It used to be that my mom would find baby sitters among her friends who had teenagers. This way, she knew them and she was helping her friends out by giving their kids a job. However, with the advent of internet popularity it is becoming increasingly rare to find a babysitter this way. Babysitting has gone high tech with online profiles and community support websites. Here are just some of your options if you don’t have a teen age neighbor to call:
This site even has pet sitters available so you can get a reliable sitter to watch your beloved Fido. The site lists sitters within a certain radius of you. Baby sitters post profiles that you can look at and you can perform a background check through the website. (The fee is $10.) However, many babysitters often do the check themselves and then provide it in their profiles. One nifty feature of this site is that you can post your jobs and every baby sitter within a 50 mile radius of your house will get an e-mail about it. There’s also a community so that you can rate baby sitters and they can rate you!
A similar website where you can post jobs and check out sitters’ profiles. It also has the added benefit of having lots of ‘how to’ articles on interviewing a babysitter or performing a background check. There is no community feature where you can rate other baby sitters though.
Don’t forget Craigslist either! They also have postings for baby sitters and people wanting baby sitters can post as well. However, there is no way to check someone’s profile or run a back ground check without meeting them. And again, there’s no community to provide accountability.
It certainly makes it more convenient if you’re in a pinch to find a baby sitter. I have to say though, as the mother of four girls, I would be quite hesitant to allow any of my daughters to post their personal information online–even when they’re teenagers. I would much prefer that my daughters baby sit for people we know or at least people that have been recommended by friends. Likewise, I would have to be in a serious pinch to hire someone I don’t know at all to baby sit for my kids. The closest I’ve come is hiring someone who I didn’t know but who had been recommended to me by several families in my church.
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