On the message board at the entrance to my gym, there is a note that says:
Hi. My name is Ashley. I’m 14 years old. I’m looking for babysitting work. I can stay with your kids while they sleep. $15 per hour.
I’m telling you, folks, we have very spoilt people in our rich little town.
“I can stay with your kids while they sleep.”
What are her plans when the kids wake up and she’s all alone with them?
I babysat once for half an hour and it felt like playing russian roulette, but hell, for 15 bucks I’m willing to watch all the sleeping children you want.
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She also adds that she knows CPR. That’s the waking time activity, I guess.
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I don’t know what the going rate for baby sitters is nowadays, but if you can’t handle children while they’re awake, I’m not letting you watch them.
She sounds like she just had a babysitter six months ago.
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That’s the going rate. I’d pay it.
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Then what will a grown up with experience charge? Twice as much?
My sister pays a grown, experienced nanny in a large city, and it’s not $30 per hour. Plus, the nanny does housework in the process.
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I don’t think it’s necessarily unreasonable to pay an experienced nanny who does housework $30.00 an hour.
That being said, an unexperienced teenager who explicitly signals that she does not want to deal with the child in any meaningful way does not deserve $15.00 an hour: $5.00 an hour is probably more like it.
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To a 14 year old who literally had to have a babysitter herself six months ago? (I googled.) Maybe it was different when I was a child, but I don’t think the average 14 year old has the gumption to babysit. It’s funny, by today’s standards, my parents would have been guilty of negligence, and they never hired teenagers to watch me or my brother.
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No worse than people wanting to get paid large sums for finding out interesting stuff, an activity called research.
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If those people are 14-year-old kids, yes, it would be extremely weird.
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We pay $10 an hour for sitters, but the kids aren’t asleep while they are being watched. We usually get students from my School of Education’s special Ed program because of my oldest kid’s issues. When we lived in CA, we paid $20 an hour for Mexican immigrants to watch them. They always cleaned as the kids slept. I miss that. Nobody cleans here while they watch the kids.
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I pay $20/hour for my kid’s math tutor, but he’s actually teaching her something, and something specialized at that. (Math tutors who can teach math being hard to come by around here.)
$15/hour seems steep for babysitting. I charged a $1.50 back in the 70s, which the inflation calculator tells me would be about eight bucks an hour now — seems right. Minimum wage, more or less.
Of course, I didn’t know CPR!
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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