Taking care of kids is never easy. Taking care of someone else’s kids, however, is a much more difficult task. I’ve baby sat a few times, so I can say from personal experience that it’s a lot harder than it seems. However, as a teen I only did this for a short period of time, just to earn a little extra money. There are other individuals--men and women alike--who turn to taking care of children as an actual career. Part time nannies, live-in nannies, part time baby sitters, full time baby sitters, none of these jobs are ever easy. Each child has different specific needs, and every family handles situations a little differently. Being a nanny is like having children of your own, regardless of whatever socioeconomic status you may be in. From personal experience, more teens tend to lean towards the path of baby sitting--decent pay, low work hours, ideal for a teenager. It’s more the young adults and adults that lean towards nanny-ing, although I know some girls that were nannies.
Before becoming a baby sitter or a nanny, a lot of price negotiating goes on, and many factors impact this. Whether it’s a full-time or part-time job, or maybe just for occasional help, the distance between the nanny or baby sitter and the home, how many children there are, additional responsibilities that could be required, transportation (like if the nanny needs to take the children to any classes, play dates, etc.), years of experience, and other special qualifications are all factors that could play into how much the nanny gets paid. This much speculation tends to be for the older set of baby sitters/ nannies. When I was hired as a baby sitter, they offered to bring the kids to my house and told me the flat fee per hour.
It seems as though for temporary baby sitters, teens are the best option. It’s enough to make a little bit of extra money without the huge time commitment of a regular job. And even if they are consistently hired, the hours of being a baby sitter are much easier to handle. However, when the time commitment grows higher than 2-3 times a week, the baby sitter transitions into more of a nanny, and that’s when time constraints change and most teens decide to slink away from these responsibilities and parents decide to go to the older set for help.
Although the per hour pay seems to be better than average for teens, for adults $9-10 an hour is not a sustainable income. Parents should be able to either take care of their kids and maintain a job or have higher pay to their more permanent baby sitters and nannies. The reason why they were hired to begin with is because parents wanted to be able to sustain their kids by still going to work--wouldn’t it be fair to be able to help their employees like this too?
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