Babysitting Circle… app?

[GeorgeBeckett]

Does anyone remember their parents in the 80s having a babysitting circle? It involved tokens/chips/match sticks.

I’ve got several friends who would all in principle be happy to do childcare swaps of an evening to allow us to go out with our partners. I feel cheeky giving a list of dates.

Surely there must be an app for this? Where I can invite people to join and we can book/keep track of “credits”.

Does anyone else do this?

My parents did this, or mum did anyway. Great idea in principle

I thought there would be loads of apps already in existence but I’m not really finding anything. And I don’t know how it worked before with the tokens to set up!

I remember my parents doing this with laminated tokens, I think they were in denominations of 1/2/3 hours, AFAIK they just had a list of members on a sheet with phone numbers and would just call around when they needed someone. You'd soon get to know who'd be iikely to say yes/need the tokens.
I'd think a simple WhatsApp group would work pretty well for dates? And start everyone with a limited number of tokens, maybe 4 hours? Enough to get the ball rolling whilst leaving motivation for members to 'earn' more and stop anybody taking the piss.

Yes this was a big thing in our village in the 80s and it worked brilliantly. Everybody did know everyone in ‘the circle’ though, not sure it’d work as well in a bigger town?

Our NCT group morfed into a baby sitting circle.

There were about 10 of us to start with, everyone knew each other as did the kids. We each started with about 6 hours of tokens in 30 mins, 1 hr and 2hr denominations. There was a list and we just phoned around until we found someone free. It worked pretty well for a 2-3 years. Once it was set up if ran itself

Don't you just ask friends?

My friends ask me. I ask them. I'm a contact for an emergency contact for school pick /holiday care.

This doesn't seam unusual to me.