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I remember the first kid I babysat for. Cute and precocious, he would gaze into my eyes and ask questions like, “Are you a kid or a mommy?”
I was, I felt, neither. At about 14, I was by no means a parent, but I was considered mature enough to care for the neighborhood’s toddlers and elementary schoolers, microwaving their dinners, playing Hot Wheels, and showing them Teletubbies.
The babysitter occupies sort of a liminal space in kids’ lives — not a nanny or daycare teacher, who might provide more full-time care and education, but someone who comes over for an evening or an afternoon, hangs out for a little while, and then leaves. “You’re supervising kids and implicitly offering them a model of what it’s like to be older and a teen — but you’re not edifying them,” Anne Helen Petersen wrote last year of millennial teen babysitters. “No one asked for my resume.”
Babysitting has changed since Petersen and I did the job in the ’90s. What was once a rite of passage for teens and tweens has become a professionalized job with dedicated apps and a workforce of experienced adults. Parents come to potential sitters with expectations and questions that reflect that increased seriousness, Katherine Goldstein, a journalist and author of the care-focused newsletter The Double Shift, told me. “Are you feeding them the right thing? Are you not letting them watch too much TV? Are you doing approved activities?” she asked.
There are lots of possible reasons for the shift from teen to adult babysitters, from safety concerns to increasingly packed teen schedules. But something is lost, say experts and parents alike, when babysitting becomes a grown-up job with expectations to match.
Taking care of a kid for a few hours can be a formative experience for teens. “Up until a couple years ago, Gracie was very shy, but babysitting encouraged her to use her voice,” Karen Johnson, an author and mom to a 14-year-old sitter, told me in an email. “She had to meet families for the first time and look confident. She also had to learn to state her pay rate and know what her time is worth as a sitter.”
It’s not just the sitters who benefit; kids, too, get something unique out of being watched by someone closer to their age. For young kids, “older kids are just so much more enchanting than adults,” Goldstein said. And resurrecting the culture of teen babysitting could help strengthen some of the community ties that have frayed in recent decades, leaving kids and adults alike ever more isolated from one another.
For Goldstein, trusting teens to care for younger children is part of “having a more collaborative sense about how to raise kids” — something she and others say is sorely needed in America today.
The rise and fall of the teen babysitter
Modern babysitting emerged in the 1920s, Faith Hill wrote in the Atlantic last year, as middle-class families gained more disposable income, and it became more acceptable for moms to go out at night. If the ’60s and ’70s were a time of anxiety around babysitting (the besieged sitter became a horror movie trope), the ’80s were perhaps the cultural apex of the practice. That decade saw not only the debut of the Baby-Sitters Club book series but also the arrival of perhaps my favorite fictional sitter: Rosalyn, the ponytailed antagonist of Bill Watterson’s iconic comic strip Calvin & Hobbes.
When 6-year-old Calvin’s parents go out for date night, Rosalyn rules with an iron fist, routinely forcing Calvin to go to bed while it’s still light outside. A tough negotiator who often insists on payment from Calvin’s parents up front, she seemed extremely grown-up to me as a child reader ,and she seems extremely grown-up to me now.
She is, however, clearly a teen, justifying her apparently exorbitant rates by pointing out that she needs to save for college.
You’d have to do a lot of babysitting to make a dent in your college tuition bill, even in the ’80s (Petersen writes that she made $2 an hour; I think I made $5). Nonetheless, babysitting was a widely accepted pastime for teens — especially, it must be said, for girls. It was a way for young people to make a little money and a way for parents to get out of the house without hiring a full-time caregiver.
Times, however, have changed. Hard data is difficult to come by, but as Hill notes, American conceptions of teens and tweens have changed radically since the ’80s. While 12-year-olds once routinely served as babysitters, now, the majority of American parents think kids should be 12 or older before they’re allowed to be home alone.
Teenagers are also busier than they once were. “They are in a lot more extracurricular activities,” Johnson, author of the book What Do I Want to Be When They Grow Up?, told me. “Sports and academics are more rigorous and time consuming than in years past, leaving less time for jobs.”
Indeed, teen employment in general has been declining since the 1970s, though it has rebounded somewhat in recent years.
Meanwhile, the rise of surveillance culture and intensive parenting have led to higher expectations of babysitters, many say. Goldstein says the message she got from parents as a teen babysitter was, “Have fun. There’s some money for pizza.”
Nowadays, there’s “probably a lot more angst and pressure” on babysitters, Goldstein said. And platforms like Care.com make it easier than ever for parents to hire adults who come with reviews and star ratings, rather than relying on the teenager down the street.
The benefits of babysitting
That’s bad news for teenagers, who need more of the experiences babysitting can provide. “We are not giving kids enough what I call independence challenges,” Goldstein said. Parents today often believe their older kids should be spending their time on academics or in structured activities, like sports or enrichment classes.
“Babysitting offers a lot of important care skills, critical thinking skills, responsibility,” Goldstein said. “You can’t get some of those same skills in adult-led activities.”
Taking care of other kids also helps teens build real-world social skills, something that’s long been a concern for adults and teens alike. Babysitting “forces me to use my free time to connect with kids and learn how to deal with problems I might face when I become a mother, instead of using my free time to scroll on my phone,” Gracie, the 14-year-old sitter, told me in an email sent through her mom.
Meanwhile, time spent with a teen babysitter can be closer to free play — something kids today often lack — than to adult supervision. “Younger kids get to enjoy an energetic teen who is willing to do fun stuff adults are not,” Johnson said. “Gracie will run around, play games, do crafts, and play pretend.”
I don’t want to romanticize teenage babysitting too much. As Vox’s Abdallah Fayyad has written, the decline in teen employment actually coincided with a big jump in high school graduation rates. And, given the state of high school students’ reading scores, focusing more on academics might not be the worst thing.
Meanwhile, as Petersen notes, teens who babysit aren’t always making pocket money they can spend on themselves — some are forced to work to help support their families.
I actually didn’t like babysitting all that much as a teenager. The same kid who asked cute existential questions also once managed to get pee in my eye. I sometimes felt pressured to babysit — a pressure I believed, I think correctly, I would not have experienced if I’d been a boy.
Still, I learned patience, adaptability, when to stand my ground and when to give in — skills that helped prepare me not just for parenthood but for relationships with partners, friends, and coworkers as an adult.
“The hardest part of babysitting is having to make split-second decisions as if the parents of the child(ren) you’re babysitting were there,” Gracie said. “It can be hard to figure out what ‘the best thing to do’ is when each family has different rules and runs their household differently.”
After doing some reporting on youth babysitting, I see it not as a perfect solution for every family or every situation, but as one part of an ecosystem of care, whose decline tells us something about families and communities in America writ large.
Goldstein notes that her family’s favorite young babysitters are children of parents she knows well. But “when you don’t invest in those larger family and adult relationships, it can feel scary or somehow unsafe to have a teenager over.”
Indeed, as it becomes less common and more difficult to know our neighbors, it’s simply harder to have the kind of interfamily bonds that foster babysitting — and lots of other forms of care, from meal trains to checking in on elders. Hiring teen babysitters isn’t going to reverse the social forces that have isolated us in the first place, but for families that can make it work, it’s a small-scale way to build community in what feels like an increasingly anti-communal world.
Plus, a good babysitter is just a fun break for kids from the sometimes rule-bound routines of family life. Goldstein said her kids sometimes ask to invite their babysitter over to play, even when their parents are home. And as Johnson points out, “getting special attention and having someone willing to go look at their special rock collection or rave about their beautiful artwork is good for the child’s well-being.”
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Thanks to everyone who wrote in about peace signs, and you can always reach me at anna.north@vox.com.
