A dozen tweens and young teens recently practiced changing diapers on baby dolls at a babysitting class in Westport.
Each student had a page for notes and a starter first aid kit. Instructor Danielle Otterspoor explained babysitting is more than just taking care of kids.
“If you do a great job, and you have a great babysitting business, you can make some good moolah, some good money,” Otterspoor said.
Otterspoor is the owner and founder of Better Babysitting Certification, so she travels around the state of Connecticut teaching classes like these. She grew up reading “The Baby-Sitters Club” series and still uses it to teach her classes.
“I think ‘The Baby-Sitter Club’ books are really inspiring these young people today to be entrepreneurs and work with kids,” she said.
It’s a skillset she said is sorely needed, especially as Connecticut and the U.S. grapple with a child care shortage and rising costs. So in addition to skills like diaper changing and first aid, Otterspoor talks the students through the business: How to get clients, what questions to ask parents when they first arrive to babysit, and how to get paid.
“I always say for pay you can write, put flexible,” she told her class.
The average rate for a babysitter for one child in 2024 was $23 an hour, according to one report, but it depends drastically on where you live, and the age and qualifications of a sitter.
Danielle said a 12-year-old “mother’s helper” might make closer to $10 an hour, a fraction of what a 30-year-old professional might earn.
The rise of babysitting
American teen girls and boys — but mostly girls – have been babysitting as a job for a century now, according to Yasemin Besen-Cassino, a sociology professor at Montclair State University.
She said the job has changed a lot in that time.
“Keeping the children safe and alive was good enough and today, a lot of parents demand more out of babysitters,” Besen-Cassino said.
Besen-Cassino wrote the book "The Cost of Being A Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap.”
“Babysitting is a quintessentially American phenomenon,” she said.
It started in the 1920s, thanks, in part, to the rise of cars, credit and entertainment. She said it peaked in the 1950s.
“Especially, in the suburbs, couples would go out to dates and someone next door, especially like a teenager or tween would come over and take care of your children,” she said.
The need continued in the 1970s as more and more women entered the workforce, she said, and into the 1980s and ‘90s as divorce rates rose and “The Baby-Sitters Club” hit the bookshelves.
Since then, Besen-Cassino says parents' expectations for who they trust their children with have shifted.
“A lot of the babysitting is done by professionals, older girls and 18- to 24-year-olds,” she said.
Yasemin said this has to do with changing attitudes towards childhood and adolescence.
Changing nature of childhood and tweens
“Our ideas about what adolescent girls can do shifted a lot. We tended to give more responsibility to girls at the time than we do today,” Besen-Cassino said.
Yasemin cites a few reasons for this. For one, many people don’t know their neighbors like people did decades ago. They don’t have that strong community connection. But another reason just comes down to how society treats tweens now.
An analysis of census data recently published by The Washington Post found late millennials and Gen Z kids have been more supervised compared to Gen X kids.
Besen-Cassino said parents feel more pressure to make sure kids of all ages are using their time productively, while making sure their childcare providers are properly qualified.
“A lot of parents demand more out of babysitters,” she said. “CPR certification, babysitting classes or other things. They want human capital for their kids, new languages, perhaps art classes.”
This means less babysitting work for tweens and more money spent on hiring professional adults to provide childcare and enrichment.
Otterspoor, the certification teacher, said this usually means better childcare for children and more peace of mind for parents. She notices the trend shifting toward hiring young babysitters for mother’s helper roles – entertaining kids while a parent is still at home.
But Besen-Cassino worries this might not be quite the same.
”Babysitting for a lot of girls was seen as sort of a rite of passage,” she said. “This is a little bit of independence for them. They felt like adults. They felt like they had authority over kids and this was an important experience.”
Learn more
“Generation: Baby-Sitters Club” is the third season of the Connecticut Public podcast series “Generation: The media we love & how it shapes us.” Over five episodes, we ask how these novels shaped children’s publishing and literacy, and inspired future leaders of writer’s rooms, boardrooms and beyond.
New episodes of “Generation: Baby Sitters Club” drop on your favorite podcast feed each Tuesday in October. Episode 4 is out now.
Follow wherever you get your podcasts, so you don’t miss our conversation with series author Ann M. Martin in our season finale dropping on Oct. 27!
