Do people actually use babysitters?

[Babyboomtastic]

Do people actually use babysitters? I don't mean a close family member or friend having the kids or coming over to babysit, but more in the old fashioned sense - hiring and paying someone to look after your child?

I see it mentioned on here a lot, but I've not known anyone IRL who has used a babysitter. One of my friends does some occasional babysitting (locally to her, not in my area) but it doesn't seem to be the done thing here.

I always used other parents so people I knew. I wouldn't have used a teenage girl. Reciprocal babysitting. At one time there was a token system in operation.

Exactly.

I challenge this on SO many threads.

Absolutely bizarre perception of how babysitting works.

Lots of people do though? Sitters.co.uk, bubble, childcare.co.uk not the street but still a stranger regardless of what “checks” they’ve had.

I guess this hugely depends whether people have family who can occasionally look after the child. Neither me nor DH have and it’s not realistic to assume we’ll never have a work commitment / hospital appointment/ anything else that requires short notice child care (we don’t do date nights anymore, but even so we need to use a babysitter 1-2x a month).

Waaay back in 1987 when I was 17, to earn a little bit of money, I put an advert in a local shop window saying 'baby sitter available' with my parents home phone number on it. A few days later I got a phone call (the only one I ever got from that ad) from a lovely woman. I ended up babysitting her children until I was 22, at least once a month, but probably more like fortnightly. They were a lovely couple/ family and the husband used to pick me up and drop me home at the end of the night, until I passed my driving test. Just yesterday, I drove past their old house and wondered, if that were now, I doubt anyone would respond to an ad in a shop window from a total stranger to look after their children!

No family nearby. I prefer to have a small group of well vetted and known, or have worked/currently work as a nanny for us or someone we know.

I would have gone insane if I had never been able to go out for an occasional evening!
Being a stay at home Mum was the hardest job I’ve ever had. Going out with my DH for the odd date night was essential. Usually the babysitter was a friend’s daughter but on occasion I phoned the Girl Scouts association to find a responsible teenager. Of course I always met with them before using them.

We used friends teenage kids and then teenage neighbours who wed known for years.
The alternative was leave the kids home alone or never leave the house until they were mid teens. Left kids with df once. Came home to find him pissed. Mil declined to ever have them.

A friend's teenage daughter is studying childcare and we very very occasionally pay her to care for DD. Maybe once every 6 months. Min wage means we can't afford £30 babysitter plus £50 cinema trip 😅

Do me a favour and don’t make our preschools and nurseries are filled with children inviting one another for sleepovers. They aren’t.

Children of this age who stay away from their parents generally do so with grandparents. You know this, so do I. If you have a reciprocal arrangement with your friends where your young children regularly stay at theirs and vice versa then great, that works, and that’s good. At present, that’s not the case here. I don’t massively appreciate being painted as some sort of over anxious parent because my very young children aren’t going on sleepovers, FYI, there are any number of parents of older children who aren’t especially anxious but hesitate over sleepovers.

How do you go out togther?

My DC are 11 and 13 and we don’t have family or friends around and we have never hired a babysitter either - so we have just never gone out together in the evening since they were born!

You just don’t hear about babysitters around here. I did look into it some years back but you had to sign up to agencies with subscription fees and that wasn’t something that we wanted to do.

As the children have got older they have each been away on school or club residentials or sleepovers, but never at the same time!

School parents here that we know either had their own families around or weren’t in a position to help so doing reciprocal babysitting wasn’t a thing.

When I was younger my parents would pay teenagers on the street to look after us.

My son and his family are in Canada, they have no choice but to use a babysitter. They use a teenage neighbour. My grandchildren love having her look after them.
I'm obviously too far away to babysit and my daughter in law's parents are another 3 hour flight from them, so they can't either.

We don't. We make effort to spend time together indoors after the kids are in bed.

We regularly asked an older lady in the village to babysit so we could go out. No family to ask. I know she did this for a few families. We were lucky to be able to afford it as I definitely felt we needed to be able to go out in the evening.

I think that’s completely different to using someone from a website. It’s someone who is known to you, you know where they live etc. I totally get that not everyone has family to help, we often don’t and I couldn’t just not go out for the next 10 years but I’d always try to use someone familiar, someone from school or someone from the village. I know lots of people who are very blase about just going online and booking someone. I wouldn’t do that for my dog let alone my kids!

it’s the same when on holiday- I’ve seen countless people use hotel babysitting services and nannies and I would rather not go out! They’d happily to go to kids club for a few hours so I’d go for a nice lunch with my DH rather than leave them in a hotel room with someone I don’t know

Obviously! Otherwise babysitting agencies wouldn't exist and half my sixth-formers wouldn't have a job.

People tend to keep it on the down low though as there is a weird amount of judgement. On here and in real life.

Some of it is people taking family help for granted and it never crossing their mind that some others don't have it.

If you were some kind of dodgy predator it would be a lot less trouble finding your victims through friends of friends of friends than by signing up to an agency, giving references and having your reviews on there, in my opinion.

Most abusers are known to the victim.

Yes, we had a teenage neighbor for a few years but they've gone to uni now. Luckily a teenage girl from around the corner posted on FB to offer babysitting and she's babysat for us three times now, she's lovely and DD adores her

I know people who do. Nursery staff often do them. For school aged kids, I'd imagine many hire teenagers. It's usually neighbours or friend's children, not just a random nobody.

We always used babysitters. I used people who advertised in the local shop. Or teens recommended by other families. Or when DC attended montessori, I used the staff from there. Usually paid £10 to £15 an hour depending on experience and rounded it up if we were back halfway through an hour.

If you don’t have family locally or even in the country, there is no option other than using babysitters from your local area, nursery, agency

Yes. I have but also used friends.

Yes, we used local teens and now my teen DC babysit local kids

This is fully theoretical as we didn't tend to go in holidays to the sort of places that had hotel nannies / babysitters (not rich enough!), but is there such a big difference between hotel kids club and having a hotel babysitter? I get that with the babysitting they're on their own with the kids which is more of a risk, but the staff for both will be vetted and checked (probably the same staff), and TBH if the hotel hasn't done a good job of checking and has hired someone reckless or abusive there's a pretty big risk with kids club too right - particularly if they're do it activities with them like swimming or watersports or whatever you'd hope they're hot on safety and supervision? Basically unless you never ever let the kids out of your sight you're always trusting someone else to some level?

Personally if the choice was between putting my kids into kids club for a few hours so we could have an adult lunch, or leaving them asleep in the hotel room with a babysitter so we could have dinner out, I'd take the latter, not because of trustworthiness of the babysitter but because my kids always hated organised fun kids club type activities and also I would feel worse about missing out on spending time with them in the daytime of the holiday whereas once they're asleep they won't even know we're gone... Like I say academic as not something that came up for us but I guess it shows we're all different and shouldn't judge one another?