To think this was way too young?

I was babysitting from the age of 12. I think it's fine so long as the child's parents are close by and have phone with them. Also my parents were close by when I was 12 so I could have called them. There were never any problems.

I used to love babysitting when I was a teen. It was easy money. Turn up, play a couple of games with the kids, put them to bed, then spend a couple of hours watching TV or doing my homework.

I did have the heebie jeebies one night when that Sarah Reed poltergeist thing was on the telly though. Almost jumped through the window when the parents came home.

My 14 y.o. (Since she was 13 y.o.) Picks up a nearby neighbours kids from after school club and cooks their dinner then puts them to bed. £10 an hour. We are available nearby if there's a problem. 2 well behaved kids aged 5 & 7. My DD is very mature and sensible.
Didn't think this was unusual.

depends on the scenario. I let a local child age 13 babysit mine. However we are only 10 mins away, her parents (who we know well) stay home and are there as back up. Family members also live next door and are on call if needed.

I babysat at that age too, mostly very near neighbours so I could call my mum in case of emergency but it was fine.

Depends. If the parents are local and easily contactable by phone I think it’s fine at 13/14.

If the parents had gone a long distance or were staying overnight I think it’s a bit young.

I think it's fine. More so than me and my friend, both 15 who were given a set of 18m old triplets to look after for the afternoon. It was school / community partnership thing. The mum bundled us out the door to the park within fifteen minutes of meeting us!

The babysitters I use are 15 for a one year old. If there's an emergency their parents or a neighbour aren't that far away. I don't worry about it at all. I was babysitting two at 15.

I also know of a few people who had their own babies by 16!

So if it was a mature 14 I wouldn't have a problem.

My stepson is 16 and I couldn't trust him long enough with my DS3 to have a shower

Lovely kid btw, great guy.. total idiot

He wouldn't be able to put his phone down long enough to ensure she wasn't inserting Lego into the cat

I agree. The older generations had responsibility at a much younger age. I know a couple of old boys (in their late 80s now) who were in the Merchant Navy at 15!

YABU. Our DD was babysitting for half the street at that age. No problem. Any crisis (& there were a couple) she rang her DM and me and we dealt with it until the parents could get home.

Basically, she was little more that a human baby monitor.

I used to babysit for a family who lived about 10 houses down from us when I was 14. The little boys would already be asleep when I got there . The parents were maths teachers and I would always take my maths homework with me!.

I babysat from 14 in the 80s for all sorts of people I didn't know, via a youth club babysitting circle. Parents used to (sometimes) leave a landline number for where they were going. I was eldest of 3 though with younger cousins so was used to dealing with children. Can't imagine my 14 yo doing this yet but maybe in a year or so.

I think our low expectations of teenagers as a society is very unhelpful and leads to low confidence and more incompetence as people don't get the chance to prove themselves.

I’m not sure that is what the parents have in mind!

This thread is so funny - I hadn't thought about being a young babysitter for such a long time. I started around age 12 or 13 and I was absolutely awful. One family got my number from friends of theirs and had me round to babysit having never met me before. There were 2 young children in a big fancy house with loads of expensive looking Persian rugs on polished hardwood floors. I gave the children rides on the rugs by running all around the house pulling the rugs with the children sitting on them shrieking with laughter. I also stole lots of coins from big jars they had lying around. Not proud of this but I was a kid myself! Funnily enough they never asked me back 😂.

Yabu. 14 year olds are perfectly capable of hiding a child for a few hours.

How far away from your own parents was the house where you babysat? We have used the 16 year old daughter of our neighbour for babysitting but we knew that her Mum (our friend) was only 2 doors away in case of emergency.

14 does seem young though.

We were babysitting from age 12 in the late nineties!

Really normal. I babysat next door's 3 and 1 year old from about 14. Daytime and nighttime. £2.50 an hour and they counted out every penny! Most of my friends were doing the same. I looked after a few other families' kids too, just not as much.

I had a baby sitting round at 15, which I why I would never have had an under 18 look after my dc! I got bored on night and woke up the toddler I was looking after. Another time I snuck some friends in for drinks.

I minded toddlers during the day from ten, babies and their siblings by twelve, newborns and their toddler brothers and sisters by fourteen.

You would know the neighbours and your parents wouldn't be far away. I never had to call an adult but I could have. No mobiles either yet - 1990s. And I'd grown up looking after and playing with younger kids as a matter of course.

I was babysitting at that age, sometimes for people I had never even met. It was quite common when I was a teen in the 70s.

I used to look after my baby/toddler niece all day and sometimes over night at 16-18 but that was in the 90s. Now I think it's far too young but back then it was very normal.

My mum was a childminder and the parents of kids she looked after not only used to ask me to babysit in the evenings sometimes, but were also happy for me to stand in for my mum and babysit for entire days during the school holidays if for some reason my mum wasn’t available. I looked after two four-year-olds from 8.30am to 6pm more than once when I was 14-15.