What is the youngest age babysitter you would use

[firstpregnancy1]

I know this topic is heavily debated and standards now are vastly different from 10,20,30 years ago.

I have a 7month old and a 2.5 year old.

My husband and I would like to start getting fitter and pre babies we would regularly play tennis in the summer evenings.

My children both go to bed at 7pm and very very rarely wake up once in bed. If the baby did it would be a quick dummy plug in and job done.

We have never used any kind of babysitter before.

I see 'ofsted registered' childminders offering babysitting services but we don't really need a whole evening and would they even be interested in coming for just 1-1.5 hours.

It got me thinking about whether it would be ok to consider a neighbour teenager?

Both kids would be in bed.
We would be gone roughly 60-70 minutes.
We would be about a 2 minute drive from home if they did wake up and sitter called us could come home immediately.
My toddler knows this teen ('not amazingly well) but wouldn't be startled or scared if they woke up as we would tell him that 'x' is coming round tonight . The 7m old wouldn't really know.

In this situation, with these set of circumstances, how old would this teenager need to be in order for you to agree to this.

13?14?15?16?17?18? Not at all unless an ofsted registered professional?

I consider myself quite overprotective and I can't tell if my judgement is normal.

If it's relevant, the teenager is sensible, reliable, has basic common sense and a 4 year old sibling so she's 'good' with children.

We don't go out together for this reason! No way am I trusting my 15m old with a teen. We have.15 and 18 yo step kids who just don't have the life skills in an emergency (not brought up by me or they might). I go out with friends. Partner is a homebody.

I used to read the babysitters club series when I was a child. I absolutely loved the books. Weren't the girls around 12 or 13? I know that was in the US but times have certainly changed.

@existentialpain 2 of them were 11 and Dawn said in her interview that she had been babysitting since aged 9. One of the parents decided to use older babysitters instead for a while as she had just had a baby and wanted someone older while the baby was little. But the older babysitters spent the whole time on the phone and ignored the children so they went back to the babysitters club. I remember way too much about those books.

Yes i think Mallory and Jess were 11?! I don't remember that exact scenario but I really loved the books until I grew out of them eventually. I think they continued for a long time but with ghost writers not Ann M Martin. Mary Ann was always my favourite character because I was a lot like her, but I liked Stacey too because she came from New York! I learnt a lot about diabetes from Stacey. But yes, they all babysat much younger than most people would consider acceptable now.

I didn't have teens babysitting my kids until they were about 10.

Up until then, it was only ever a trusted adult.