Photo: TikTok
Who would leave their kid alone like that?
By Isaac Serna-Diez — Written on Jan 14, 2023
Family trips and days at amusement parks are most consistently haunted by one thing — no, not parking, but the trip to the restroom.
If you don’t have the right number of people or an even split of genders to go into each room, it can get quite chaotic to get in and out in a reasonable amount of time.
However, everyone can agree that you’re not supposed to leave your child (or children) waiting outside while you go into the bathroom to conduct your business.
At Disneyland, a child was left alone in a stroller outside of the restrooms.
A woman named Cynthia recorded and posted a video to TikTok (@cynthia_e.f22) showing how a child was seemingly left alone outside of a restroom area while she and her family were there.
“How can you just leave your kid like that,” read the caption of the video, “kid left alone at Disneyland by the woman’s bathroom.”
The minute-and-a-half-long video was spent with Cynthia recording and surveying the scene around her with a family member, wondering if anyone would come by and collect the child that was left unsupervised.
“Someone left their kid here,” Cynthia’s family member observed.
“I know, that’s crazy,” she responds. “I wonder whose kid this is.”
As the only people who seemed to care about the child that was left alone, the two were resigned to staying there and waiting for the parents of the child.
Other passersby took note of what was going on, as they kept repeating the fact that a child was left there out loud, but the parents had yet to come.
Eventually, Cynthia’s family member suggested that maybe, the parent had gone into the bathroom, leading her to ask “but why not take the kid with you if you went to the bathroom?”
They suggested that maybe, it was because the child was a boy and they weren’t allowed inside women’s restrooms, but they couldn’t know for sure.
Two adult women eventually came back for the abandoned child.
Replying to a comment from the original video, Cynthia uploaded a second video that provided an update on what had happened.
“I waited for the mom to get there so I can leave,” she wrote in the caption. “The worst part is there was two of them with him and they both decided to get in there together. I didn’t make a scene but I did tell a member after she came out.”
This shorter, 3-second clip simply showed the two women talking to the child in Spanish, with Cynthia now off to the side.
To combat the “culture barrier” argument that some people were making in the comments, someone replied “they are speaking Spanish. Not no Spain Spanish that is Mexico Spanish. As a Mexican from Mexico, I know it's not normal to just leave your baby.”
“Two of them?! They couldn’t take turns watching their kid?!” one angry commenter wrote in reply to the video.
Someone else implied that this was normal for the child, observing that “The fact the kid wasn’t crying indicates that’s not the first time,” although it can’t be said for sure.
Whatever the circumstances for the young child are, many people praised Cynthia for refusing to leave the child alone without parental supervision — if only the same could be thought of by the boy’s actual parents.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Keep up with his rants about current events on his Twitter.