Yep, I’ve done that gig a couple of times. It’s really fun, actually, once I can convince the kids that while Mommy and Daddy are here, they’re not *here *here, and we’re not going to bug them unless someone is bleeding. I bring all sorts of crafts and activities (nothing like watching the cleaning staff blanch when I bring out the oobleck in a fancy hotel!) and everyone brings a sleeping bag and a flashlight so we can bunker down and let the parents go as late as they want to. The hardest part is that no one wants to leave! I charge $10 per hour for the first kid, $5 for each additional, minimum $15 per hour, and I bring all my own supplies. (This pricing scale is a bit of a trick. Two kids are much easier to work with than one, so I price it so that people are strongly encouraged to come up with at least two kids for me!) Some people have each parent pitch in, and some couples decide to pay for it for their guests. Once my fee was actually a shower gift to the married couple (parents of two) and the guests at large. (Trust me, even your own kids will become a pain if you make them hang around your reception all night if there are no other kids there.)
As for the OP, I don’t have much to add. Basically yeah, it can be that hard, especially if you’re new in town or just not terribly social. And it can be very expensive, babysitters in Chicago average $12-15 and hour for one kid. And that’s an *average *- I assume there are still kids out there doing it for $3 a hour, so that means someone else is doing it successfully for $25. Me, I’m $10 in my own home, but I’d have to go up to $15 to go to your home. My own kids are just too disrupted if I’m out too much.
Lest you feel we’re taking advantage, consider that you probably pay your mechanic five to six times that amount to take care of your car. This is your *child *we’re talking about. I don’t provide slack-jawed yammering on the phone while the kids watch *Hellraiser *on the cable and eat frozen pizzas babysitting. I provide good homemade mostly organic food and play and structured educational activities and actual *care *for the child.
It really does depend on the age of the kids. My wife and I have no family in the immediate area to rely upon, and when the kids were really little, up to maybe 3 and 4 we never went anywhere. Around the 1 to 2 year stage kids can be quite frightened of strangers. In fact there’s a phrase for it: “making strange.”
It would have been too much to ask of a teenage neighbour to try and look after them at that age for possibly, what 8 to 10 hours. Not to mention the expense.
It gets better. At 8 and 9 years old they all but push us out the door now when a babysitter comes over, and have for a few years.
I think Dangerosa has a good rundown of all the things it could mean.
As for how easy to find one… We go out nearly every week, but when our latest babysitter moved out of town, I had to start over. I found someone via a Craigslist ad (I’ve found some great babysitters this way), but due to various schedules mismatches it was 3 weeks between when I emailed her and we could actually meet up. Then we had her do a “trial run” to make sure she liked my son and my son liked her. It all worked out, but in all it was close to a month just to find someone we’d be comfortable with. A family could go through all that and still discover that the babysitter wasn’t available on a specific desired day.
So 8 weeks may sound like plenty of notice, but it’s not implausible to me that someone could try to find a sitter for a specific day 8 weeks out, and not succeed–especially if they were starting from scratch.
This might be fine for an ordinary party, but not a wedding. Most of the time you have to RSVP well before a week in advance. The caterer needs to know how much food to make, the coordinator needs to know how many chairs to set up, etc. Backing out with only a week’s notice if you’ve already said you’ll attend is not a smooth move.
Rubystreak, take your friends at their word. You’ll just make yourself crazy if you worry that it’s really code for something else.
If we were in the same position as your invitees, I’m not sure we’d be able to find a sitter. We’re fairly new in town and we haven’t built up a social circle. I can’t think of anyone I’d leave my kids with. Twice when my parents were here visiting, my husband and I took the opportunity to get out, but only for a max of a couple hours. I completely trust my parents, but my kids are still small and the youngest is going through separation anxiety. My oldest has been left with sitters before, but only for emergencies (when I was in labor with the baby and when the baby was hospitalized a few months later).
I fully expect this situation to change as they get older. At this point, finding a sitter capable of handling a 3 year old and a 15 month old (climbing, eating everything, frantic when Mummy’s not around) would be difficult, and it is expensive. As they get older, though, things should be a little easier and we hope to be back in the wedding circuit soon! (Which is funny, because by then, everyone will be married with kids, and we won’t have anywhere to go.)
Kids don’t use babysitting as a “first job” thing the way they did when I was a kid. They’re simply not interested in earning their own money (or don’t need to because they have hefty allowances that take care of their teenaged needs).
Many parents won’t consider leaving their children with anyone but a trusted family member. I have no clue why that’s changed over the years.
It’s expensive! My neice makes $40 for one day of babysitting.
My neice has been babysitting for a little monster for about two years now. She can’t stand the kid. She quit babysitting and the woman nearly broke down in tears. She begged my niece to reconsider. The niecelette caved and is still watching the kid, but she says he’s a horrible, ill-mannered little jerk. Evidently, my niece is the only option this woman has! Maybe all the other teenagers already ditched her.
If you can just hang in there a little while, there will be more weddings when your friend’s kids get married (as well as your own). Viola!You know you are a dedicated parent to small children when you fantasize about doing basic things again and 5 - 10 years down the road seems likea perfectly reasonable estimate.
(Since it’s come up twice now, let me just mention that 98% of kids with “separation anxiety” only suffer from it in the 38 seconds as Mom or Dad is leaving and the 20 minutes after they return. Once you’re gone, they’re fine. When you come back, they know it’s safe to melt down and treat you badly to let off stress. It’s actually a sign of good bonding - when I have a kid who is completely indifferent about Mom leaving from day one is when I worry.)
Back in the day, my circle of friends gave each others names to their customers so there was nearly always someone who could do it if you were booked or otherwise unavailable on a given night. My two best friends and I had regulars, but would always fill in for each other.
I’ve seen this before. It’s a great idea if the kids are the type who will stay with a complete stranger.
I used to work in the nursery of a furniture store. Yup! Folks would park their kids with me while they bought dinettes and ottomans. It was actually a really fun job.
Sometimes it can be difficult to come up with a babysitter. When our kids were young, we were lucky enough to live near our parents, so we had help for something important like a wedding. We also had friends with kids and we worked out deals (we take their kids one Friday to give them a night off, and they take ours the following Friday) that didn’t cost us anything. The older the kids get, the better it works to have them stay with friends or share a babysitter.
Of course, for a wedding in a close circle of friends, you’ll all be looking for sitters at the same time, at that can make it quite rough–especially if your regular sitters are invited to the wedding!
It’s fairly common for multiple attendees at the same wedding to hire a couple of older teens to watch all of the kids together.
:eek: $50 to $100? For one evening? Granted, my youngest is 15 now, so I haven’t used a sitter in a while, but a hundred bucks? If we’re out at a wedding and reception, that’s probably five hours. A hundred dollars is $20 per hour. That’s over triple the minimum wage! Starting teachers here don’t make that much*, and they have to deal with 20 kids at a time and teach them something at the same time!
The standard for babysitters around here is the same they’d make working at a regular job in town, or perhaps a bit less. Call it $5 to $7 per hour. The most I’ve ever paid was $10 per hour for two kids, and I felt robbed.
*(The local school pays a starting teacher with no experience and a bachelor’s degree $21K per year. Figure 40 hours per week for 9 months, and you have about $14 per hour)
Oh sure, but for 2% they scream for hours. For some number of them it isn’t the seperation anxiety, its because they become manipulative little shits when they can get away with it and a sitter is the perfect person to get away with it. “I don’t leave little Treton” may be more about “because when I do leave little Trenton he convinces his sitter he can have ice cream for dinner, watch rated R movies, stay up until midnight and then the next day I have to deal with it.”
Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think I would really call what you describe “separation anxiety”. My son is 15 months and every week I try leaving him in the nursery at fellowship. The first time, I could hear him crying as I left. I came to peek in the window 10 minutes later (per the nanny’s suggestion) and he was still doing that uncontrollable sobbing thing where they’re sucking in huge gasps of air and wailing. Every week, though, we try and he’s worked up to actually playing without holding onto me. We play for a little while and then I take him with me up to the padded, sound-proof room they let babies hang out in during the sermon. The nanny said it takes some kids months to get to where they’re not crying the entire time after their parents leave.
When we left him with my parents, my mom said he cried hysterically for nearly an hour. My oldest has never had any real separation anxiety and when he was younger, he would have had a reaction similar to what you describe. I attribute both reactions to their innate personalities; they’re very different in almost every way. I have no doubt my little one will outgrow this, but he just hasn’t figured out that just because I’m not in his direct line of vision, it doesn’t mean I’ve moved to Siberia, never to return. (I also sometimes idly wonder if his reaction has anything to do with the three hospitalizations and numerous invasive tests he had to endure as an infant.)
I believe we’ve paid $20 an hour for a sitter. I know we’ve paid at least $10.
Remember that sitting is one of those “you can make big money Friday and Saturday nights - but its not a full time job with benefits” gigs.
We are now at the “call their friends and trade evenings” stage. Where we can call and say “we have something to do Friday night, can our daughter come over for a sleepover - we’ll owe you.” This is a great thing.
But that five hour average might not always be the case. I’ve seen many weddings where there was an hour or two hang-out between the ceremony and the reception, if you’re a half-hour or more away from home it’s not going to do you much good to drive back home. So, wedding at 4, reception at 6, let’s say you leave by 10:30 and add an hour for getting there and back… that’s around the $6 hourly rate you mentioned (at $50) and could be higher for people in different areas.
I’m going to show up and provide the other side; we are parents who go out alone almost every week. The difficult bit is to find a teenaged babysitter who is willing to just show up every single Friday (or whatever day), unless she has something important planned. You just hire her as a permanent sitter and cultivate that relationship. But you have to find a teenager you trust–ours is the daughter of a family friend who we also know from church. I babysat her when she was 3 and I was visiting from college. She’s a great kid. She’s getting too old now; she has much more of a life and can’t come as much. So I’ll have to start the search again. Before we had her, we had a wonderful neighbor girl whose mother works at the library.
(I dunno, I think maybe my town is stuck in a time-warp though. The girls here all sound horrified if you offer them more than about $4 per hour; that’s the going rate for 2 kids. Girls have actually said to me, “Oh no, that’s too much money!”)
As far as weddings go, that’s a tough one. Finding a babysitter for practically a whole day isn’t easy at all. If it was far away and I didn’t have family available, I would probably not be able to find anything.
However, I’d like to say that if at all possible, it is really great for your marriage to get out together on a real date. Our weekly dates keep me sane, and allow us to go out and have real together time. I really look forward to them and am unhappy if we can’t go. Sometimes we just go run errands at Target, but we’re alone together and that’s the important part.
My wedding reception starts at 6:30. Conceivably, a person could leave at 9:30, after cake. It’s not a huge time commitment, more like an evening out. I’m actually not doing a ceremony during the day and hours of hang-time between out of consideration for people’s time.
This is all interesting to know, about the sitter situation. Just another source of trepidation for a future parent. I don’t think I need to go out a lot even now, but it’s daunting to know how hard it is for some people even if they want to.
I wouldn’t worry too much about. In my experience, while they’re little and sitters are the hardest to arrange, you’re too mind-numbingly tired to miss going out that much anyway. That didn’t really help, did it?