It is when your child grabs it and dumps it into the tub. Unless, of course, you specifically asked her not to use her cell while she was watching your kid.
If she was doing such a good job watching my kid, she wouldn’t have lost her cellphone.
Well make up your mind. After all, if the kid barely had to move to reach the phone, then clearly it (and she) were mere inches away. How much closer do you WANT her to your kid? :rolleyes: 
And more seriously, you haven’t answered my question about the bracelet. Is it the phone in particular? When she enters your home, does she still have the right to have her possessions on or near her, or does your kids’ ‘right’ to be grabby supersede that?
What sort of sitting are we talking about here? I’m starting to picture a Nanny Skexis perched on the nearest available surface, within a 1-foot radius at all times, unmoving, unblinking, eyes wide on the kid every nanosecond, in order to earn Dangerosa’s 10 dollars. 
(btw, maybe it’s just my weirdo city, but the only teenage babysitter I know gets $20 an hour and says that’s the going rate).
The only real way to stop the speculative fussin’ and feudin’ is to find out exactly what actually happened. When I read the OP I pictured the bath running or finishing, and the kid in the process of getting in or out when the legendary grab was made. Does "don’t know’ mean “didn’t ask,” or that the sitter claims not to know (which would be very weird)?
Yep. The best I recall, she was telling me the tale while I was doing something else in the kitchen. Seems like she said “picked up my phone”, which implies that she had laid it down close to the water. That wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but like Diana asks, what if it had been an heirloom watch? Probably not smart to have it around water either, but at the same time the child shouldn’t have picked it up. I split the blame 50/50.
I think most of us are assuming that the phone was lying within easy reach of the tub, unencumbered in any way. Grabbing something so readily available is rather different from wrestling something off of one’s person.
In my home, anything laying around is fair game for a kid to pick up and look at with only a few exceptions. Someone’s purse for instance. But if someone brings something into the house and sets it down, its ok to pick it up. Then if its dropped in the tub, its an accident.
Who gives a crap if she’s on the job or not? She’s a minor. Her PARENTS might want to call her.
The entire point to a cell phone is that you can carry it with you. There’s nothing wrong with someone having a cell phone on them, on or off the job, and if she was involved in any way in bathing a six-year-old she was doing plenty more than most babysitters do; honestly, what 6-year-old doesn’t bathe themselves?
Not paying for it would be cheap and demonstrates an unwillingness to accept responsibility for the actions fo one’s child. It’s a move based out of pure greed, nothing else.
Her PARENTS know where she is and she can leave a number. Making my kid pay for the phone shows an unwillingness to accept responsibility for leaving your phone close enough to the tub for accidents to occur.
Are we ever going to find out why a 6 year old needs to be bathed by the sitter, or are you intentionally holding out on us?
This seems intentionally obtuse to me. So it’s not simply that you’re hostile about the presence of a cell-phone, you’re willing to waive your kid’s responsibility for the accidental destruction of anyone else’s personal property in your home as long as you didn’t specifically give permission for it to be there?
When I used to baby sit as a kid, I’d always bring a book or a little project along with me to read or work on when the kids were doing their homework and not needing assistance, or were napping, or bathing, or in bed for the evening. If your kid picked up my book and accidentally dropped it in a bowl of tomato sauce, or broke one of my tools, would you offer to replace it? I’m curious because at first I thought it was just a reaction about the cell-phone, but the quoted message seems to me like you would justify or excuse accidental damage to nearly any personal property and thus shift the responsibility which IMHO is a terrible lesson to give your kid. Accident or intentional, necessary item or not, we pay for things we break, period. I do, at least, and I will expect my (hypothetical) children to.
As a babysitter, I would have told the parents that it happened, and would have accepted gratefully if restitution were offered, but would not have requested it myself. From the babysitter’s point of view, I took a job working with a six year old and therefore accept that accidents (note accidents, if the kid intentionally flushed the phone, that’s a different story) happen, the same way that if I were working with dogs I’d accept that sometimes I might get bitten. It’s the right thing to do for the parents to offer to pay, but I wouldn’t demand it because even as a teenager I realized that some people have different (or conveniently flexible) definitions of culpability and are willing to foist the responsibility to anyone within reach of plausibility. It was plausibly my fault and therefore I wouldn’t make an issue of it, but I would also probably not babysit your kids again.
I would never try to withold information from YOU, Bear 
I don’t know what was going on because I wasn’t there. It’s possible she was in the bathroom keeping the child(ren) company during bathtime, or maybe helping her rinse shampoo out of her hair (as others have pointed out). The cousin/mom has 3 kids and I think they were all in there together. Do y’all need me to get the whole story from my step-daughter?
Like, say, a cell phone number. It’s so convenient.
That’s just too darned bad. A six year old is old enough to know not to break things. You break it, you buy it.
And failing to pay for it shows an unwillingness to accept responsibility for your kid’s behavior. See how that works? Because seriously, this:
If it’s YOUR stuff that you’re willing to have trashed because you can’t be bothered to teach your kids that not everything in their line of sight is theirs, great. But I sincerely hope that you warn other people *before * they come into your home that as far as you’re concerned, everything they bring with them and fail to grasp tightly now belongs to your children.
Ah. It’s just that if this was a developmentally delayed child, it would take much of the responsibility away from her actions.
In such a case, Dangerosa’s ludicrous parenting stategy of “my kid can and will grab anything you set down and that’s perfectly acceptable” might be understandable. But for normally developed children, 6 years old is old enough to know learn things like “Dont touch”, and “Dont take”. It’s not so hard to teach a 6 year old to not mess with other peoples’ shit simply because it’s temporarily in your home and within reach.
My home is child-proofed to the extreme. I do warn any people who come in here that they should stash all belongings up high, or in a very secure place. When people leave their laptops, I-pods, cell phones, or PSPs on the coffee table, they shouldn’t blame the baby when he slobbers all over them, or the two-year-old when he calls Tokyo on the cell phone. Shiny little things with buttons attract little children. I recommend that people protect their own possessions.
That said, I know little about typical six-year-olds. My five-year-old is developmentally disabled, and I wouldn’t put it past him to dunk a cell phone, just for the reaction. I also can’t imagine any reason to have a cell phone in the bathroom, as I and his dad and even his teenaged step-sisters have managed to supervise his baths so far without clinging to a cell phone.
Someone else mentioned this before but I want to reiterate… many people simply don’t use a landline! Myself as well as many of a parent-friends do not have one either.
I do not have kids but I would definitely not mind if a babysitter brought a cell phone and I think it’s a good thing that the sitter kept it close to her - bathroom and all. If something happened to the child, like he drowned or something, EVERY second counts… even the extra 35 seconds it would take to run to the closest landline.
The parents should have paid 100%
If it were my kid, I’d pay. My babysitter keeps her cell phone close by and that’s fine–sometimes when I need to reach her when we’re out, I call her on it instead of on our home phone; it’s just easier. Guess my attitude is different than some of yours. I can’t imagine telling my sitter I did not want her phone in my home.
If I were on the other side (as the babysitter) I would hope the parents would simply offer to pay, but whether or not I would request that they do so depends on the circumstances. The fact that the clients were family is an important factor. I’d hope they would pay (in fact, I’d expect them to be quick to offer), but since our relationship is more than just business, I’d be leery about pushing it. If I piss off a client, they can just stop hiring me. If I piss off family, that crap just stays around and comes back to bite me. I don’t see any logical reason why they’d be pissed/offended, but logic doesn’t always rule the day. The fact that they didn’t offer to pay is already a red flag.
You don’t sound very “nice.”
Phones belong in the same category as purses, IMO. Personal, necessary, and crammed with stuff that’s of no use to anyone except the owner. Why would anyone “pick up and look at” someone else’s phone? I’d see that as an invasion of privacy. As for why some people bring their phones everywhere, that’s just the way it is nowadays. Deal.
Beyond that, I can’t comment until/unless I know where the phone was originally and how it got into the tub.