their actions, quite possibly because most of the public insists on tiptoeing around everyone’’s feelings.

Depending on the violent crime statistics in your neighborhood, you may need to develop a less-confrontational Plan B.

I think it takes a parent or two to raise a child, not a village. What if the village has an idiot?

Wow – now I feel like reading Dostoevsky this morning.