Mum horrified when three-year-old son walks home from childcare without anyone noticing
A panicked mother was horrified when her three-year-old boy walked home from childcare by himself, with nobody even realising he was missing.
The little escape artist managed to navigate the nearly kilometre walk along a busy road all by himself, making it home safe, but distressed.
His mother Sarra Reid has spoken of how she opened the front door of her home in Ayrshire, Scotland, to see her son Liam Radcliffe standing there crying.
The boy managed to walk the nearly kilometre distance to the house alone and told his mum he just wanted to come home, the Daily Record reported.
His concerned mother immediately returned Liam to the daycare centre, fearing staff would be in a panic searching for him.
But when she arrived Ms Reid said nobody had even realised he had been missing from the daycare centre for about 20 minutes.
“There are buses, lorries and I don’t really want to think what could have happened,” she told the newspaper.
“I had expected to see a search going on for him. But when I walked in with him, the staff just looked perplexed.
"It was then that it dawned on me that they did not know he was missing. I was absolutely horrified.”
Nursery staff said Liam would have walked through two sets of doors as well as an unlocked gate, to leave the premises.
The childcare centre has since vowed to alarm the main door and padlock the gate to prevent future wandering children, and employ an additional staff member to keep watch.
“We take our children’s safety very seriously and the new way of working will help ensure that such an incident doesn’t happen again,” the South Ayrshire Council’s director of educational services, Douglas Hutchison said.
Closer to home, a Gold Coast childcare centre came under fire last week after a worker reportedly locked in a baby on a bus on a 30 degree day, for more than an hour.
The 16-month-old showed severe signs of dehydration when her distraught mother Lisa Easton arrived to take her to the hospital herself, after she said the Parkwood daycare centre failed to seek medical advice.
