Adventures in Babysitting

I’m fortunate that my in-laws live so close.

(No, I’m not drinking as I write this…why do you ask?)

What I mean is that we can often rely on my husband’s parents to stay with our daughter when we want to go out for a few hours. It’s good quality time for them and our daughter, and I estimate this arrangement has saved us about $3 billion over the past five years. (Give or take.)

With babysitters now earning anywhere from $10-$15 an hour to watch one child, it makes me want to travel back in time to visit the teenage me who accepted $1 per hour to babysit up to four children, hold her down, and scrub the word “sucker” (and the ever-present Clearasil remnants) off her forehead.

I don’t even want to know how little the people who babysat us were paid. In my opinion, there is only one reason the babysitting hourly rate has increased disproportionately to inflation — and that is that we are willing to pay so much for good care because we love our children way more than our parents loved us. (How else do you explain all the bicycling we did without helmets, the gallons of non-organic milk we consumed and leaving us in the care of uncles who told us The Tell-Tale Heart as a bedtime story?)

Perhaps I’ve revealed too much.

I can’t believe I ever even wanted to babysit. Because in addition to it not being worthwhile financially, some of the child care circumstances in which I found myself completely threatened my mental and physical well-being.

There was the family with four children who gave me the responsibility of ensuring the oldest child practiced piano while I babysat. After his parents left, I sent him into the next room to practice. I heard a click, then piano playing for half an hour, and then another click. I went to investigate and learned that he had recorded an earlier practice which he played back on his tape recorder while he occupied himself playing video games in another room.

Another family had two children — a boy who was only one year younger than me and his sister, who was about 5. His parents hired me to try and shame him into behaving, and also because they were worried he was going to torture his sister if they were left alone. My first night on the job, he held both me and his little sister at gunpoint (a BB gun, but still) while threatening to flush her pet goldfish down the toilet.

On the rare occasions we do have to hire sitters, they really have it made, based on the fact we have only one child and they earn a small fortune. The upside is that for our money, we get qualified sitters we really trust.

Although, we have bought our daughter a BB gun just in case.