Is This The End Of The Teen Babysitting Era?

As a child of the ’80s, I spent my summer breaks either babysitting or being babysat. Teen sitters held a mythical status for me. I was in awe of the neighbor who walked me to the library, taught me how to paint my nails, and introduced me to Days of Our Lives on lazy summer days.

I know I wasn’t the only one altered by the presence of the girl next door. Jennifer Barnett, who writes the Stroopwaffled newsletter, was raised in a strict home but says that having teenaged babysitters changed her entire worldview: “They talked about boys and makeup and gave me access to freedoms I didn’t otherwise have, like staying up late or eating popcorn in the living room. It always felt so safe with them.”

Of course, like so many in our generation, both of us wanted to be like our sitters so much that we took up the mantle of child care relatively young. “Neighbors tried getting me to babysit when I was 9!” says Barnett, who said her mother was able to ward them off until she was in middle school. I was just 11 years old when I first got CPR certified and learned how to change diapers and save a choking toddler. Even before I could drive, I was cooking boxed mac and cheese and slathering suntan lotion on 5-year-olds, wasting away hot Florida days poolside with my charges.

What felt idyllic at the time seems, in retrospect, like a bafflingly large responsibility for someone so young. But as Jessica Calarco writes in her book Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Social Safety Net, young girls are often raised to be caregivers, socialized to believe we are naturally able to look after children. “We groom girls to stand in for the social safety net from the time they’re old enough to hold a baby doll,” she writes.

Though I’m not sure I ever felt like a natural with children — I was in it more for the money and the Baby-Sitter’s Club aspiration — it did feel like a rite of passage. One that seems to have become a vanishing rarity as teenagers have come to know both their limits and their worth. The age of the exploited, underpaid child sitter is over.

Though I live on a limited income that makes booking a sitter for a night out a luxury good, I’m not sure it’s such a bad thing to be paying the people responsible for my kid a living wage. The trouble is that with a smaller circle, as an exhausted single parent, I don’t have the benefit of a babysitting swap or a nearby grandparent to rely on when the neighborhood youth trade Pull-Ups and sippy cups for jobs in the drive-through. When, in the pre-pandemic era, I posted an ad in search of a summer sitter on the college job board, I sorted through dozens of one-sentence emails only to find few who could commit to the gig — they were all spending their school breaks traveling. Today, friends report scrambling to fill in the summer child care gaps, noting that the teens who once might’ve taken pocket money to lounge in the air conditioning are instead going away to weeks-long enrichment camps or spending their summers with grandparents. Even finding good one-off child care has proven nigh impossible of late, with one neighbor posting a $50-per-hour surge rate on NextDoor so she could hold Valentine’s Day dinner reservations.

Teens like 15-year-old Audrey say that’s because kids like her are juggling a packed schedule with little downtime. “Besides, I have to babysit my brothers all the time. I don’t want to do it for someone else’s kids in my free time, too.”

Though I live on a limited income that makes booking a sitter for a night out a luxury good, I’m not sure it’s such a bad thing to be paying the people responsible for my kid a living wage.

While apps like Care.com and Urban Sitter have stepped in to replace the word-of-mouth references our mothers once used with official background checks that give parents a greater sense of safety, that access comes with a fee — and minimum age limits. Although the American Red Cross offers recommendations solely based on the age at which it is legal for kids to stay at home alone in the United States (which ranges from 8 in South Carolina to 14 in Illinois), Urban Sitter requires sitters be aged 18 and up.

The shift to professionalization that the apps have ushered in has also led to both clarity of roles and higher average wages. An annual report by Urban Sitter reveals that most sitters are earning well above the minimum wage in most places, with a national average of $25 an hour (up 5.9% in the last year) or a flat rate of $110 per day. We all know that the better you pay and the better your snack cupboard looks, the greater your likelihood of keeping a good babysitter on hand.

Yet moving sitter recruitment online doesn’t necessarily help parents find the best fit. Michelle L. recounts turning to an app after having difficulty finding a carer in her rural part of the Catskills — and calling it quits after two unsuccessful matches, one of whom requested to bring her boyfriend along. Another mother, Marilee, tells me that finding a mother’s helper while she worked from home was proving tough, likely because she wanted more support with cleaning and organizing than with child care itself.

The teens, it seems, not only know their worth, they know the value of their work.

Young people like 14-year-old Hayden in Boulder, Colorado, seem to understand that knowing your limits is key to having a good babysitting experience. When advertising her services, she makes clear what’s possible and what isn’t: “I can cook and take care of pets, but I can also only take one or two children at a time, otherwise I cannot devote my attention to the kids when they need it,” she tells me.

And setting those boundaries seems to be not just savvy, but necessary, if a glance at r/babysitting is any indication. Common inquiries include: am I being taken advantage of, why are they not paying me, and how do I break up with this terrible family without hurting the kids.

Reading the posts, it’s astonishing to learn what some parents are asking their sitters to put up with — from undisciplined or clearly ill children to extending the time you’re away for hours with no notice. It’s not unusual for the professional caregivers who lurk there to root for the kids while urging young sitters to get out. Other times, they make it clear to new sitters that the parents have unreasonably expanded the scope of their work. Because, as it turns out, the teen sitters of my youth, who made sure the kids were alright, were met with much lower expectations than those of today. Being asked to serve as a chauffeur, housekeeper, cook, and Montessori preschool teacher all at once appears so common that I don’t wonder why the teen sitter’s become an endangered species.

So if you do find someone who does the job well and whom your kids like, don’t take them for granted: Come home when you say you will and pay them what you agree upon, if not more. Otherwise you may end up like Adrian Daub, host of The Feminist Present podcast, who once joked about being called out by his sitter for trying to negotiate their rate. He confirmed for me over email that yes, he was accused of entering a “slippery deflationary slope.”

The teens, it seems, not only know their worth, they know the value of their work. And unless something big changes soon, we really, really, really can’t do this without them.

Courtney Tenz writes about the arts and culture. Her stories on parenting alone have appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Vox, and more.