My parents never engaged a babysitter for me.

I remember going to after school daycare for a few months after my mother returned to work when I was about ten to eleven years old. I begged to be a latchkey kid and they finally relented.

I remember babysitting for neighbors when I was probably about twelve years old. The couple left for a very long time and there were at least four kids under age nine. There was no food in that house. This was in 1988. There was no cable TV, no internet.

The eldest child told me I could get more money if I cleaned up. I swept their kitchen. There wasn’t much to clean. There wasn’t much to do. I felt responsible for keeping those kids safe and occupied. I remember spinning them on the floor in a papasan. The little one started crying because she was hungry. I traipsed all of them next door to my house and I asked my parents for a banana or something to feed that child. They soon moved away and I worry about them still.

I babysat for neighbors all throughout my teens, mostly good experiences that paid well for very little effort. Often, I would arrive as the babies or children were getting ready for bedtime. As I became more experienced, I would feed and ready kids for bed, then read or watch TV. I never felt comfortable eating the snacks or drinking the soda or whatever the parents left for me. Often the dads would drive me home, even though I was perfectly capable of walking.

I paid maybe $350/month for full-time daycare and preschool for my daughter when I was a teacher in Georgia in the early 2000s. Shoutout to Ms. Divina and Mrs. Kristie!

We had a lovely babysitter, Erin, when we lived in Hawaii and we paid her well and our kids loved her and she loved my kids. I trusted her. It was only a few times in the evenings so my husband and I could go out.

Since we homeschool, we never needed to worry about regular child care. I can’t imagine having to pay for regular childcare for my four kids. Thankfully, they’re all teens and young adults now.

When my eldest daughter became a teen, I was worried about having her babysit. She wanted to make her own money and there aren’t many ways for tweens and teens to do that, and certainly not in another country. We lived in Germany at the time, so the only families she babysat for were other American military families who lived on the nearby bases. We signed up for a babysitter training day with the Red Cross. They certify kids over age twelve in CPR and basic child care.

Unfortunately, I ended that little job when a mother required my fifteen-year-old daughter to babysit her special needs medically fragile epileptic toddler – with no instructions, no access to a phone or communications, no medical expertise, and no emergency information – for $5/hour. I imagined horror stories if something happened to that baby and my daughter couldn’t contact someone.

When we moved back to the States, to Ohio, I realized that few parents are willing to pay well for childcare – $5 was the norm per kid – and my teens were expected to cook, supervise those meals, clean up from meals and play, sometimes bathe, and get kids in bed and asleep – before the parents returned. My teens babysat a couple times before deciding it wasn’t worth the effort.

A local pastor did pay my teen about $10-20 an hour for one vegan toddler, but they had two rambunctious dogs, so she chose not to continue that business deal after a couple times – because of the untrained dogs.

During the pandemic quarantine, I noticed so many parents realizing that is not feasible to work from home, have their children learn online at home, and also care for homes. I do understand that if a model is working or at least familiar, and then that is removed, it is very stressful. So many families couldn’t get any child care when they returned to work. Other families couldn’t pay for child care if their jobs were terminated.

There is a childcare crisis in this country.

Children delight me with their brazenness and eye contact and how they say and do the most unexpected things. They cannot and should not be controlled. So many children are destroyed by school systems and societal systems and religious systems, by those same system values perpetuated at home. The system is broken and is working exactly as it was designed to work.

I see oodles of posts in the city and mommy Facebook groups begging for babysitters, nannies, and whatnot – all year long, but especially now that it’s spring and summer is looming. These parents are desperate for camps, nannies, day care, something – for their children over summer while they are at work.

Some of the posts are interesting and the requirements are a bit outrageous.

I’m sure these parents are super nice. I wonder if it’s even worth the money.

It’s normal and natural that people want the most value for the least money. But a true caregiver has to be insured and have some kind of access to social benefits. For most, it is just a glorified part time job for cash.

Babysitting seems like a normal, acceptable, easy job for a teen or college student, young mother, retired mom or grandma. I think it’s problematic that care giving is often one of few jobs available for women.

I don’t want to be responsible for someone else’s children in my house, yard, car, at a pool, amusement park, restaurant. I don’t really want my kids to be responsible for someone else’s children. We live in too much of a litigious society.

I have witnessed things, y’all. In these days of ring doorbells and nanny living room cameras, it’s just someone’s word against a kid’s. Who will the parent believe? And I see and hear what these kids say and do in the streets, y’all. Whew.

I’m sure many don’t think of the worrisome situations that I do. I wouldn’t want to be liable and I sure don’t want my kids to be liable in case something happened with these children on their watch.

Childcare in Crisis: Ohio

• Ohio now has the lowest eligibility for Publicly Funded Child Care in the country for kids 0 to 5. North Carolina, who previously held last place, updated their eligibility to 200% FPL for children 0-5 in July of 2023, leaving Ohio in last place for the same age group at 145% FPL.
• Between 2019 and 2021 (the most recent figure available), the number of children benefiting from publicly funded childcare in Ohio dropped by 28,697, from 172,585 children to 143,888. Publicly funded childcare enrollment peaked seven years ago in 2017 at 181,122 and has declined since.
• From 2017 to 2022, the number of childcare workers in Ohio dropped by 35.89%, with the biggest decrease of nearly 5,000 workers happening between 2019 and 2020 Many areas around the state simply have not recovered from this loss of workforce and many remaining childcare facilities are at a high risk of closure as key federal COVID emergency funding ends.
• The median hourly wage for childcare workers in Ohio is $13.15 — an annual salary of $27,352 for those working full time. For comparison, the median for all workers in Ohio was $21.51 an hour in 2022, with 13.4% of Ohioans living in poverty.
• The amount the state reimburses childcare providers per child is not based on the actual cost of childcare, but rather on a backward-looking market rate survey of what providers recently charged for services in an area. This rate is important because it determines the amount of money providers receive and therefore their ability to stay open, improve facilities, and pay providers a living wage.
• 39% of Ohioans live in a childcare desert. A childcare desert is any census tract with more than 50 children under age 5 that contains either no childcare providers or so few options that there are more than three times as many children as licensed childcare slots. 41% of white Ohioans, 37% of Hispanic or Latino Ohioans, and 29% of Black Ohioans live in a childcare desert. In Ohio, childcare deserts are most prevalent in rural areas.
• Affordable childcare lets parents work. According to a poll done in 2023 by the First 5 Years Fund, nearly 59% of parents who are not working full time would do so if childcare was more affordable.

I don’t have answers to the childcare crisis in the USA. Other countries provide childcare and education and parent benefits and medical care. We don’t value families here. Get out and vote.

Some people have interesting requirements for pet sitters:

Resources:

• Motherwhelmed by Beth Berry
• Jesus, the Gentle Parent by LR Knost
• Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay Gibson
• Raising An Emotionally Intelligent Child by John Gottman
• The Mother Dance: How Children Change Your Life by Harriet Lerner

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• Healing Mother
• Standing Alone
• Balancing Blogging and Mothering
• Navigating Motherhood During Deployment
• A Mother’s Résumé
• Childcare Crisis