Babysitter: An American History Capa dura - 2009

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“A good babysitter is hard come by,” explained a reporter on CBS News during the summer of 2007. A year earlier, a mother blogged that “babysitters seem to care nothing about kids and charge $16 an hour to watch TV and text message their boyfriends.” And then, of course, reported Living Safely magazine in the 1990s, there were the “horror stories: parents arriving home to find their sitter has thrown a party, or gone to one. . . .” Intrinsic to such typical complaints is a longing for the golden age of babysitting when teenage girls were both pleasant and plentiful. Yet the view that babysitters today are hard to take and even harder to find is not new. In a letter to “Dear Abby” in 1969, one woman described the batch of hungry sitters “who ate the fridge to the bare walls” and disparaged the one with “the gall” to raid the “deep freeze.” What is unknown to these recent observers is that a prior idyllic age of babysitting is more apparent than real: distressed parent-employers have suspected their sitters of doing wrong ever since the beginning of babysitting nearly one hundred years ago. In fact, parent-employers have been complaining about babysitters since the advent of the “modern” American teenage girl, a debut that coincided with the creation of babysitting, the job that defaulted to white, middle-class, female adolescents by virtue of their sex, race, class, and age.

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• Choice, 05/01/2010, Page 0
• Library Journal, 07/15/2009, Page 114