If you allow your child to go to someone else’s house and something happens to your child while there should it be deemed the parents responsibility or the parent in charge at the time?

I was just thinking of a scenario that happened in the town I grew up in when I was a child and wondered what other people thought.

When I was growing up there were two boys who went to the daycare my mom worked at. One was 5 and the other 7. During the winter (we live in Canada) the parents allowed their two boys to walk down to a river to play not far from their house. The parents were at home. The boys decided to walk out onto the ice of the river, fell in and after the children were missing for hours the family notified police. There were search and rescue crews out for weeks looking for them and sadly their bodies were found and the boys had drowned.

The family had two daughters who were younger living in the house and CAS (Canada’s version of CPS) brought them into foster care. Fast forward to almost five years later, this family had gotten their daughters back and my neighbour who was a little girl the same age as me happened to be friends with them. One winter her mother allowed her to go to this families house to play for the day and while there the family whose sons had drowned daughters and my neighbour all went to play at the same river under this families watch, walked out onto the ice and fell in. Luckily this time someone was walking by and saw the girls and got help and they all survived but all had to go to the hospital for medical treatment.

The daughters of the family whose sons had drowned just years before in the exact same scenario were taken back into foster care. When my neighbours mom went to get her daughter from the hospital CAS was not going to let her bring her daughter home as they found it negligent that the mother had left her child with these people in the first place and still deemed it her own mothers responsibility. Eventually my neighbours mother did get her daughter back.

In a situation like this where a child is at another families home when something like this happens should it be their own parents responsibility or should all responsibility lie with the parents who were in charge at the time of the event?