Do you tell child a babysitter is coming round?

[desperatehousewife]

My DS is 3. He is normally babysat for by my mum and dad. He is a pretty good sleeper and once asleep not normally any problems. We have had the odd babysitter who he doesn't know as well...but has been totally oblivious to it as asleep.

We are going out on Sat night and are using a new friends 19 yr old daughter. She has never babysat for DS before. He has met her a couple of times recently and liked her.

Should I get him to sleep and hope he doesn't wake up asking for me. Or is now the time to be honest with him and tell him we are going out and that is coming round to babysit.

I think he will go ballistic if I do the latter. He might not settle and will be a mare and i will spend night being wracked with guilt.

we recently had the same thing, dd is 3 and ds 6mnths, dd has always been looked after by family, but now we are in usa have to us baby sitters we decided to tell her one was coming rather than put her to bed because although she is an excellent sleeper it would be just our luck that would be the one night she would wake and then be freaked out, it actually went fine and she went to bed better thab usual (probably because it wasn't me or dh doing it). I think the danger of not telling them is that if they do wake up the trauma of you not being there, but a relative stranger may be such that it jeopardises future outings, (my elder sister woke once and found a babysitter in the house that she didn't know was going to be there and then for a will after that had a bed wetting problem - can say for certain it was linked, but...) so i would approach it gently over the next few days to give him time to get used to the idea, hope it works out

thanks chicmum...i'm just thinking he's a little bugger if he even gets a whiff of us going out (even with my mum and dad babysitting) he'll kick off. Really not sure whether to tell him or not.

dhw, if you have a baby sitter in mind could you introduce him first and then tell him that sometimes when you go out this person will be looking after him - then on the night in question you dont have to tell him your going out in case he kicks off - but if he wakes up its all good?

I always tell mine.

I'd tell him. I was the sitter once looking after a friends child who slept through and had huge problems when he woke up, not nice for the both of us.

thanks everyone - i've decided i'm going to tell him - we can't continue to pretend that we don't go out (even though we don't often!) He has got to learn that we have a life outside of him.

I'm going to warn him in advance, put him to bed, get the babysitter to go up and read him a story and then wait for him to fall asleep then go out.

Sounds like a good plan.

Our dd loves being looked after by babysitters (she's 2 now) so whenever we go out we tell her who's coming over and she gets really excited - I think it's because they make more fuss of her at bedtime - they read longer stories or make them more different, they quite often play with her and sometimes even let her stay a little longer (we're quite easy going when it comes to routines). I think it's great to start getting them used to you being out every now and again, early on. My brother-in-law and his wife have a 3 year old and a 6 year old and they get hell from their kids when they go out because they leave them only once or twice a year so they're not used it at all - and that's with their gran, not even a stranger.