We’ve secured a babysitter for Saturday and are looking forward to a night out. But babysitting sure isn’t the same as when I was a teenager.
I babysat a lot back then. With Seventeen magazine rolled under my arm, I would run out of my house to a beeping car at 7:00 almost every Friday and Saturday night until I went off to college. Babysitting provided funds for more magazines, cheese fries at the mall, and a film at the 12 plex. It also provided access to TV, which was banned at our house; the better parents also had HBO, which meant R-rated movies after the kids went to sleep.
Yes, those were the simple days. Now every kid I know has a TV in their room and a generous allowance. They don’t need the tube or the paltry $5 an hour. I feel like our teenage babysitters are doing me a favor or racking up experience points. My kids have to entertain her (“Hey, watch Ian pretend to skateboard!”) and be perfect.
We also have to compete with the many activities of these girls. Our Saturday night friend is the manager of a basketball team and a member of a teen club. This thirteen year old has a better night life than we do.
I long for the days of the simple cash exchange of services. When parents could pay off a bored, poor 13 year old girl to mind two sleeping tots without strings or tricks.
Apt. 11d 
Laura, you must have been a significantly better teenage babysitter than I was. I remember quite clearly what used to happen when I babysat — and that’s why I would never ever hire a teenager!
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I think this all depends on what side of the transaction you are on. Bosses always view things different from the employees. There are probably former employers of Laura’s who thought they were being used just for the HBO
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Your parents banned TV entirely? No wonder you had conflicted feelings about my simplicity posts. We only had banned programs growing up (Love Boat and Dallas were major offenders).
We struggle to find babysitters too. There’s the demographic problem: for reasons good or ill, hardly anyone ever looks for, or ever expects, boys to be babysitters. So that generally wipes out have the adolescent population right there. Then you have to hit that narrow window between 12 and 15, because younger than that and you just don’t trust them, and older than that and you’re sure they won’t be available on any given night. What’s left is heavily competed over. No wonder decent babysitters know they can charge top dollar.
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We pay $14 an hour to an adult who used to take care of our daughter and now cares for an infant down the street. And, we don’t go out much…
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I was wondering about that, Dave. $5 isn’t even minimum wage.
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We hire college kids from where we work. We pay them $8-10/hour. We only go out every 3 or 4 months. I was paid $2/hour when I was growing up.
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We’ve never, ever, ever had a paid babysitter at our house. Probably never will. Make no mistake, we’ve paid for out-of-the-house daycare (home-based and other). But when you have two dogs and one of those is a breed that scares most people (first a Rottie, now a Staffie, aka tiny pit bull) and a special needs kid, you can forget even thinking about babysitters and evenings out.
Which seriously, seriously, seriously sucks. I babysat my ass off until I was 16 and old enough to get a wage job. I figure that the universe owes me some serious babysitting karma. Maybe it will come for my children’s children?
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I own one of those 13 year olds- my daughter. She is the oldest, we also have an 11 year old, 7 year old and 3 year old. Mallory is slave labor. She babysits for us for free- or rather extras- more time on the computer- a friend to spend the night. Once in awhile I slip her a $20. She pet sits for a ton of people during the summer and Christmas vacation, so she always has cash. She turns down lots of babysitting jobs from people besides us. She has simple tastes and hordes money, so she rarely needs it.
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Why don’t you all “buddy up” and trade babysitting with other parents? Laura, I know you just moved and might not know other nearby parents well enough, but wouldn’t that be the best source of responsible care? It can’t be good for a marriage to only get out alone together a few times a year.
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Do you tip? Do you feed them? Did you pay $5 back in the city? It seems bizarre that you are complaining about getting a huge bargain!
Those older than 15 are old enough to work part-time jobs that pay more, as much as $9 or $10+. That’s likely where they get money to bankroll their social lives.
Of course, lots of those low-wage jobs remain low-wage because immigrants and the poor are waiting in line to take them as a second or third job.
It’s true that kids bankrolled by wealthy parents aren’t motivated to work at all.
So, it seems that getting sitters will be tough without paying more. We pay at least $10, often $11-12. And we have just one kid. That’s in NYC. Maybe it’s different in the ‘burbs.
Also, you were being exploited as a kid! Yeah, maybe it was easy or fun work, and only until 9:00 or 9:30 at the latest, after which you were paid to sit around and watch TV for 2-4 hours until parents got back. But you showed up on time, couldn’t leave if you got tired of the job, and were in charge of someone else’s house and kid. Didn’t you feel even slightly responsible? Spooked? Deal with sick kids? Parents who come back a lot later than promised?
And why is it girls who babysit? Do boys not need money because they don’t buy magazines and lip gloss? Did they just get an allowances? Did they work higher paying jobs (paper routes, raking leaves)? Was their work physically harder but a lot less responsible? It’s not like a family was going to be left in the lurch if they decided not to show up, or left without doing the whole job. (Oh, silly me … then and now people assume that it’s got to be a young woman who take care of kids.)
Both the old-fashioned and current babysitter concept is fraught on both economic and non-economic levels. I even hate the word.
My son is ecstatic when his little neighbor comes over with his dad to “take care of him while we go out.”
I agree that the best alternative is neighbors with young kids to swap services co-op style.
Of course, what I really yearn for is not the good old exploitative days, but nearby relatives for nights out.
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Hey, I would pay more than $5 an hour. Going out with the hubby and getting out of the house is worth more than $5 an hour for me. But I was told that was the going rate around here. It’s tax-free, she comes after the kids are asleep, and she’s 13. It seems that a lot of teenagers aren’t even willing to babysitter for $10, because they don’t even need that. I read somewhere that the average teenager spends $100+ per week.
I don’t think that babysitting is necessarily exploitative. It’s part-time. The kid can pick and choose families. I can think of a situation or two that was odd when I sat. One family had me watch their two kids, one was just a baby, for long hours and paid me $2 an hour. In nickles. But for the most part, it was easy work. (I really liked the TV part. )
I would much rather have a responsible teenager watching my kid than have to negotiate with another family. It’s much simpler.
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My experience has been that boys are discriminated against for babysitting jobs. When I was 14 or so, I tried it out and the only people who would take me on were the family across the street whose son had been my best friend. And this was in one of those classic old skool neighbourhoods where everyone knows everyone else.
My half-nephew just took the babysitting course offered through St John’s Ambulance (the canadian first aid training group) and I was tempted to tell him to save his money and just do lawn mowing in the summer and snow shovelling in the winter.
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When I was 14, my parents’ friends increasingly wanted me to babysit for their kids. Being a kid overly afflicted with superego, I thought the responsible thing to do was to know more than I did about “parental” skills–first aid, cooking, etc. So I went to a free class offered for teenage babysitters by some community group. I was the only boy in a room of 40 students. Kind of awkward.
One accidental perk of being an academic is that you know lots of very responsible, smart, engaging, friendly 18-21 year olds who might be willing to babysit. But we’re very fortunate beyond that in that we happened to meet a wonderful, intelligent, caring older woman who has babysat for others in our town and was willing to do so for us.
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“One accidental perk of being an academic is that you know lots of very responsible, smart, engaging, friendly 18-21 year olds who might be willing to babysit.”
True, but wasn’t there a Chronicle piece from a while back, talking about students (mostly grad students, I guess) who babysat or otherwise helped out the faculty around their homes, and the discomfort and confusion (admittedly, perhaps only perceived) which resulted? While I wouldn’t necessarily say no, I have to admit I’m kind of leary of the idea of ever hiring a former student or some who might be one of my students in the near future.
Of course, finding a kid-friendly older person willing to babysit is simply ideal; I envy your find, Tim. That’s one of the greatest benefits of living near grandparents, after all. Some friends of ours in Toronto go and visit her parents in Ottawa with great regularity, significantly in part because I think that’s just about the only time they ever get out of the house to see a movie.
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To Russell: Yea, it might result in an awkward, frustrating situation in some cases, but not all.
I LOVED babysitting for my profs when I was an undergrad. We knew each other well enough that they knew I was responsible and I knew they weren’t freak, weirdo parents. (Also, my group of friends was always trying to find ways to go to prof’s houses, anyway…we had this obsession of seeing them as “real people.”)
One family in particular became a sort of family away from home. By my last year of college I was so fed up with noisy campus and paying for laundry, that I offered to babysit for free in return for a quiet place to study and do my laundry. I was so desperate to get away from the campus environment that I was willing to do anything.
And it never badly affected my relationship with the prof in class as a student.
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I hit the jackpot for babysitters b/c of my place of employment – a girls’ school. My big concern is how close they live. Some girls come from an hour away and that is too far to drive after a night out. Our best babysitter (one block away) graduated and went to college far away. She was responsible and had little social life beyond organized school functions which were on my calendar so we didn’t plan to go out then. I was surprised at the huge wage disparaties. One girl did 2 dollars an hour for 2 kids over the summer. Our old babysitter got 10, our current gets 7. Strikingly, it seems like the richest kids got paid the least.
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Coming to this late, I know, but I babysat AND…nannied! as a youth. The babysitting was almost all for one pair of extremely unruly kids — the boy was in constant trouble at school, aged 6 — and the despairing parents glommed onto me when they discovered, to my own amazement, that I had complete control. I was 14-16 and had the social life of a three toed sloth.
Nannying was different — I was 18 and lived-in for about 6 weeks, looking after 2 boys while their mum was sick, and then away on a book tour. The elder boy was horrific, but seems to have turned out fine. I adored the younger boy.
I never got paid more than a pittance, for either, mainly because a) my parents believed it was wrong to ask people for money even when working for them and b) I agreed.
The irony is that I am very uncomfortable having boys babysit unless I know them very well; whereas I’m fine with girls.
I’ve hired former undergrad students, and one grad student over whom I have no oversight professionally. I wouldn’t be comfortable hiring kids when in my classes, but after that would be — is — fine.
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Here’s a warning to profs who hire current or former students — keep your personal stuff well hidden. The temptation is great to snoop around. I should know, I did it.
Actually, a pretty famous writer was teaching at my university when I was there, and she left her personal journals out on a shelf. Obviously, I couldn’t resist.
These days, obviously, your computer should be password protected if you are having students roaming around in your house.
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Ditto on the snooping part — I babysat often and was trustworthy with the kids, but after they were asleep, I would poke ALL around the house, looking at the parents’ books, music, jewelry, toiletries, etc. Very careful to cover my tracks; at least no one ever busted me that I know of. I wasn’t BAD, just curious.
And I would never have a male babysitter for our daughter unless it is someone I have literally known all his life. Sorry, it’s not a personal thing — just given that vast majority of sexual abusers are male, it does not seem worth the risk.
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It is unfortunately not necessarily wise to trust males you have known all your life not to be molesters.
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I babysat from the time i was 11 years of age. My mother, an alcoholic at the time was always out so i took on the role of mother in the home. Duties included changing diapers (cloth), feeding, bathing, etc, etc. When i got a bit older, 15 years of age i babysat all around our neighbourhood. It made me a better mother.
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My daughter is 14 years old. She has been babysitting for the same family since she received her babysitters certificate at teh age of 12. She occasionally has to feed them a supper that has already been prepared, wash the dishes, play with the kids (there are two) and then put them to bed. She makes $4.50 per hour. I am trying to find out what the going rate for teenage babysitters in the Ottawa, Canada area is. Please send me your comments.
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i am a young lady looking to baby sit 1month-10 please u can count on me never let u down have 15 cousins and 7 brothers and sisters
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