Babysitting as a teenager is definitely a fond and formative memory for me, for a lot of reasons outlined in this piece. (Ditto being babysat as a younger kid.) In my own life, it feels like it was a really important step up from being a child into being an adult. It was meaningful, immersive, hands-on practice for a lot of adult responsibilities.
I don't have kids myself, but I wonder how much of that practice-adulting has been replaced (in theory) by the grind of modern-day childhood and youth, the never-ending activities that are all intended to optimize a kid's chances of success in our modern capitalist hellscape. That stepping-stone to adulthood isn't hands-on or communal, but more likely to be isolated and competitive. You don't get to practice-adult by babystting (or camp-counselling, or lifeguarding, or what-have-you), but by packing your waking hours with college-application-friendly activities; and this burns out both kids and parents so much that the "breaks" in the form of screen time feel absolutely necessary just to maintain sanity and snatch a bit of psychological relaxation.
“I wonder how much of that practice-adulting has been replaced (in theory) by the grind of modern-day childhood and youth, the never-ending activities that are all intended to optimize a kid's chances of success in our modern capitalist hellscape. That stepping-stone to adulthood isn't hands-on or communal, but more likely to be isolated and competitive.”
As a stepparent of teenagers I wish I could add a million more likes for this.
I used to live in Jackson, WY, and I recall hearing local parents arrive at the ski resort with their pre-teens and say, “Okay, meet us back at this spot at 3pm!” And they’d run off and find their friends and spend the day skiing and jumping off cliffs or something. I remember how this seemed so amusing to me, such a special quirk of this specific town. The kids all walk or ride their bikes to school alone, they often seem like stereotypical rebel troublemakers but with too-fast e-bikes. But that’s how unusual this type of parenting is today! The babysitting phenomena is one example of this larger shift, I think—if parents would drive their 10 year old kid to school, even though it’s a block away, why would they leave them with an “unqualified” teenager? And if your own parent is supervising you, you cannot babysit somebody yourself! But yes, you can volunteer at an after school kids camp when you turn 16 because structure!!! College!
My mom asked me recently how I learned so much about kids (I’m not a mom) and I pointed out how much I learned from babysitting since junior high, caring for younger cousins and being the go-to aunt when I was married to my ex prepared me for a job at a children’s charity and later helping my sister with her child.
I think there’s value in both the resume-building activities and caring for kids and it provides a great grounding for adulthood. We need to find that balance.
Speaking as the parent of a teenager, there's SO MUCH GRIND now. It's tragic.
It's not even necessarily from us. My kid's school is just so intense and there's very little free time with all the homework. Meanwhile, I think that down time is so important to making friends and learning who you are.
Love this. Also just have to say, that as a parent of younger kids, it has been SO hard to find a babysitter - somebody who can do what I did as a kid, which is to stop by after school for a few hours or watch the kids while the parents grab dinner. It feels like (at least in the area that I live in) high schoolers are not available because of how busy they are and others who babysit (nannies, nurses, teachers, grad students) are more professional and thus charge a lot more. Many in my area seem to charge $25-35/hour with a minimum 3-4 hours, which is hard to swallow for a casual Friday out.
Agree. We have to book our babysitter at least a month in advance, work around all her sports practices & games, and it's $20/hr. It's almost impossible to justify except for something really special planned in advance! And she doesn't live in our neighborhood, either--this feels key. All my babysitting was with families in my neighborhood.
I also read the Babysitter’s Club books in the 80s/90s and started a babysitter’s club. I advertised at church and we made sure everyone knew that if one of us couldn’t work, we’d call someone who could. We worked all the time, sometimes 2 at a time with rich families with disabled kids. It was hugely empowering and fun and certainly contributed to me later becoming a teacher and l, I think, a good one pretty early on. Notably, it also paid for my wardrobe at a time when my parents were barely scraping by. The work was important.
I tried to get my kids to babysit when they were young teens but:
1) it’s just not done. I don’t understand it but folks are just not in the market somehow. Maybe it’s the small town thing, and people’s sisters and moms are doing the work? But the moms I talk to are exhausted and isolated; I think they’re just not going out. I think it’s the intensive parenting thing that Anne calls out.
2) What could my kids buy with what parents can pay? If the parents are going to the movies, they’re spending $50. Then they need to pay my kid enough to go to the movies (when I babysat in the 90s, one job with 2 kids paid for a night at the movies with snacks and maybe an ice cream after, or 1/2 a Gap shirt). So say you paid my kid $10 an hour …now their date is almost $100 and Netflix is looking good.
3) Young teens can’t go to the movies or out for ice cream without “their grown ups” now. I tried to let my kids go to the park or the coffee shop on their own but there was only one other mom who would allow these jaunts. Our town is 2 miles across! We know the coffee shop owners, and everyone else!
4) Kids don’t need $ to socialize; they only need phones. And in the early teen years, it’s less scary and weird than like, working, or than the kind of socializing you’d spend money on
5) I am a stepmom, and the first time I left my 8 and 10 year old home to go to the store for 15 minutes, their mom (who is not usually insane) threatened to sue for sole custody. Moms in the neighborhood were like, “Well, I always take my 14 year old to the grocery store (2 miles away!) with me…”. We have incredibly responsible and resourceful kids. It shocking
Last reflection: I did start babysitting regularly when I was 10 because I looked older and I think that was a Bad 90s Decision™️ but 12 is just right.
My mom friends also just never go out unless their partner can stay home to watch the kids. For a weekend away, they fly their own parents in to babysit. They are exhausted and isolated, as you said!
I realized this when I had friends visiting from out of town and they asked me to find a babysitter for them. I figured it wouldn’t be a problem with so many friends who are parents. Just ONE person got back to me with her babysitter’s name-and it was her daughter’s preschool teacher, not a teenager. No one else had EVER used a non-family babysitter.
I wonder if people are scared from a safety standpoint - both to hire a teenager or to be a teen babysitter - in our litigious society.
I repeatedly offer free babysitting to my friends so they can get a night out as a couple (the kids would be asleep anyway so who cares where I watch TV) and no one ever takes me up on it. My sense is they think it’s too burdensome or that they should handle things themselves.
As someone who doesn’t have kids myself, I love living vicariously through my friends’ parenting experiences and I truly would be happy to be helpful. It would make me feel like part of the community. I had nothing but wonderful experiences babysitting as a teen and being babysat as a kid by older girls who really cared about me.
This is so interesting because my perspective is so different. I live in a small "village" of about 19,000 north of Chicago, and while kids are very busy and "programmed", a lot of young teens have at least some unprogrammed time during the week or weekend. Other surrounding areas are similar. Young tweens/teens (as young as 4th grade) bike or walk to the "square" and shop at Walgreens, Starbucks, the library, the ice cream place, and a few other places without adults. There are often "mother's helpers" who start babysitting around 12 with parents in the house, and around 14 without parents there.
My own oldest daughter (16) has been babysitting since she was 12, and many of her friends babysit. They often are involved in multiple extracurriculars as well, and their jobs include working at after-school care for the elementary schools and working at local summer camps. I'm realizing that we must be very lucky to have this culture that encourages some independence at younger ages than elsewhere!
Elder millennial who babysat and then nannied on top of a food service job growing up. My brother also babysat (moms of all boys LOVED him). I have two daughters, one of whom is a teen now. I appreciate the conversation about the professionalizing of childhood but I wanted to add something. I would be curious if there was someone also looking at the decline of sleepovers as well. Growing up we had big sleepovers with close and less close friends all piled in. That is rarely the case now—it’s a much more carefully curated and less frequent thing. Maybe because professionalized sports are eating up this spare time. But I don’t think we can have either of these conversations without talking about the sexual assault rate for millennial women in their teens and our cultures do nothing attitude about addressing sexual assault. I was never assaulted as a babysitter but I was approached a few times by fathers. Occasionally an older son from a previous marriage would show up unannounced and express interest in my presence. Many of the parents I know across a variety of cultural backgrounds are cognizant of how assault happens are work diligently to prevent their daughters being in a situation that might lead to a 13 or ever 15 year old having to navigate that. I just think that it’s interesting that when the teen girl mental health study came out in 2023 everyone raged about social media but no one talked about what it might be like having 1 out of 10 of your friends at the lunch table having reported (I emphasize reported because as a female pastor of 20 years there’s a big gap between the number of women assaulted and those who report) sexual assault. Yes, I know that we are giving something up in terms of community fiber. But I am just so curious about this dynamic of the shift.
“But I don’t think we can have either of these conversations without talking about the sexual assault rate for millennial women in their teens and our cultures do nothing attitude about addressing sexual assault.”
Yes.
One of the men who babysat me as a young child (mid-80s) was later convicted of sexually assaulting some other kids that he’d babysat (conviction was mid-90s). I don’t recall if he ever did anything inappropriate with me or my siblings; I was so little at the time and I have only vague recollections of him (mostly that he gave us more ice cream than we were allowed, so I adored him). He was someone my parents knew intimately for decades. My parents were strict, cautious people, and didn’t allow many people to babysit us, but they had trusted him completely.
When I was in my twenties, I was cleaning out my old bedroom at my parents’ house, and I found a stack of letters from him. (I didn’t recall having received these letters.) He had written them after he’d moved away to attend college. Letter after letter telling me how much he liked me, and how much he thought about me, and how he hoped to come back and visit me during holidays. I had been in early elementary school when he’d sent these. It was so horrifying to realize that during the years before he got convicted, he’d obviously been attempting to groom me and my parents didn’t realize it.
Not everyone has experience with pedophiles in their lives, but most women that I know in my age cohort have experienced sexual assault (although back then, our date rapes weren’t considered assaults). And all women of any age have experienced harassment.
We talk about how hard it is to trust others after you’ve experienced assault or attempted assault, but it’s also extremely hard to trust *your own* judgment again.
I am absolutely picky about who watches my child. Many of my child’s relatives are very irate that I haven’t permitted them to spend time alone with my kid, but I’d rather be hated and labelled as over-protective than get these decisions wrong.
I don’t think we’re going to increase the prevalence of casual babysitting or remedy the gender gap in babysitting / child care until we’ve (a) dealt with misogyny in some meaningful way; and (b) made some progress in understanding and treating pedophilia.
Yes the banal way so many of us either experienced or lived in proximity to someone we know well who experienced this is sobering. And your a & b points are dead on.
“I am absolutely picky about who watches my child. Many of my child’s relatives are very irate that I haven’t permitted them to spend time alone with my kid, but I’d rather be hated and labelled as over-protective than get these decisions wrong.”
I don't have kids, so haven't personally navigated this, but I read an article within the last year or two about asking the parents of a kid who invited your kid to a sleepover if there were guns in the home and how they were stored. Especially in certain parts of the country, those conversations can be really fraught and tense, especially if the result is that you're not comfortable with your kid spending time in that home. I wonder if (in addition to the SA concerns, which are terrible and real) some parents would just rather avoid the question entirely and veto sleepover requests.
Yes! And the list grows longer—it used to be pools, then we added guns and now we have to ask about gummies. We are very fortunate to live in a community where the dominate religious practice is pacifism so guns are less of a concern (in Texas, can you believe?) but for a porch meet up with a parent you barely know but may have to interact with for a decade it’s certainly anxiety inducing.
We’ve already had to navigate this with guns and also unsafe dogs. We ended up ghosting a couple we otherwise liked because they had unsecured guns all over the house (AR-15 in a laundry basket, anyone?), as well as a dog who didn’t like kids and we just couldn’t risk it with our then 2 year old, even with us there.
I think you’re on to something about changes in people’s trust of other adults and families and what goes on in their homes. I grew up in a small rural town where my parents knew all of the families whose houses we slept over or babysat at. (There’s one difference from my situation as a parent with elementary kids.) And even when the families were different from my parents—a mean dad who swore and yelled at his kids, a dad who drove me home after a night at the bar—my parents and I had trust that the place wasn’t (too) unsafe for me. There’s the second difference. Now I think that if we don’t know the people, we assume that their house is likely dangerous for our kids, and therefore spending time there isn’t worth the risk unless we have evidence it’s safe.
I think this is true and a really sharp insight. I deeply empathize with the reasoning. I have not been assaulted but again, as a female pastor who’s listened to countless women share their story in my office, I am aware of how common and prevalent it is in these intimate spaces. That and the decision we have made as a culture to not address sexual assault. For example my kids public school program is called “anti-victimization training” and the premise is how to not be harmed and what to do if you are. Nowhere in the curriculum does it frame it in terms of “here’s how not to cause harm to other human beings and how it impacts the human other human beings when you do. Our general community and cultural value is that we don’t harm others.”
"Our general community and cultural value is that we don't harm others." It sounds so simple! But also feels like it's missing/taken for granted in modern society, in a way that doesn't actively TEACH it.
I am so sorry this happened to you, Cara. I think this is an interesting thing to discuss. I have 3 daughters and I see 2 main things happen in terms of sleepovers. 1) Parents don't let their kids have sleepovers at all, I think because their worried about what you're saying. 2) Parents do the opposite - just drop their kids off for sleepovers at a house where they have never even met the parents. They don't even come in to say hello. Wild, right?! I have a background in sexual assault prevention so I always talk to my kids about what they can do. But also I make sure to get to know the parents, find out who is staying at the house, etc... I think it is expressed in some of this discourse around kids who are growing up with smartphones today but who have no real world experience. This leads to some really problematic situations.
We do similar education for our girls and always make sure to know parents. I am always so surprised when parents just drop off and don’t come meet us. My husband and I have been known to just hang out in the yard doing yard stuff during pick up and drop off just to go meet parents in their cars—ha! I like the second part of what you said and I think it would help me flesh out my curiosity about the intersection of assault, childhood and smartphones like this: have parents in an attempt to protect our kids from the downside of IRL experiences (not knowing what to do in an emergency while babysitting, creepy dads, litigious culture, etc) traded in the upsides (intergenerational interactions, community fiber, low qualification job experience, etc)? And to what extent is this trade off a parenting issue or a wider cultural issue because we seem wholly disinterested in addressing the downsides?
Great points. Nothing untoward ever happened to me at sleepovers or while babysitting, for which I'm grateful. It's heartbreaking to know that's not always the case. I wonder if part of it was how well known my parents and I were to the families (whether friends or for babysitting) for either scenario. Not that knowing someone beforehand means nothing will happen! But I can't recall any scenarios where we didn't all know each other well ahead of unsupervised time in someone's home. It feels rarer to encounter tight-knit neighborhoods these days.
Yes, we’ve lived in our neighborhood for 12 years and most of the houses have turned over multiple times and when families move in they aren’t moving from another neighborhood in town where we have mutual friends—they are moving from other cities and countries so there’s no way to do what I call a “community check” or “relational reference” on them.
It's so interesting. I'm in a mentor program where I work with a 16-year-old and this child is LITERALLY not allowed to walk down the street in NYC by herself. She must be accompanied by a parent or other approved adult. It's not religious. I always wonder if something terrible happened to the mother (who seems to be the stricter parent) and this is the outcome.
The girl told me that she is wants to learn how to use public transport but probably won't know until she's an adult because her parents drive her everywhere they don't walk together.
I think this is helpful in the context of the conversation about babysitters and sleepovers. Statistically they are much more risky than walking on the street. My kids have a fair amount unsupervised freedom because we don’t want them in shock going to college. I once read a NYTimes article in like 2009 that said the modern parents brain is not wired to assess risk well. We were made to hear a twig snap in the woods and determine if it’s a predator coming to eat our kids or not. And I think that true and hard.
I am very sorry for what happened to your friend and I know that what she is doing comes from a good place but she is doing so much harm to her kids by making them scared of everything. The reality is that she will not be able to be with her kids every second of their lives and not exposing them to normal day to day events will leave her kids much more vulnerable down the road
This was a great essay. As a solid gen X woman, I babysat for $2/hour and the way you described it was perfect. I gave the kids baths, since it was what my older sister did with her kids before bed. The parents were amazed! I’d always fall asleep on the sofa watching tv. Then later on in college, I babysat for a babysitter “madam” who booked a group of us gigs to parents who didn’t know who they were getting. That was weird. In one house, there was nothing but dozens of bunches of bananas to eat. Nothing!
But then—many years later in my late twenties/ early thirties, I had a boyfriend with two young kids. I remember telling him that I would fall asleep when I babysat, after the kids went to bed. He. Was. Outraged. He couldn’t believe how irresponsible that was! (What did he expect me to do? Stand guard outside their bedroom doors??) That was the first time I noticed a shift in generational parenting styles, one that we’re still seeing playing out.
Today’s parents seem so much less connected to their communities and so less trusting, plus liability culture has seeped into everything, I think.
I'm an almost 40 year old millennial with two kids, 10 and 7. I feel like the outrage from that dad is a little much, but yes, I do have a hard time trusting. We don't have family in the area and almost never hire sitters. When the kids were younger, it was largely because they were fairly difficult babies and toddlers. My husband and I got in the habit of taking a half day off from work and going on a day date while they were in school/daycare so as not to need a sitter. It seemed like an easier (and cheaper!) solution all around.
Reflecting on this essay, I realize I am actually more open to a babysitter these days. My kids are more self-sufficient than young children, but I don't want them alone just the two of them yet. There wouldn't be much for a babysitter to do than feed them, hang out, and break up fights as needed. Having older kids makes it easier to trust, as well. They know about body boundaries and can, theoretically, stand up for each othee. Each child also has a Gizmo watch that they could use text me if something was going horribly wrong. And, now that they are in elementary school, we know families with older teens and actually have a network of options. There are two families in particular whom we love and trust that both have kids of babysitting age. Perhaps it's time to give them a call.
omg here to co-rep the $2/hour club. I might've made it up to like $4 by late high school with a richer family. absolutely wild to think back about making $10-$20 for a whole night of sitting. straight cash obviously, one time my mom raised my stash and I threw a fit about being robbed (by who, the fucking dog?) and she confessed with absolutely zero remorse: "life costs money, I needed cash for groceries".
I really loved that boredom featured heavily in this essay. It is one of the thing I remember most about babysitting and now realize it is something I still carry a little bit of embarrassment around when I look back on it. But it’s true that I value that “boredom” today. I remember hours after the kids were asleep watching whatever was on TV. Getting excited babysitting for certain people because they always had the good snacks, or left money for pizza. Home was not my safe place growing up, and having access to different examples of domestic space and family was like a personal anthropology study - a peek behind the curtain of other possibilities. Other peoples’ homes really were grounding to me!
I continued to babysit into university. Having people I babysat for in a new town really expanded my sense of loose-tie community. Again, this is something I have appreciated more with some years of distance and especially in the years since the pandemic. It’s fun having kids around (very peripherally) that I’m not close with anymore but I saw them grow for a time. I introduced them to a cool new tv show perhaps. We had a fun time at the pond one day. These little memories connect me to myself as well at different ages living in the same city.
Again, the boredom features heavily in these university babysitting memories. And certainly memories of having more anxiety about the boredom. Maybe it was more access to technology, or more prevalent anxiety at that time in my life. This essay is making me think it also had to do with a levelled up sense of “professionalization”, since I was older - and trying desperately to figure out MY CAREER, and MY SKILLS. I would often know I could fall back on babysitting (because people were desperate for older and reliable sitters), but I felt bad that I would get bored, and that maybe that meant I was a bad sitter. It’s funny how value judgements were present because I remember that reading a book felt more appropriate than binging something on a streaming service during these years, for example (though I would still binge, just guiltily).
I am now a new mom and I’ve done a lot of reflecting on my babysitting years to help counteract some of the invasive mind-pressures of intensive parenting culture. I babysat babies younger than my own kid is now when I was a teenager and, honestly, the thought does worry me (in that way of “what if xyz had happened - would 15 year old me known what to do?!). But sometimes it is also calming. There is some baseline in me that feels competent in caring for my child and my friends children because of those years spent caring for others’.
Interested to see where this discussion goes. This really has me thinking this morning. Thank you!
I basically only babysat for anyone complicated when my own mom was at our house. (She decided this on her own, but there also weren’t a lot of places she wanted to be in the evenings of the 1990s, and definitely not the PTA meetings I covered for.) Someone a block away even had me as a babysitter for their child with diabetes—my mom had been her teacher, so I guess they figured that she was a backup in emergencies. Maybe 15yo you would have just called your own mom?
Babysitting as a kid gave me all kinds of valuable experience that it's so weird to see many of my friends trying to build for the first time as they're becoming parents. Even beyond never having held a baby, made a bottle, changed a diaper before doing so for your own kid, I think babysitting made me emotionally resilient for the challenges of caretaking. Like yeah, sometimes babies are just gonna cry for no reason-- you're not doing anything wrong, it's just what babies do, you've just gotta soothe them as best you can. I recently met my boss colicky three month old daughter and she was FLOORED that I was perfectly happy to bop around with a fussy baby all afternoon without getting flustered. Having to develop comfort with that while also dealing with the mindfuck that is becoming a first time parent seems daunting as shit.
++ to lots and lots and lots of TV on other people's couches eating other people's snacks, and to getting sneak-previews into other (rather intimate) domestic lives and versions of home and family-making.
As a teen I babysat for a few neighborhood families. This was big because we lived in the smallest house on the edge of a very wealthy development. The families I sat for were rich in a way I didn’t understand - tvs in every room including the bathroom! Carpeting so deep you wade through it! The parents had brick-like cellphones, the first I’d ever seen!
And the kids…were kids. Who were so desperate for attention that they had so much fun with just paper and crayons or messing with the leaves outside (before the gardeners could get to them). I learned for the first time how important parental attention was for kids and how money can’t help with giving time and love.
ooh wow yes as someone who was a babysitter for a couple families from the time kids were born/true babies up until a lot were pre-teens/teens, I throw my anecdotal samples 100% behind the idea that my 16 year old self knew whatever advanced psychologist/sociologists know about the relationship between attention and behavior/mental health/general wellness etc... and that more money often equaled less attention and more acting out. sigh!
I think as with so many other issues, the solution to finding teen babysitters is cultivating community. I have a 3.5 year old and have found several teen babysitters for her over the years through my community - a friend’s young cousin, my yoga teacher’s daughter, etc. My expectations for an occasional babysitter are low - basically just keep my kid alive and relatively entertained for a few hours.
I myself did a ton of babysitting as a teenager because I have 4 younger siblings, in addition to babysitting for neighbors and people from church. It was never something I particularly liked doing or sought out, and I don’t think I was good at it. I never really resented it, though. It was just something I did.
Reading this essay struck me the same way. Community is always the answer to a Culture Study question! :)
When we lived in a large city, we never even considered hiring a teen babysitter because we didn't know a single teen! But now that we've moved to a suburb, we are in this delightful community that really emphasizes getting to know and socializing with your neighbors. Our neighborhood newsletter lists teens willing to babysit, petsit, do yard work, etc. We've used that resource, but we've also just approached the parents of teens on our block and asked if their kids are interested. It's always been a yes! It helps that we live in a walkable community so younger teens or teens without a license/car can still babysit easily. We've found a lot of younger teens are more excited and willing to babysit, plus have fewer commitments. (Also: check the night of prom before you plan a big spring party!)
Growing up we had a babysitter who was everyone's favorite-she lived one street over so she could walk herself over and home, even in the dark. Her younger sister was decidedly the B squad. Sometimes when the parents on our street were all attending the same party, they would hire both of them and send all us kids to one house for the evening. We'd be carried home half asleep by our parents at the end of the night. I have some great memories of those nights!!
Agree on the burbs! Our town does a Girl Scout hang night where you can drop your kids off for $25 a kid to hang with the scouts, leading games and crafts in a Main Street store front. Burbs can be so great! I feel like it is a very lame secret we unlocked.
I am a former sitter who staffed such parties and can vouch they are some very good memories from our side, too. Definitely in the "foundational responsibility" category to be like 14 alongside your bestie managing a basement teeming with 2-8 year olds. I am convinced this contributed to my radical sense of under-whelm upon going to American college, where 20 year olds are sort of allowed to act like///are treated like adolescents. I'd been taken so seriously as a sitter aged 12-18 (as soon as I got my license I was driving parents' and teachers' cars all around town to pick up and chauffeur kids). I hated feeling like I'd regressed in perceived maturity!
Community is absolutely the answer. Because the one point that I haven't seen reflected is how rare it can be to actually know kids outside of your kids' age ranges if you aren't intentional about building that community. I've had babysitters for my kids, who were my friend's older kids. But I've also noticed how rare that can be. If, for example, you start having kids at 30+ and live in a place where most people start having kids soon after high school or college, you might not know those teens well enough to feel comfortable with them or for their parents to feel comfortable sending their kid to your house, even for a job. A lot of parents can be insular, preferring to make friends based off school, which will shut you out if your kids are younger and closer in age.
yeah, this is so so so real. Birthday parties don't help. (lol fucking birthday parties! a whole sub thread! why do we worry more about how many flavors of seltzer we stock in the cooler than whether there are activities that don't require our and 15 other adults' direct supervision?!)
anyway I still can't get over the annual bday party one of my bestie throws where she invites all the important kids in her kiddo's life, which has been a mixed-age neighborhood crew since birth. and it's just kickball at the walkable park. Without fail every year some parent expresses confusion about "what's happening" as if we need an agenda, and wonders aloud "who these kids are" because they're not in their kid's school class, etc. ahhh! so silly! and also sad!
I was thinking exactly this. The problem for us, and most other mothers I know in our medium sized city in the Intermountain west, is that they don’t know any teens to call. Having left the religion of my upbringing it feels like spaces where intergenerational relationships exist like this are few and far between (or non existent?). In our case, we happen to live on a street with 2 11-year olds who just started babysitting this year and it has been THE DREAM. We have 2 children 5 and under and it’s so great to be able to give the girls across the street the experience and our kids a chance to be cared for by someone else. That being said, our neighbors down the street with kids slightly older than ours have never used the sitters, and have said it’s because they just don’t feel comfortable with their age. They also tend toward more intensive parenting across many topics/areas. Anyway, I do think we’re maybe not the norm but I find that sad for all the same reasons AHP describes here.
really cool you're giving the 11 year olds this chance to feel responsible as they're capable of being, and to model for your <5 kiddos what bigger kids are capable of.
My fave 12 year old recently asked me "what does it mean to be grown up?" and we had a couple of conversations over a couple of days about parsing through "things that are part of being a grown up" versus different kinds of responsibilities and accountability that can be assumed at different ages/stages. She is a hugely caring and resourceful presence as the oldest of 4 kids, and our conversations (and her ongoing ones with other adults in her life and w/ her parents who also left the religion of their upbring and are hardcore rebuilding from scratch!) were a sweet way to work through ideas about how 12 year olds can and should be seen as accountable and capable of many things, and they are also not yet full-grown grown-ups and therefore are neither accountable nor capable of other things.
Anyway, keep on keeping on, you awesome parent doing hard re-building work!
re: intergen relationships outside church. phew, yeah, damn. I've had the best luck at local libraries (w/ younger kiddos and elders happenstance interactions or facilitated via like reading hours); in garden spaces and outdoor community work events (i.e. family-friendly brush/trail/park clean-up type stuff); and inviting older neighbors to things like birthday parties or just to sit in the backyard for an hour while kids play, it makes the older folks feel included just to be physically a low-key observational part of younger life :)
I babysat so much from age 12 to about 20. We did not have cable, and omg I watched soo much mtv and vh1 and Comedy Central after the kids went to sleep. So much. Real world and pop up video and this was even long enough ago that there were a lot of music videos!! There was a Peter Gabriel video with bugs that freaked me the eff out in strange houses awake by myself!
I also had the distinction of being the only girl babysitter who could babysit all 6 of the Cxxxxxxl boys by myself! (Until my little sister became the only other girl babysitter) This could be credited to my knowledge of the rules of football, a very mid ability to throw a decent spiral with a nerf football that was smaller than a regulation football, and that one time I broke back into the house after they locked me out of it bc I was not stupid and also could pick some locks. We did not tell their parents that part.
I love the distinction of being the only one to wrangle a certain family — I had that as well with a family that others thought too difficult and I just adored
Was this the only babysitting household that used those two skills simultaneously? No, it was not. Also why were these kids locking me or themselves places?
lol — SO MANY LOCKED DOORS in my childhood! And now my 5-year-old has discovered the locks on our bedroom door. Really glad I learned how to pop them open at 13 😂
Oh and we have had a teenager babysit my kiddo when she was about 18 months old, the upstairs neighbor’s older daughter who usually lived with her mom. She was mostly too busy to babysit though. Now our go to is retired neighbors two doors down or brother-in-law 4 blocks away. I also learned by reading this that when I have left my kid (now 7) at 6yo alone for ten minutes to pick up pizza a block away—instead of having them deliver it—I was apparently breaking illinois state law. She was in front of pbs kids puts her into a trance. And i thought it was good for her.
The effort needed to maintain a big enough Rolodex of teen/college babysitters and the process of back and forth to run through it to find someone available is something I’ve given up recently. Between their rotation and aging out and all the back and forth… I started paying a premium for a service that assembles and manages the availability of performers who babysit as a survival job. They’re wonderful. Your point about availability, even during busy Senior year, really struck a cord. To be able to land a babysitter (who didn’t feel rather comfortable cancelling last minute but that’s another conversation about generations) with one or two calls would have kept me hiring teens.
We had a great 13 year old sitter who my 7 year old LOVES… but she started just not replying to texts (even ones in a group text with her mother) and so I had to give up on her. My daughter is so sad… but I’m not going to waste time trying to get this sitter to commit when 90% of the time she ignores me.
The going rate for babysitters in my town is $15-20/hour. Even if we found someone, adding $60+ for a night out isn’t something we’re likely to do, especially on top of food and drink prices still feeling incredibly high.
We invite people over for board game night (with and without kids) and my spouse and I will go out with friends solo while the other stays home with the kids.
Teens charge $20/hour here. Adults, it’s $30/hour. Aside from a few yearly events (work party or school fundraiser), there’s nothing I want to do that badly!
Came here to talk about the differences in cost. Paying $2-3/hour would change the game! (I get inflation, but $2 in the 80s/90s was still dirt cheap for a babysitter.) Even new babysitters in our area are expecting at least $12/hour, and often more. On top of that we usually order pizza for the kids/babysitter, so total we're often up to an extra $80-100 for a simple night out. We can *technically* afford it and yet it easily doubles our expenses: if we spend $100/$125 for a "nice" dinner, it then turns into $200+, which feels very different.
We had one family in our neighborhood with three teenage girls whose mom was very clear with them that they were to accept WHATEVER people could afford to pay them, and be grateful for it. They were fantastic babysitters but soon aged out due to an increase in activity load + then graduating and going off to college. Miss those days!
Same. We've hired teen babysitters a few times, and we plan to in the future, but rarely. If we do go out together, we usually only do it if a family member can watch them for free. It's just too expensive!!
Same prices here. I can theoretically afford it, and I want to support paying people what they're worth. But when my babysitting bill for dinner and a movie is $75, it changes the "is this worth it" calculus. I am very lucky to have teens in my neighborhood who are great and willing to babysit.
Minimum wage where I live is $15 an hour. Why would teens want to babysit for less than that when they can go work retail/fast food/movie theatre and work with friends?
That’s exactly it for us. We have paid $20-25/hour for baby-sitting and usually throw in dinner or snacks so it’s typically $100 before we’ve even left the house. It’s hard for it to feel “worth it.” We have my MIL baby-sit or ask friends and neighbors to monitor watch for us. Less flexibility but it’s also much cheaper.
I remember when I was 14 a new family moved in next door. I think the very next day the dad came over and wanted to know if I babysat. He didn’t know me at all! lol. But I ended up babysitting for them so much and they paid so well (there were 4 kids), that they were basically responsible for the down payment I put on my car at 19. I so grateful for that and just getting to know those kids and having independence from my own family.
Yes - For both the babysitter and the kids they were watching. I wonder if today’s kids will be less socialized than we (old millennials) were if they are so rarely watched by anyone outside of their families and teachers?
"down payment on my car" really resonates! I am the child of a comfortably middle class suburban home-owning family surrounded by neighbors whose incomes ranged from significantly-more-stressed-and-stretched to so-much-more-well-off-I-didn't-even-fully-comprehend-their-assets (an interesting feature of a peri-urban suburb with homes mostly 100+ years old....not quite the extreme class homogeneity we see in some newer/planned burbs today?) Anyway, my besties who occupied similar or lower-income places on that spectrum did a lotttttt of sitting for those higher up the earning ladder and boy did those chicken nuggets and milk bottles equal a lot of jeans, first phones and early college savings!
Anyway because (of the privilege) of never being asked to work to support family expenses, I maintained my earnings for my own saving/spending. I can draw pretty damn direct lines from every single essential or luxury thing I acquired in my teen and college years (including paying off student loans) to units of time spent babysitting (tbh I am more charmed by this on behalf of my 15 yo self than my 25 yo self. one of those ages is more nostalgic, one feels more fully bought into scarcity student loan crisis culture!)
My experience babysitting was so, so similar (not surprising, given that I was also babysitting in semi-rural Idaho in the 90s). I loved the babysitters my parents hired - our favorite was the one who always brought her box of smelly markers and paper for us to use. That -- and the Babysitters Club books -- inspired me to always take a "kid kit" when I started babysitting myself (around age 11). By ages 12-17 babysitting was my primary source of income. I had a lot of families who would call me, usually people from church. $2/hour was the average rate -- I remember being excited whenever the family who paid $2.50/hr booked me! They had three kids who I babysit when they were ~8months, 3, and 5. I'd feed them dinner (usually mac and cheese or chicken nuggets, frozen pizza was a treat!), play with them, bathe them, get them ready for bed and put them down for the night. Now that I have three kids of my own, I think about that babysitting experience a LOT! I felt perfectly comfortable and capable of doing everything I described above for three young kids as a young teen, and I could barely handle doing all of the same things for my own three young kids when I was in 30s! (I know it's different caring for your own kids day in and day out than it is being an occasional babysitter, but oh! to have the confidence of young me!) I still keep in touch with some of the families I used to babysit for.
Other fav memories from being a teen babysitter: the few houses that had HBO I could watch (such a treat!) and watching "Unsolved Mysteries" after the kids were in bed (and freaking myself out!). I would also always raid the bookshelves of the houses I was babysitting at. This was how I stumbled across "The Joy of Sex" as well as a few other sex guide-type books, that I would secretly devour -- being super careful to put the book back *exactly* how I had found it, and making sure nothing around it was disturbed. This was the only way -- in my "abstinence only"-era childhood -- that I learned anything about sex!
Part II: Hiring a babysitter for my own kids has been such a different experience. First, it's at *least* $15/hour, and I would always go out of my way to make things easy for the babysitter (i.e. absolutely no expectation of doing bathtime, etc.) The expectations just feel so different than when I was babysitting. I would never have left dirty dishes in the sink, or show up empty handed (not a single babysitter I ever hired showed up with arts and crafts activities, or anything like the "kid kits" I *always* took babysitting).
What's been really interesting to me, though, is experiencing hiring babysitters in another country. My family moved to the Netherlands last year and the babysitting experience here is so much more like it was when I was babysitting in the 90s! You can easily hire a neighborhood teen, they bike or walk over to your house, and paying 6-8 euro is the norm, even 4-6 euro if it was a really young teen or a "mother's helper" situation. (A fellow American here even had their neighbors tell them to stop paying higher rates for babysitters because they were driving the prices up!) To be clear, this is for casual, occasional babysitting with teens. If you hired a nanny and/or someone for longer, steadier hours and/or with an education degree you would expect to pay more. Still, it's made hiring babysitters SUCH a different experience for us. We can actually afford to go out sometimes now and it seems like the teens are just happy to be able to make some money, like I was as a teen (that is to say: I don't feel like we're exploiting them by underpaying -- 8 euro/hour is more than a teen would make at other jobs). Plus it's been great for our kids to get the language exposure of having a local babysitter. All in all, it's really very refreshing!
OH MY GOD the joy of sex how could one FORGET! pre internet no less, the "this house has HBO, I am the person with sole control of this remote, and the TV isn't facing the street so I don't think neighbors can see"....what a deeply essential part of babysitting nostalgia!!
Also I have to say I breathed the heaviest sigh of "wow, yeah" when you mused about how it somehow feels harder to do things in our 30s that we did at literally 13 (different wear and tear long-term vs short term care load/mental load levels as you said of course, but wow did that reflection really spur me to think more about what of the modern care/mental load can be lessened to help caregivers inhabit even a sliver of the more care-free ease we had at 13.....thank you for this thought exercise!!)
I'm a cusper - born in 1965, I'm a few weeks from turning 59. (No one seems to be able to decide if I'm the Last Boomer or the First Xer.) I babysat as a pre-teen, although as a boy, I wasn't in demand like my sister was. I can relate as both a consumer and a provider of babysitting, which, as you indicate, is different from "child care."
When our kids were young, the youth at church were encouraged to "provide service" by offering to babysit for families (for free, of course!) so that harried parents could enjoy a date night. Mormons gotta Morm, as we say, so when I say "youth" I of course mean the young women ages 12-17. Since Latter-day Saints run to larger families, this could be quite an adventure. I suppose by this they learned something useful about coping with lots of kids, which culturally was a statistically likely outcome, as well as the expectation that a lot of free labor would be donated over the years.
We paid when we could, and didn't go out too often. Then the Internet changed everything, and a significant number of those young women decided that they'd been played and are now happily post-Mormon.
I read what you said about phones and screen time while nodding with approval - on my phone. 🤷🏽♂️
My own relationship with babysitting is complicated, to the point where the idea of offering to watch kids for someone even in my thirties is not something that sparks joy.
I'm the oldest of five kids and, since my mom had all five of us by the time she was 30 (there's a 10 year spread between me and my youngest brother), there was a lot of heavy helping out from a young age. My step-dad at the time worked a ton to balance out my mom staying home with the kids, which essentially made my mom a single parent.
So when my mom signed me up for a babysitting course in 7th grade, I did it. I put up fliers, I met people in my neighborhood, and had steady kids I babysat for a few years. Even when I stopped babysitting for money, I was still helping watch kids at home until I moved out.
But the idea of 7th graders watching kids today is wild today. Thankfully, kids seem to be kids a little longer these days (I think I had an extreme example of growing up early) -- at least the kids in my sphere. I know true crime has always been popular, but I also have to wonder if there is some impact constantly devouring content about how dangerous strangers are is bad for (babysitting) business?
We have middle schoolers babysit often because their moms are home up the street AND THEY TAKE IT SO MUCH MORE SERIOUSLY. They ask me if there are food allergies and where the bandaids are (because that’s what the babysitting class taught them!) and they offer half price rates to get experience ($6!!!). It’s wild and I love it and I think I will get to keep them as they grow before everything gets professionalized for them. As a middle school. educator at the core, I love seeing middle school babysitters get to test being grown in safe ways. My kids are 6, 6 and 8, and are not too bananas so I know I have it pretty good. But I love love my middle school babysitters.
Our small town has a for real Babysitters Club modeled on the books (they read them!) and it's all 11 year olds who charge $10 for two of them! I hire them to watch my kids on holidays and over Spring Break...it's the best.
We have the same thing on our street! Two 11-year olds who live across the street a few houses apart and usually come together for $10/hour. I feel like we won the lottery for as long as they’ll keep coming.
"My own relationship with babysitting is complicated, to the point where the idea of offering to watch kids for someone even in my thirties is not something that sparks joy."
Yes, same! Thank you for sharing. I started babysitting around 10 and feel like I was parentified at a young age thru babysitting. As I babysat thru my college years, there was all this pressure from younger parents to entertain their kids rather than to keep them safe and keep them from fighting, as previous older parents had expected. Now, in my late 30s, I'm trying to find the joy in hanging out with kids again. It still feels like work.
I was thinking about the trust aspect, too. I particularly found myself feeling awkward about the idea of a male babysitter. It is not fair of me, but it wasn't long before my mind jumped to SA.
1. My best friend and I took a babysitting class at the hospital when we were in 4th or 5th grade that taught CPR and who knows what else. It was great!
2. I made my own Babysitter's Club-inspired Kid Kit but I don't think I ever once remembered to bring it with me.
3. I was a mother's helper starting at age 10 and then started babysitting the year after that. As a child-free Illinoisan, it blows my mind that kids can't be left unattended until age 14 now. WHY and HOW. I was the go-to babysitter for the neighborhood. The neighbors made sure my mom was home when I first started out or when I watched an infant for the first time, just as a back up. But I never needed the help.
4. Most families paid me $2/hour but one family paid me $4 AND left an array of snacks for me. The absolute dream!
5. Because I was mostly watching neighborhood kids, there was no issue of transportation. I'd just walk across the street. The exception was my neighbor's sister who lived across town. Either she or her husband would pick me up or drop me off. There was never any weirdness with the husband—I don't think I ever thought twice about being in a car alone with him, which I now recognize could have gone south. I'm grateful all my babysitting experiences were positive, aside from the occasional kid puke incident.
6. Once I left for college, my younger brother took over most of my babysitting gigs. We had girls and guys babysit us growing up so babysitting never seemed like a gendered thing to either of us.
7. I nannied twice as an adult (once after grad school when jobs were scarce and once in my early 30s when I was massively burned out by work) and I'm still in touch with the last family I worked for. I adore them and I'm so glad nannying gave me some space to figure out what I wanted my life to look like.
I have 2 kids- a 2.5y/o and a 3 month old. I desperately want a middle school aged babysitter to come play with my toddler (and maybe make funny faces at my baby for like, 2 hours in the afternoon once a week or so, so I can get stuff done. It is SO HARD TO FIND! There are lots of adults, nannies etc but I would really like a 12 year old because so often older teens and adults aren’t willing to be silly! Plus it seems like middle school is the sweet spot before they’re just on their phones all the time (she says while typing this on a phone)? But howww do I find someone? I’ll be home the whole time so it doesn’t need to be someone super experienced, just someone who can play with my kids while keeping them alive. I will stay out of the way!
Also can we talk about the fact that I found a regular babysitter/nanny for the summer- she’s starting grad school next fall and is looking for something to fill between leaving her job and moving- and I feel like we are the same age because I feel like I’m also 23 inside but I am absolutely not (I’m 29 and feel extremely old and very young at the same time, sometimes? Like how am I supposed to know what to do with my life and also I am exhausted because I have 2 babies).
Yes, this is a familiar problem! I was like, howwwww do I meet a teen?? What I did was I actually printed up some "Babysitter Needed" flyers (with limited information) and stuck a couple on telephone poles in my neighborhood, plus one on the bulletin board in the public library. It worked! Now I have contact info for 3 neighborhood teens with varying availability. (As soon as I got a couple responses, I went around and took my posters down, and I started by meeting at a park.)
That was a great idea, especially about meeting them first. I think it’s important to meet THEIR parent too—cuz in a pinch some day, that kid is likely going to call their mom (I know I called my mom when I wasn’t sure about something), and you want to know who they are.
yes! That was actually my favorite part, meeting the moms and being like, "okay, she seems like a rational and trustworthy adult, I feel comfortable having her as backup," plus, now I have talked to a couple more neighbors who I otherwise wouldn't have met.
I was nervous about the poster idea, but I'm glad I did it. The poster was mostly a QR code to a google form, and the information on the google form was just what anybody could reasonably have guessed from seeing us out walking the dogs.
I’m older now (36), but was 28 with my first and 31 with my second. They are almost 5 and 8 now.
1. You will meet young teenagers as your kids get older. They will be older sibs of your kids friends.
2. I know you will be around, but I think many parents of young tweens would be cautious for their own tween feeling responsible for 2 under 3. It’s a demanding stage, as you know! From a setting up the sitter for success, perspective, I would want my (future) 12 year old to start with 4-8 year olds who are fully potty trained. There are just a lot of variables and judgement calls with the under 3 set that are hard to anticipate.
Also, you will age into big sister/wise mentor role for the younger sitters and that is such a fulfilling relationship! Having been on both sides of it, it is one of my favorite flavors of femine bonding.
I feel like babysitters in the past were mainly found word-of-mouth. Our babysitter lived next door. The kids I babysat myself in the 80s: 1. lived around the corner, or 2. were related to someone a relative knew, or 3. were younger cousins. When my son was little (early 2000s), I found his babysitters via church bulletin (she had put a little ad in it, saying she’d taken a babysitting course) and via my town’s ‘Rent a Kid’ program. (Not sure if the do that anymore though).
Maybe see if your area offers a babysitting course of some kind and if they do, reach out for referrals?
You’re looking more for a mother’s helper since you’ll be home (that’s what I had—I never actually left my son alone with a babysitter, though I was alone with kids when I babysat). Since you’re looking for middle school, you’re likely looking for someone who hasn’t had any babysitting experience and maybe hasn’t taken a babysitting class but instead maybe has younger siblings and so knows how to play with kids? Maybe you can find someone via a local Boys and Girls Club, or the Y, Girl Scouts, Church, local mom’s club. I wouldn’t advertise for one per se (maybe that’s just my own prudence talking).
Babysitting as a teenager is definitely a fond and formative memory for me, for a lot of reasons outlined in this piece. (Ditto being babysat as a younger kid.) In my own life, it feels like it was a really important step up from being a child into being an adult. It was meaningful, immersive, hands-on practice for a lot of adult responsibilities.
I don't have kids myself, but I wonder how much of that practice-adulting has been replaced (in theory) by the grind of modern-day childhood and youth, the never-ending activities that are all intended to optimize a kid's chances of success in our modern capitalist hellscape. That stepping-stone to adulthood isn't hands-on or communal, but more likely to be isolated and competitive. You don't get to practice-adult by babystting (or camp-counselling, or lifeguarding, or what-have-you), but by packing your waking hours with college-application-friendly activities; and this burns out both kids and parents so much that the "breaks" in the form of screen time feel absolutely necessary just to maintain sanity and snatch a bit of psychological relaxation.
“I wonder how much of that practice-adulting has been replaced (in theory) by the grind of modern-day childhood and youth, the never-ending activities that are all intended to optimize a kid's chances of success in our modern capitalist hellscape. That stepping-stone to adulthood isn't hands-on or communal, but more likely to be isolated and competitive.”
As a stepparent of teenagers I wish I could add a million more likes for this.
my favorite article ever, “the Overprotected Kid” talks about broadly how parenting styles have changed in the last two decades (three, now), and parents constantly supervise their children and do not give them space to grow as adults: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/04/hey-parents-leave-those-kids-alone/358631/
I used to live in Jackson, WY, and I recall hearing local parents arrive at the ski resort with their pre-teens and say, “Okay, meet us back at this spot at 3pm!” And they’d run off and find their friends and spend the day skiing and jumping off cliffs or something. I remember how this seemed so amusing to me, such a special quirk of this specific town. The kids all walk or ride their bikes to school alone, they often seem like stereotypical rebel troublemakers but with too-fast e-bikes. But that’s how unusual this type of parenting is today! The babysitting phenomena is one example of this larger shift, I think—if parents would drive their 10 year old kid to school, even though it’s a block away, why would they leave them with an “unqualified” teenager? And if your own parent is supervising you, you cannot babysit somebody yourself! But yes, you can volunteer at an after school kids camp when you turn 16 because structure!!! College!
this article is canon to me
My mom asked me recently how I learned so much about kids (I’m not a mom) and I pointed out how much I learned from babysitting since junior high, caring for younger cousins and being the go-to aunt when I was married to my ex prepared me for a job at a children’s charity and later helping my sister with her child.
I think there’s value in both the resume-building activities and caring for kids and it provides a great grounding for adulthood. We need to find that balance.
Speaking as the parent of a teenager, there's SO MUCH GRIND now. It's tragic.
It's not even necessarily from us. My kid's school is just so intense and there's very little free time with all the homework. Meanwhile, I think that down time is so important to making friends and learning who you are.
Love this. Also just have to say, that as a parent of younger kids, it has been SO hard to find a babysitter - somebody who can do what I did as a kid, which is to stop by after school for a few hours or watch the kids while the parents grab dinner. It feels like (at least in the area that I live in) high schoolers are not available because of how busy they are and others who babysit (nannies, nurses, teachers, grad students) are more professional and thus charge a lot more. Many in my area seem to charge $25-35/hour with a minimum 3-4 hours, which is hard to swallow for a casual Friday out.
Agree. We have to book our babysitter at least a month in advance, work around all her sports practices & games, and it's $20/hr. It's almost impossible to justify except for something really special planned in advance! And she doesn't live in our neighborhood, either--this feels key. All my babysitting was with families in my neighborhood.
I also read the Babysitter’s Club books in the 80s/90s and started a babysitter’s club. I advertised at church and we made sure everyone knew that if one of us couldn’t work, we’d call someone who could. We worked all the time, sometimes 2 at a time with rich families with disabled kids. It was hugely empowering and fun and certainly contributed to me later becoming a teacher and l, I think, a good one pretty early on. Notably, it also paid for my wardrobe at a time when my parents were barely scraping by. The work was important.
I tried to get my kids to babysit when they were young teens but:
1) it’s just not done. I don’t understand it but folks are just not in the market somehow. Maybe it’s the small town thing, and people’s sisters and moms are doing the work? But the moms I talk to are exhausted and isolated; I think they’re just not going out. I think it’s the intensive parenting thing that Anne calls out.
2) What could my kids buy with what parents can pay? If the parents are going to the movies, they’re spending $50. Then they need to pay my kid enough to go to the movies (when I babysat in the 90s, one job with 2 kids paid for a night at the movies with snacks and maybe an ice cream after, or 1/2 a Gap shirt). So say you paid my kid $10 an hour …now their date is almost $100 and Netflix is looking good.
3) Young teens can’t go to the movies or out for ice cream without “their grown ups” now. I tried to let my kids go to the park or the coffee shop on their own but there was only one other mom who would allow these jaunts. Our town is 2 miles across! We know the coffee shop owners, and everyone else!
4) Kids don’t need $ to socialize; they only need phones. And in the early teen years, it’s less scary and weird than like, working, or than the kind of socializing you’d spend money on
5) I am a stepmom, and the first time I left my 8 and 10 year old home to go to the store for 15 minutes, their mom (who is not usually insane) threatened to sue for sole custody. Moms in the neighborhood were like, “Well, I always take my 14 year old to the grocery store (2 miles away!) with me…”. We have incredibly responsible and resourceful kids. It shocking
Last reflection: I did start babysitting regularly when I was 10 because I looked older and I think that was a Bad 90s Decision™️ but 12 is just right.
My mom friends also just never go out unless their partner can stay home to watch the kids. For a weekend away, they fly their own parents in to babysit. They are exhausted and isolated, as you said!
I realized this when I had friends visiting from out of town and they asked me to find a babysitter for them. I figured it wouldn’t be a problem with so many friends who are parents. Just ONE person got back to me with her babysitter’s name-and it was her daughter’s preschool teacher, not a teenager. No one else had EVER used a non-family babysitter.
I wonder if people are scared from a safety standpoint - both to hire a teenager or to be a teen babysitter - in our litigious society.
I repeatedly offer free babysitting to my friends so they can get a night out as a couple (the kids would be asleep anyway so who cares where I watch TV) and no one ever takes me up on it. My sense is they think it’s too burdensome or that they should handle things themselves.
As someone who doesn’t have kids myself, I love living vicariously through my friends’ parenting experiences and I truly would be happy to be helpful. It would make me feel like part of the community. I had nothing but wonderful experiences babysitting as a teen and being babysat as a kid by older girls who really cared about me.
This is so interesting because my perspective is so different. I live in a small "village" of about 19,000 north of Chicago, and while kids are very busy and "programmed", a lot of young teens have at least some unprogrammed time during the week or weekend. Other surrounding areas are similar. Young tweens/teens (as young as 4th grade) bike or walk to the "square" and shop at Walgreens, Starbucks, the library, the ice cream place, and a few other places without adults. There are often "mother's helpers" who start babysitting around 12 with parents in the house, and around 14 without parents there.
My own oldest daughter (16) has been babysitting since she was 12, and many of her friends babysit. They often are involved in multiple extracurriculars as well, and their jobs include working at after-school care for the elementary schools and working at local summer camps. I'm realizing that we must be very lucky to have this culture that encourages some independence at younger ages than elsewhere!
Elder millennial who babysat and then nannied on top of a food service job growing up. My brother also babysat (moms of all boys LOVED him). I have two daughters, one of whom is a teen now. I appreciate the conversation about the professionalizing of childhood but I wanted to add something. I would be curious if there was someone also looking at the decline of sleepovers as well. Growing up we had big sleepovers with close and less close friends all piled in. That is rarely the case now—it’s a much more carefully curated and less frequent thing. Maybe because professionalized sports are eating up this spare time. But I don’t think we can have either of these conversations without talking about the sexual assault rate for millennial women in their teens and our cultures do nothing attitude about addressing sexual assault. I was never assaulted as a babysitter but I was approached a few times by fathers. Occasionally an older son from a previous marriage would show up unannounced and express interest in my presence. Many of the parents I know across a variety of cultural backgrounds are cognizant of how assault happens are work diligently to prevent their daughters being in a situation that might lead to a 13 or ever 15 year old having to navigate that. I just think that it’s interesting that when the teen girl mental health study came out in 2023 everyone raged about social media but no one talked about what it might be like having 1 out of 10 of your friends at the lunch table having reported (I emphasize reported because as a female pastor of 20 years there’s a big gap between the number of women assaulted and those who report) sexual assault. Yes, I know that we are giving something up in terms of community fiber. But I am just so curious about this dynamic of the shift.
Very important point — and I hate that instead of addressing the cause of assault the only defense is individualized and necessarily over-reactive
“But I don’t think we can have either of these conversations without talking about the sexual assault rate for millennial women in their teens and our cultures do nothing attitude about addressing sexual assault.”
Yes.
One of the men who babysat me as a young child (mid-80s) was later convicted of sexually assaulting some other kids that he’d babysat (conviction was mid-90s). I don’t recall if he ever did anything inappropriate with me or my siblings; I was so little at the time and I have only vague recollections of him (mostly that he gave us more ice cream than we were allowed, so I adored him). He was someone my parents knew intimately for decades. My parents were strict, cautious people, and didn’t allow many people to babysit us, but they had trusted him completely.
When I was in my twenties, I was cleaning out my old bedroom at my parents’ house, and I found a stack of letters from him. (I didn’t recall having received these letters.) He had written them after he’d moved away to attend college. Letter after letter telling me how much he liked me, and how much he thought about me, and how he hoped to come back and visit me during holidays. I had been in early elementary school when he’d sent these. It was so horrifying to realize that during the years before he got convicted, he’d obviously been attempting to groom me and my parents didn’t realize it.
Not everyone has experience with pedophiles in their lives, but most women that I know in my age cohort have experienced sexual assault (although back then, our date rapes weren’t considered assaults). And all women of any age have experienced harassment.
We talk about how hard it is to trust others after you’ve experienced assault or attempted assault, but it’s also extremely hard to trust *your own* judgment again.
I am absolutely picky about who watches my child. Many of my child’s relatives are very irate that I haven’t permitted them to spend time alone with my kid, but I’d rather be hated and labelled as over-protective than get these decisions wrong.
I don’t think we’re going to increase the prevalence of casual babysitting or remedy the gender gap in babysitting / child care until we’ve (a) dealt with misogyny in some meaningful way; and (b) made some progress in understanding and treating pedophilia.
Yes the banal way so many of us either experienced or lived in proximity to someone we know well who experienced this is sobering. And your a & b points are dead on.
“I am absolutely picky about who watches my child. Many of my child’s relatives are very irate that I haven’t permitted them to spend time alone with my kid, but I’d rather be hated and labelled as over-protective than get these decisions wrong.”
I’m in the same boat, one hundred percent.
I don't have kids, so haven't personally navigated this, but I read an article within the last year or two about asking the parents of a kid who invited your kid to a sleepover if there were guns in the home and how they were stored. Especially in certain parts of the country, those conversations can be really fraught and tense, especially if the result is that you're not comfortable with your kid spending time in that home. I wonder if (in addition to the SA concerns, which are terrible and real) some parents would just rather avoid the question entirely and veto sleepover requests.
Yes! And the list grows longer—it used to be pools, then we added guns and now we have to ask about gummies. We are very fortunate to live in a community where the dominate religious practice is pacifism so guns are less of a concern (in Texas, can you believe?) but for a porch meet up with a parent you barely know but may have to interact with for a decade it’s certainly anxiety inducing.
We’ve already had to navigate this with guns and also unsafe dogs. We ended up ghosting a couple we otherwise liked because they had unsecured guns all over the house (AR-15 in a laundry basket, anyone?), as well as a dog who didn’t like kids and we just couldn’t risk it with our then 2 year old, even with us there.
In fairness, I also would not want to hang out with people who have an AR-15 in their laundry basket...!!
Absolutely! And they also had a 2 year old!
I think you’re on to something about changes in people’s trust of other adults and families and what goes on in their homes. I grew up in a small rural town where my parents knew all of the families whose houses we slept over or babysat at. (There’s one difference from my situation as a parent with elementary kids.) And even when the families were different from my parents—a mean dad who swore and yelled at his kids, a dad who drove me home after a night at the bar—my parents and I had trust that the place wasn’t (too) unsafe for me. There’s the second difference. Now I think that if we don’t know the people, we assume that their house is likely dangerous for our kids, and therefore spending time there isn’t worth the risk unless we have evidence it’s safe.
I think this is true and a really sharp insight. I deeply empathize with the reasoning. I have not been assaulted but again, as a female pastor who’s listened to countless women share their story in my office, I am aware of how common and prevalent it is in these intimate spaces. That and the decision we have made as a culture to not address sexual assault. For example my kids public school program is called “anti-victimization training” and the premise is how to not be harmed and what to do if you are. Nowhere in the curriculum does it frame it in terms of “here’s how not to cause harm to other human beings and how it impacts the human other human beings when you do. Our general community and cultural value is that we don’t harm others.”
"Our general community and cultural value is that we don't harm others." It sounds so simple! But also feels like it's missing/taken for granted in modern society, in a way that doesn't actively TEACH it.
I am so sorry this happened to you, Cara. I think this is an interesting thing to discuss. I have 3 daughters and I see 2 main things happen in terms of sleepovers. 1) Parents don't let their kids have sleepovers at all, I think because their worried about what you're saying. 2) Parents do the opposite - just drop their kids off for sleepovers at a house where they have never even met the parents. They don't even come in to say hello. Wild, right?! I have a background in sexual assault prevention so I always talk to my kids about what they can do. But also I make sure to get to know the parents, find out who is staying at the house, etc... I think it is expressed in some of this discourse around kids who are growing up with smartphones today but who have no real world experience. This leads to some really problematic situations.
We do similar education for our girls and always make sure to know parents. I am always so surprised when parents just drop off and don’t come meet us. My husband and I have been known to just hang out in the yard doing yard stuff during pick up and drop off just to go meet parents in their cars—ha! I like the second part of what you said and I think it would help me flesh out my curiosity about the intersection of assault, childhood and smartphones like this: have parents in an attempt to protect our kids from the downside of IRL experiences (not knowing what to do in an emergency while babysitting, creepy dads, litigious culture, etc) traded in the upsides (intergenerational interactions, community fiber, low qualification job experience, etc)? And to what extent is this trade off a parenting issue or a wider cultural issue because we seem wholly disinterested in addressing the downsides?
Great points. Nothing untoward ever happened to me at sleepovers or while babysitting, for which I'm grateful. It's heartbreaking to know that's not always the case. I wonder if part of it was how well known my parents and I were to the families (whether friends or for babysitting) for either scenario. Not that knowing someone beforehand means nothing will happen! But I can't recall any scenarios where we didn't all know each other well ahead of unsupervised time in someone's home. It feels rarer to encounter tight-knit neighborhoods these days.
Yes, we’ve lived in our neighborhood for 12 years and most of the houses have turned over multiple times and when families move in they aren’t moving from another neighborhood in town where we have mutual friends—they are moving from other cities and countries so there’s no way to do what I call a “community check” or “relational reference” on them.
Yep! Or raise your hand if you were ever driven home from babysitting by a dad who had probably been drinking.
It's so interesting. I'm in a mentor program where I work with a 16-year-old and this child is LITERALLY not allowed to walk down the street in NYC by herself. She must be accompanied by a parent or other approved adult. It's not religious. I always wonder if something terrible happened to the mother (who seems to be the stricter parent) and this is the outcome.
The girl told me that she is wants to learn how to use public transport but probably won't know until she's an adult because her parents drive her everywhere they don't walk together.
I think this is helpful in the context of the conversation about babysitters and sleepovers. Statistically they are much more risky than walking on the street. My kids have a fair amount unsupervised freedom because we don’t want them in shock going to college. I once read a NYTimes article in like 2009 that said the modern parents brain is not wired to assess risk well. We were made to hear a twig snap in the woods and determine if it’s a predator coming to eat our kids or not. And I think that true and hard.
I am very sorry for what happened to your friend and I know that what she is doing comes from a good place but she is doing so much harm to her kids by making them scared of everything. The reality is that she will not be able to be with her kids every second of their lives and not exposing them to normal day to day events will leave her kids much more vulnerable down the road
This was a great essay. As a solid gen X woman, I babysat for $2/hour and the way you described it was perfect. I gave the kids baths, since it was what my older sister did with her kids before bed. The parents were amazed! I’d always fall asleep on the sofa watching tv. Then later on in college, I babysat for a babysitter “madam” who booked a group of us gigs to parents who didn’t know who they were getting. That was weird. In one house, there was nothing but dozens of bunches of bananas to eat. Nothing!
But then—many years later in my late twenties/ early thirties, I had a boyfriend with two young kids. I remember telling him that I would fall asleep when I babysat, after the kids went to bed. He. Was. Outraged. He couldn’t believe how irresponsible that was! (What did he expect me to do? Stand guard outside their bedroom doors??) That was the first time I noticed a shift in generational parenting styles, one that we’re still seeing playing out.
Today’s parents seem so much less connected to their communities and so less trusting, plus liability culture has seeped into everything, I think.
Just sitting here shaking my head wanting to lecture that late 20s boyfriend
…but he also goes to sleep at night!! 🤣
I know! But he was a Man. There are so many sneaky little ways to make women feel bad.
I'm an almost 40 year old millennial with two kids, 10 and 7. I feel like the outrage from that dad is a little much, but yes, I do have a hard time trusting. We don't have family in the area and almost never hire sitters. When the kids were younger, it was largely because they were fairly difficult babies and toddlers. My husband and I got in the habit of taking a half day off from work and going on a day date while they were in school/daycare so as not to need a sitter. It seemed like an easier (and cheaper!) solution all around.
Reflecting on this essay, I realize I am actually more open to a babysitter these days. My kids are more self-sufficient than young children, but I don't want them alone just the two of them yet. There wouldn't be much for a babysitter to do than feed them, hang out, and break up fights as needed. Having older kids makes it easier to trust, as well. They know about body boundaries and can, theoretically, stand up for each othee. Each child also has a Gizmo watch that they could use text me if something was going horribly wrong. And, now that they are in elementary school, we know families with older teens and actually have a network of options. There are two families in particular whom we love and trust that both have kids of babysitting age. Perhaps it's time to give them a call.
This is the stage we are in and find to be a good fit for teen sitters. It is delightful to see the next stage or two in the sitters, as well.
omg here to co-rep the $2/hour club. I might've made it up to like $4 by late high school with a richer family. absolutely wild to think back about making $10-$20 for a whole night of sitting. straight cash obviously, one time my mom raised my stash and I threw a fit about being robbed (by who, the fucking dog?) and she confessed with absolutely zero remorse: "life costs money, I needed cash for groceries".
I really loved that boredom featured heavily in this essay. It is one of the thing I remember most about babysitting and now realize it is something I still carry a little bit of embarrassment around when I look back on it. But it’s true that I value that “boredom” today. I remember hours after the kids were asleep watching whatever was on TV. Getting excited babysitting for certain people because they always had the good snacks, or left money for pizza. Home was not my safe place growing up, and having access to different examples of domestic space and family was like a personal anthropology study - a peek behind the curtain of other possibilities. Other peoples’ homes really were grounding to me!
I continued to babysit into university. Having people I babysat for in a new town really expanded my sense of loose-tie community. Again, this is something I have appreciated more with some years of distance and especially in the years since the pandemic. It’s fun having kids around (very peripherally) that I’m not close with anymore but I saw them grow for a time. I introduced them to a cool new tv show perhaps. We had a fun time at the pond one day. These little memories connect me to myself as well at different ages living in the same city.
Again, the boredom features heavily in these university babysitting memories. And certainly memories of having more anxiety about the boredom. Maybe it was more access to technology, or more prevalent anxiety at that time in my life. This essay is making me think it also had to do with a levelled up sense of “professionalization”, since I was older - and trying desperately to figure out MY CAREER, and MY SKILLS. I would often know I could fall back on babysitting (because people were desperate for older and reliable sitters), but I felt bad that I would get bored, and that maybe that meant I was a bad sitter. It’s funny how value judgements were present because I remember that reading a book felt more appropriate than binging something on a streaming service during these years, for example (though I would still binge, just guiltily).
I am now a new mom and I’ve done a lot of reflecting on my babysitting years to help counteract some of the invasive mind-pressures of intensive parenting culture. I babysat babies younger than my own kid is now when I was a teenager and, honestly, the thought does worry me (in that way of “what if xyz had happened - would 15 year old me known what to do?!). But sometimes it is also calming. There is some baseline in me that feels competent in caring for my child and my friends children because of those years spent caring for others’.
Interested to see where this discussion goes. This really has me thinking this morning. Thank you!
Great reflections.
I basically only babysat for anyone complicated when my own mom was at our house. (She decided this on her own, but there also weren’t a lot of places she wanted to be in the evenings of the 1990s, and definitely not the PTA meetings I covered for.) Someone a block away even had me as a babysitter for their child with diabetes—my mom had been her teacher, so I guess they figured that she was a backup in emergencies. Maybe 15yo you would have just called your own mom?
Babysitting as a kid gave me all kinds of valuable experience that it's so weird to see many of my friends trying to build for the first time as they're becoming parents. Even beyond never having held a baby, made a bottle, changed a diaper before doing so for your own kid, I think babysitting made me emotionally resilient for the challenges of caretaking. Like yeah, sometimes babies are just gonna cry for no reason-- you're not doing anything wrong, it's just what babies do, you've just gotta soothe them as best you can. I recently met my boss colicky three month old daughter and she was FLOORED that I was perfectly happy to bop around with a fussy baby all afternoon without getting flustered. Having to develop comfort with that while also dealing with the mindfuck that is becoming a first time parent seems daunting as shit.
++ to lots and lots and lots of TV on other people's couches eating other people's snacks, and to getting sneak-previews into other (rather intimate) domestic lives and versions of home and family-making.
As a teen I babysat for a few neighborhood families. This was big because we lived in the smallest house on the edge of a very wealthy development. The families I sat for were rich in a way I didn’t understand - tvs in every room including the bathroom! Carpeting so deep you wade through it! The parents had brick-like cellphones, the first I’d ever seen!
And the kids…were kids. Who were so desperate for attention that they had so much fun with just paper and crayons or messing with the leaves outside (before the gardeners could get to them). I learned for the first time how important parental attention was for kids and how money can’t help with giving time and love.
ooh wow yes as someone who was a babysitter for a couple families from the time kids were born/true babies up until a lot were pre-teens/teens, I throw my anecdotal samples 100% behind the idea that my 16 year old self knew whatever advanced psychologist/sociologists know about the relationship between attention and behavior/mental health/general wellness etc... and that more money often equaled less attention and more acting out. sigh!
I think as with so many other issues, the solution to finding teen babysitters is cultivating community. I have a 3.5 year old and have found several teen babysitters for her over the years through my community - a friend’s young cousin, my yoga teacher’s daughter, etc. My expectations for an occasional babysitter are low - basically just keep my kid alive and relatively entertained for a few hours.
I myself did a ton of babysitting as a teenager because I have 4 younger siblings, in addition to babysitting for neighbors and people from church. It was never something I particularly liked doing or sought out, and I don’t think I was good at it. I never really resented it, though. It was just something I did.
Reading this essay struck me the same way. Community is always the answer to a Culture Study question! :)
When we lived in a large city, we never even considered hiring a teen babysitter because we didn't know a single teen! But now that we've moved to a suburb, we are in this delightful community that really emphasizes getting to know and socializing with your neighbors. Our neighborhood newsletter lists teens willing to babysit, petsit, do yard work, etc. We've used that resource, but we've also just approached the parents of teens on our block and asked if their kids are interested. It's always been a yes! It helps that we live in a walkable community so younger teens or teens without a license/car can still babysit easily. We've found a lot of younger teens are more excited and willing to babysit, plus have fewer commitments. (Also: check the night of prom before you plan a big spring party!)
Growing up we had a babysitter who was everyone's favorite-she lived one street over so she could walk herself over and home, even in the dark. Her younger sister was decidedly the B squad. Sometimes when the parents on our street were all attending the same party, they would hire both of them and send all us kids to one house for the evening. We'd be carried home half asleep by our parents at the end of the night. I have some great memories of those nights!!
Agree on the burbs! Our town does a Girl Scout hang night where you can drop your kids off for $25 a kid to hang with the scouts, leading games and crafts in a Main Street store front. Burbs can be so great! I feel like it is a very lame secret we unlocked.
What! This is brilliant.
I am a former sitter who staffed such parties and can vouch they are some very good memories from our side, too. Definitely in the "foundational responsibility" category to be like 14 alongside your bestie managing a basement teeming with 2-8 year olds. I am convinced this contributed to my radical sense of under-whelm upon going to American college, where 20 year olds are sort of allowed to act like///are treated like adolescents. I'd been taken so seriously as a sitter aged 12-18 (as soon as I got my license I was driving parents' and teachers' cars all around town to pick up and chauffeur kids). I hated feeling like I'd regressed in perceived maturity!
Community is absolutely the answer. Because the one point that I haven't seen reflected is how rare it can be to actually know kids outside of your kids' age ranges if you aren't intentional about building that community. I've had babysitters for my kids, who were my friend's older kids. But I've also noticed how rare that can be. If, for example, you start having kids at 30+ and live in a place where most people start having kids soon after high school or college, you might not know those teens well enough to feel comfortable with them or for their parents to feel comfortable sending their kid to your house, even for a job. A lot of parents can be insular, preferring to make friends based off school, which will shut you out if your kids are younger and closer in age.
yeah, this is so so so real. Birthday parties don't help. (lol fucking birthday parties! a whole sub thread! why do we worry more about how many flavors of seltzer we stock in the cooler than whether there are activities that don't require our and 15 other adults' direct supervision?!)
anyway I still can't get over the annual bday party one of my bestie throws where she invites all the important kids in her kiddo's life, which has been a mixed-age neighborhood crew since birth. and it's just kickball at the walkable park. Without fail every year some parent expresses confusion about "what's happening" as if we need an agenda, and wonders aloud "who these kids are" because they're not in their kid's school class, etc. ahhh! so silly! and also sad!
I was thinking exactly this. The problem for us, and most other mothers I know in our medium sized city in the Intermountain west, is that they don’t know any teens to call. Having left the religion of my upbringing it feels like spaces where intergenerational relationships exist like this are few and far between (or non existent?). In our case, we happen to live on a street with 2 11-year olds who just started babysitting this year and it has been THE DREAM. We have 2 children 5 and under and it’s so great to be able to give the girls across the street the experience and our kids a chance to be cared for by someone else. That being said, our neighbors down the street with kids slightly older than ours have never used the sitters, and have said it’s because they just don’t feel comfortable with their age. They also tend toward more intensive parenting across many topics/areas. Anyway, I do think we’re maybe not the norm but I find that sad for all the same reasons AHP describes here.
really cool you're giving the 11 year olds this chance to feel responsible as they're capable of being, and to model for your <5 kiddos what bigger kids are capable of.
My fave 12 year old recently asked me "what does it mean to be grown up?" and we had a couple of conversations over a couple of days about parsing through "things that are part of being a grown up" versus different kinds of responsibilities and accountability that can be assumed at different ages/stages. She is a hugely caring and resourceful presence as the oldest of 4 kids, and our conversations (and her ongoing ones with other adults in her life and w/ her parents who also left the religion of their upbring and are hardcore rebuilding from scratch!) were a sweet way to work through ideas about how 12 year olds can and should be seen as accountable and capable of many things, and they are also not yet full-grown grown-ups and therefore are neither accountable nor capable of other things.
Anyway, keep on keeping on, you awesome parent doing hard re-building work!
re: intergen relationships outside church. phew, yeah, damn. I've had the best luck at local libraries (w/ younger kiddos and elders happenstance interactions or facilitated via like reading hours); in garden spaces and outdoor community work events (i.e. family-friendly brush/trail/park clean-up type stuff); and inviting older neighbors to things like birthday parties or just to sit in the backyard for an hour while kids play, it makes the older folks feel included just to be physically a low-key observational part of younger life :)
I babysat so much from age 12 to about 20. We did not have cable, and omg I watched soo much mtv and vh1 and Comedy Central after the kids went to sleep. So much. Real world and pop up video and this was even long enough ago that there were a lot of music videos!! There was a Peter Gabriel video with bugs that freaked me the eff out in strange houses awake by myself!
I also had the distinction of being the only girl babysitter who could babysit all 6 of the Cxxxxxxl boys by myself! (Until my little sister became the only other girl babysitter) This could be credited to my knowledge of the rules of football, a very mid ability to throw a decent spiral with a nerf football that was smaller than a regulation football, and that one time I broke back into the house after they locked me out of it bc I was not stupid and also could pick some locks. We did not tell their parents that part.
I love the distinction of being the only one to wrangle a certain family — I had that as well with a family that others thought too difficult and I just adored
I loved those 6 boys so much!! I am still facebook friends with a few of them.
“Not stupid and can pick some locks” is an excellent babysitting resume.
Was this the only babysitting household that used those two skills simultaneously? No, it was not. Also why were these kids locking me or themselves places?
lol — SO MANY LOCKED DOORS in my childhood! And now my 5-year-old has discovered the locks on our bedroom door. Really glad I learned how to pop them open at 13 😂
Ugh my 7yo is always locking doors.
Oh and we have had a teenager babysit my kiddo when she was about 18 months old, the upstairs neighbor’s older daughter who usually lived with her mom. She was mostly too busy to babysit though. Now our go to is retired neighbors two doors down or brother-in-law 4 blocks away. I also learned by reading this that when I have left my kid (now 7) at 6yo alone for ten minutes to pick up pizza a block away—instead of having them deliver it—I was apparently breaking illinois state law. She was in front of pbs kids puts her into a trance. And i thought it was good for her.
omg thank you for reminding me how integral real world was to my entertainment fulfillment at that age.
The effort needed to maintain a big enough Rolodex of teen/college babysitters and the process of back and forth to run through it to find someone available is something I’ve given up recently. Between their rotation and aging out and all the back and forth… I started paying a premium for a service that assembles and manages the availability of performers who babysit as a survival job. They’re wonderful. Your point about availability, even during busy Senior year, really struck a cord. To be able to land a babysitter (who didn’t feel rather comfortable cancelling last minute but that’s another conversation about generations) with one or two calls would have kept me hiring teens.
We had a great 13 year old sitter who my 7 year old LOVES… but she started just not replying to texts (even ones in a group text with her mother) and so I had to give up on her. My daughter is so sad… but I’m not going to waste time trying to get this sitter to commit when 90% of the time she ignores me.
Yes! They graduate and go to college SO fast. Sigh.
The going rate for babysitters in my town is $15-20/hour. Even if we found someone, adding $60+ for a night out isn’t something we’re likely to do, especially on top of food and drink prices still feeling incredibly high.
We invite people over for board game night (with and without kids) and my spouse and I will go out with friends solo while the other stays home with the kids.
We pay our babysitters $25/hour for weekdays and $30/hour on nights & holidays, and I recently got my first quote for $35/hour. For one 3.5 year old!
When he was born - just 3 years ago - the going rate was $18-$20/hr.
My partner and I don’t feel like we can ever have a sitter for fun stuff; we can only afford it if we are earning money during that time too.
Teens charge $20/hour here. Adults, it’s $30/hour. Aside from a few yearly events (work party or school fundraiser), there’s nothing I want to do that badly!
Same. And honestly, the last thing I want to do after a long day of parenting is go out. I want to sit on my couch.
Came here to talk about the differences in cost. Paying $2-3/hour would change the game! (I get inflation, but $2 in the 80s/90s was still dirt cheap for a babysitter.) Even new babysitters in our area are expecting at least $12/hour, and often more. On top of that we usually order pizza for the kids/babysitter, so total we're often up to an extra $80-100 for a simple night out. We can *technically* afford it and yet it easily doubles our expenses: if we spend $100/$125 for a "nice" dinner, it then turns into $200+, which feels very different.
We had one family in our neighborhood with three teenage girls whose mom was very clear with them that they were to accept WHATEVER people could afford to pay them, and be grateful for it. They were fantastic babysitters but soon aged out due to an increase in activity load + then graduating and going off to college. Miss those days!
Same. We've hired teen babysitters a few times, and we plan to in the future, but rarely. If we do go out together, we usually only do it if a family member can watch them for free. It's just too expensive!!
Same prices here. I can theoretically afford it, and I want to support paying people what they're worth. But when my babysitting bill for dinner and a movie is $75, it changes the "is this worth it" calculus. I am very lucky to have teens in my neighborhood who are great and willing to babysit.
Minimum wage where I live is $15 an hour. Why would teens want to babysit for less than that when they can go work retail/fast food/movie theatre and work with friends?
That’s exactly it for us. We have paid $20-25/hour for baby-sitting and usually throw in dinner or snacks so it’s typically $100 before we’ve even left the house. It’s hard for it to feel “worth it.” We have my MIL baby-sit or ask friends and neighbors to monitor watch for us. Less flexibility but it’s also much cheaper.
I remember when I was 14 a new family moved in next door. I think the very next day the dad came over and wanted to know if I babysat. He didn’t know me at all! lol. But I ended up babysitting for them so much and they paid so well (there were 4 kids), that they were basically responsible for the down payment I put on my car at 19. I so grateful for that and just getting to know those kids and having independence from my own family.
"independence from my own family" is so important and so underdiscussed in this scenario!
Yes - For both the babysitter and the kids they were watching. I wonder if today’s kids will be less socialized than we (old millennials) were if they are so rarely watched by anyone outside of their families and teachers?
"down payment on my car" really resonates! I am the child of a comfortably middle class suburban home-owning family surrounded by neighbors whose incomes ranged from significantly-more-stressed-and-stretched to so-much-more-well-off-I-didn't-even-fully-comprehend-their-assets (an interesting feature of a peri-urban suburb with homes mostly 100+ years old....not quite the extreme class homogeneity we see in some newer/planned burbs today?) Anyway, my besties who occupied similar or lower-income places on that spectrum did a lotttttt of sitting for those higher up the earning ladder and boy did those chicken nuggets and milk bottles equal a lot of jeans, first phones and early college savings!
Anyway because (of the privilege) of never being asked to work to support family expenses, I maintained my earnings for my own saving/spending. I can draw pretty damn direct lines from every single essential or luxury thing I acquired in my teen and college years (including paying off student loans) to units of time spent babysitting (tbh I am more charmed by this on behalf of my 15 yo self than my 25 yo self. one of those ages is more nostalgic, one feels more fully bought into scarcity student loan crisis culture!)
My experience babysitting was so, so similar (not surprising, given that I was also babysitting in semi-rural Idaho in the 90s). I loved the babysitters my parents hired - our favorite was the one who always brought her box of smelly markers and paper for us to use. That -- and the Babysitters Club books -- inspired me to always take a "kid kit" when I started babysitting myself (around age 11). By ages 12-17 babysitting was my primary source of income. I had a lot of families who would call me, usually people from church. $2/hour was the average rate -- I remember being excited whenever the family who paid $2.50/hr booked me! They had three kids who I babysit when they were ~8months, 3, and 5. I'd feed them dinner (usually mac and cheese or chicken nuggets, frozen pizza was a treat!), play with them, bathe them, get them ready for bed and put them down for the night. Now that I have three kids of my own, I think about that babysitting experience a LOT! I felt perfectly comfortable and capable of doing everything I described above for three young kids as a young teen, and I could barely handle doing all of the same things for my own three young kids when I was in 30s! (I know it's different caring for your own kids day in and day out than it is being an occasional babysitter, but oh! to have the confidence of young me!) I still keep in touch with some of the families I used to babysit for.
Other fav memories from being a teen babysitter: the few houses that had HBO I could watch (such a treat!) and watching "Unsolved Mysteries" after the kids were in bed (and freaking myself out!). I would also always raid the bookshelves of the houses I was babysitting at. This was how I stumbled across "The Joy of Sex" as well as a few other sex guide-type books, that I would secretly devour -- being super careful to put the book back *exactly* how I had found it, and making sure nothing around it was disturbed. This was the only way -- in my "abstinence only"-era childhood -- that I learned anything about sex!
Part II: Hiring a babysitter for my own kids has been such a different experience. First, it's at *least* $15/hour, and I would always go out of my way to make things easy for the babysitter (i.e. absolutely no expectation of doing bathtime, etc.) The expectations just feel so different than when I was babysitting. I would never have left dirty dishes in the sink, or show up empty handed (not a single babysitter I ever hired showed up with arts and crafts activities, or anything like the "kid kits" I *always* took babysitting).
What's been really interesting to me, though, is experiencing hiring babysitters in another country. My family moved to the Netherlands last year and the babysitting experience here is so much more like it was when I was babysitting in the 90s! You can easily hire a neighborhood teen, they bike or walk over to your house, and paying 6-8 euro is the norm, even 4-6 euro if it was a really young teen or a "mother's helper" situation. (A fellow American here even had their neighbors tell them to stop paying higher rates for babysitters because they were driving the prices up!) To be clear, this is for casual, occasional babysitting with teens. If you hired a nanny and/or someone for longer, steadier hours and/or with an education degree you would expect to pay more. Still, it's made hiring babysitters SUCH a different experience for us. We can actually afford to go out sometimes now and it seems like the teens are just happy to be able to make some money, like I was as a teen (that is to say: I don't feel like we're exploiting them by underpaying -- 8 euro/hour is more than a teen would make at other jobs). Plus it's been great for our kids to get the language exposure of having a local babysitter. All in all, it's really very refreshing!
I looked it up (to make sure I wasn't spreading misinformation about teen wages*). In the NL these are the minimum wages for teens:
19 years €7.96
18 years €6.64
17 years €5.24
16 years €4.58
15 years €3.98
So, if you're 14 or 15, getting €8/hour IS a pretty good gig.
(source: https://www.government.nl/topics/minimum-wage/minimum-wage-amounts-as-of-2024) *[why yes, I *am* an academic reference librarian, why do you ask? ;) ]
This is great. We also did “kid kits” because of the books, and I remember loving to read moms’ magazines!
OH MY GOD the joy of sex how could one FORGET! pre internet no less, the "this house has HBO, I am the person with sole control of this remote, and the TV isn't facing the street so I don't think neighbors can see"....what a deeply essential part of babysitting nostalgia!!
Also I have to say I breathed the heaviest sigh of "wow, yeah" when you mused about how it somehow feels harder to do things in our 30s that we did at literally 13 (different wear and tear long-term vs short term care load/mental load levels as you said of course, but wow did that reflection really spur me to think more about what of the modern care/mental load can be lessened to help caregivers inhabit even a sliver of the more care-free ease we had at 13.....thank you for this thought exercise!!)
I'm a cusper - born in 1965, I'm a few weeks from turning 59. (No one seems to be able to decide if I'm the Last Boomer or the First Xer.) I babysat as a pre-teen, although as a boy, I wasn't in demand like my sister was. I can relate as both a consumer and a provider of babysitting, which, as you indicate, is different from "child care."
When our kids were young, the youth at church were encouraged to "provide service" by offering to babysit for families (for free, of course!) so that harried parents could enjoy a date night. Mormons gotta Morm, as we say, so when I say "youth" I of course mean the young women ages 12-17. Since Latter-day Saints run to larger families, this could be quite an adventure. I suppose by this they learned something useful about coping with lots of kids, which culturally was a statistically likely outcome, as well as the expectation that a lot of free labor would be donated over the years.
We paid when we could, and didn't go out too often. Then the Internet changed everything, and a significant number of those young women decided that they'd been played and are now happily post-Mormon.
I read what you said about phones and screen time while nodding with approval - on my phone. 🤷🏽♂️
My own relationship with babysitting is complicated, to the point where the idea of offering to watch kids for someone even in my thirties is not something that sparks joy.
I'm the oldest of five kids and, since my mom had all five of us by the time she was 30 (there's a 10 year spread between me and my youngest brother), there was a lot of heavy helping out from a young age. My step-dad at the time worked a ton to balance out my mom staying home with the kids, which essentially made my mom a single parent.
So when my mom signed me up for a babysitting course in 7th grade, I did it. I put up fliers, I met people in my neighborhood, and had steady kids I babysat for a few years. Even when I stopped babysitting for money, I was still helping watch kids at home until I moved out.
But the idea of 7th graders watching kids today is wild today. Thankfully, kids seem to be kids a little longer these days (I think I had an extreme example of growing up early) -- at least the kids in my sphere. I know true crime has always been popular, but I also have to wonder if there is some impact constantly devouring content about how dangerous strangers are is bad for (babysitting) business?
We have middle schoolers babysit often because their moms are home up the street AND THEY TAKE IT SO MUCH MORE SERIOUSLY. They ask me if there are food allergies and where the bandaids are (because that’s what the babysitting class taught them!) and they offer half price rates to get experience ($6!!!). It’s wild and I love it and I think I will get to keep them as they grow before everything gets professionalized for them. As a middle school. educator at the core, I love seeing middle school babysitters get to test being grown in safe ways. My kids are 6, 6 and 8, and are not too bananas so I know I have it pretty good. But I love love my middle school babysitters.
Our small town has a for real Babysitters Club modeled on the books (they read them!) and it's all 11 year olds who charge $10 for two of them! I hire them to watch my kids on holidays and over Spring Break...it's the best.
We have the same thing on our street! Two 11-year olds who live across the street a few houses apart and usually come together for $10/hour. I feel like we won the lottery for as long as they’ll keep coming.
"My own relationship with babysitting is complicated, to the point where the idea of offering to watch kids for someone even in my thirties is not something that sparks joy."
Yes, same! Thank you for sharing. I started babysitting around 10 and feel like I was parentified at a young age thru babysitting. As I babysat thru my college years, there was all this pressure from younger parents to entertain their kids rather than to keep them safe and keep them from fighting, as previous older parents had expected. Now, in my late 30s, I'm trying to find the joy in hanging out with kids again. It still feels like work.
I was thinking about the trust aspect, too. I particularly found myself feeling awkward about the idea of a male babysitter. It is not fair of me, but it wasn't long before my mind jumped to SA.
Some of my babysitting highlights:
1. My best friend and I took a babysitting class at the hospital when we were in 4th or 5th grade that taught CPR and who knows what else. It was great!
2. I made my own Babysitter's Club-inspired Kid Kit but I don't think I ever once remembered to bring it with me.
3. I was a mother's helper starting at age 10 and then started babysitting the year after that. As a child-free Illinoisan, it blows my mind that kids can't be left unattended until age 14 now. WHY and HOW. I was the go-to babysitter for the neighborhood. The neighbors made sure my mom was home when I first started out or when I watched an infant for the first time, just as a back up. But I never needed the help.
4. Most families paid me $2/hour but one family paid me $4 AND left an array of snacks for me. The absolute dream!
5. Because I was mostly watching neighborhood kids, there was no issue of transportation. I'd just walk across the street. The exception was my neighbor's sister who lived across town. Either she or her husband would pick me up or drop me off. There was never any weirdness with the husband—I don't think I ever thought twice about being in a car alone with him, which I now recognize could have gone south. I'm grateful all my babysitting experiences were positive, aside from the occasional kid puke incident.
6. Once I left for college, my younger brother took over most of my babysitting gigs. We had girls and guys babysit us growing up so babysitting never seemed like a gendered thing to either of us.
7. I nannied twice as an adult (once after grad school when jobs were scarce and once in my early 30s when I was massively burned out by work) and I'm still in touch with the last family I worked for. I adore them and I'm so glad nannying gave me some space to figure out what I wanted my life to look like.
I have 2 kids- a 2.5y/o and a 3 month old. I desperately want a middle school aged babysitter to come play with my toddler (and maybe make funny faces at my baby for like, 2 hours in the afternoon once a week or so, so I can get stuff done. It is SO HARD TO FIND! There are lots of adults, nannies etc but I would really like a 12 year old because so often older teens and adults aren’t willing to be silly! Plus it seems like middle school is the sweet spot before they’re just on their phones all the time (she says while typing this on a phone)? But howww do I find someone? I’ll be home the whole time so it doesn’t need to be someone super experienced, just someone who can play with my kids while keeping them alive. I will stay out of the way!
Also can we talk about the fact that I found a regular babysitter/nanny for the summer- she’s starting grad school next fall and is looking for something to fill between leaving her job and moving- and I feel like we are the same age because I feel like I’m also 23 inside but I am absolutely not (I’m 29 and feel extremely old and very young at the same time, sometimes? Like how am I supposed to know what to do with my life and also I am exhausted because I have 2 babies).
Yes, this is a familiar problem! I was like, howwwww do I meet a teen?? What I did was I actually printed up some "Babysitter Needed" flyers (with limited information) and stuck a couple on telephone poles in my neighborhood, plus one on the bulletin board in the public library. It worked! Now I have contact info for 3 neighborhood teens with varying availability. (As soon as I got a couple responses, I went around and took my posters down, and I started by meeting at a park.)
That was a great idea, especially about meeting them first. I think it’s important to meet THEIR parent too—cuz in a pinch some day, that kid is likely going to call their mom (I know I called my mom when I wasn’t sure about something), and you want to know who they are.
yes! That was actually my favorite part, meeting the moms and being like, "okay, she seems like a rational and trustworthy adult, I feel comfortable having her as backup," plus, now I have talked to a couple more neighbors who I otherwise wouldn't have met.
I was nervous about the poster idea, but I'm glad I did it. The poster was mostly a QR code to a google form, and the information on the google form was just what anybody could reasonably have guessed from seeing us out walking the dogs.
I’m older now (36), but was 28 with my first and 31 with my second. They are almost 5 and 8 now.
1. You will meet young teenagers as your kids get older. They will be older sibs of your kids friends.
2. I know you will be around, but I think many parents of young tweens would be cautious for their own tween feeling responsible for 2 under 3. It’s a demanding stage, as you know! From a setting up the sitter for success, perspective, I would want my (future) 12 year old to start with 4-8 year olds who are fully potty trained. There are just a lot of variables and judgement calls with the under 3 set that are hard to anticipate.
Also, you will age into big sister/wise mentor role for the younger sitters and that is such a fulfilling relationship! Having been on both sides of it, it is one of my favorite flavors of femine bonding.
I feel like babysitters in the past were mainly found word-of-mouth. Our babysitter lived next door. The kids I babysat myself in the 80s: 1. lived around the corner, or 2. were related to someone a relative knew, or 3. were younger cousins. When my son was little (early 2000s), I found his babysitters via church bulletin (she had put a little ad in it, saying she’d taken a babysitting course) and via my town’s ‘Rent a Kid’ program. (Not sure if the do that anymore though).
Maybe see if your area offers a babysitting course of some kind and if they do, reach out for referrals?
You’re looking more for a mother’s helper since you’ll be home (that’s what I had—I never actually left my son alone with a babysitter, though I was alone with kids when I babysat). Since you’re looking for middle school, you’re likely looking for someone who hasn’t had any babysitting experience and maybe hasn’t taken a babysitting class but instead maybe has younger siblings and so knows how to play with kids? Maybe you can find someone via a local Boys and Girls Club, or the Y, Girl Scouts, Church, local mom’s club. I wouldn’t advertise for one per se (maybe that’s just my own prudence talking).
Yes to hard to find! My mom found all of my babysitters through our church, and I’m not religious.