Babysitting - what's the going rate?
 

Long story short - we will be moving soon. Have already met some of the neighbors and one of the couples has an 18 mo. old baby. They can't wait till we move in so our 15 yr old daughter can baby sit :)

What's the going rate these days for babysitting? Inquiring teenage minds want to know.

Thanks,

My wife says $8-10 an hour, which seems high to me, but she says that's what teenage babysitters are getting. We do ask that the babysitter clean up after herself and the babysat - if she feeds them a snack, she does the dishes, if she gets out toys for them to play with, she puts them away.

Agreed. We pay $10/hour. Not a bad part time job--no taxes to pay!
Christian

My daughter charges $6. The neighbors keep her pretty busy.

just paid $10.00 an hour

I'm going to be an old fogy here, but kids nowadays are spoiled rotten. Fast-food restaurants in our area can't find any teenagers willing to work for pocket money because their parents take care of that for them. As a result, whenever I swing by a burger or taco joint (when thankfully isn't often these days), I have to wait forever to get a screwed-up order because the restaurant is grossly understaffed - by middle-aged mental midgets.

There are some girls in our neighborhood who put out flyers saying that they wanted to babysit to "earn money" for some school-related field trip. The wifey called them up to arrange for some babysitting and they said that, like, actually they weren't really interested in babysitting, they just, like, wanted a "donation". The whole thing was a scam. In any event, paying a 13-16 year old girl 8-10 smackers an hour to sit on her butt and watch TV with some younger kids seems ridiculous to me. $5-6 per hour is more like it.

we pay $7 and they do a fine job.

we paid 7 an hour, but raised to 8 when she turned 16. However, I also have a 5 and 3 year old, and they are pretty wild, but she's happy to do it.

We also have a 21 y.o. who helps out when she can on the weekends, she's $10 an hour. She's also very happy with that. I always give them an extra few bucks behind wifey's back when I pay them (kids are very wild, remember?).

Ross, are you moving out of the area all together?

Hey Chris - nope, just moving to a smaller house in Castro Valley. Smaller house - Bigger Garage!!

Now I feel like an old fogey - that almost brought beer out the nose!

The wife and I thought $6/hr would be pretty good.

By the way, the 15 year old is saving for a Boxster! She already has enough to cover six months of insurance :)

We shall see.

Thanks again!

12$/hr - anything over 30 minutes is considered an hour, anything under isn't. Also includes open use of the fridge and pantry. Eat anything you want - remeber, the more suger you feed the kids the bigger the crash will be, but pror to the crash will be hell to pay!

Rules:
No friends over and no use of the phone unless it's a 911.
Stay out of the Master bedroom and don't go into Mommies top drawer! No bouncing on the beds (remember what happend to the 10 little monkeys!).
Stay away from Daddies work bench.

Whats in Mommies top drawer???

$8/hour

Rules:
No more than one boy over at a time.
Don't drop the baby.
Don't put water in the liquor bottles.

I think there are more--my wife would know...

Screen them somehow if you can. A co-worker of mine was having her children sat by another co-workers 19 year old daughter. She was going through Mommie's top drawer, her closet and taking stuff home.

Holy crap, $5.00 per hour around here and they are glad to get it.

Some friends of mine have the worst kids I ever met. Daddy somehow found a 19 year old smokin' hot Swedish baby sitter. (Au pair?) Mom and dad went away for the weekend. When mom got sick, they returned home early. Story goes that dad made several panicked calls home to warn the baby sitter they were coming home, but the phone was off the hook. When they walked in the house, there were strangers sleeping all over the house. They were in the parents bed, the kids beds and crashed on the floor. They finally found the kids sleeping on the floor of a walk-in closet. There were traces of cocaine on the glass coffee table and a bong in the kitchen. They went through a few good bottles of wine they found in a wine cooler.

Mom said "You're fired!"
Dad said, "Let's not be so rash, it's not that bad."

They are now divorced and the Swedish girl is no longer dating daddy. Man, I love the suburbs!

I've heard so many au pair nightmare stories. A former co-worker of my wife's had his Range Rover impounded after his European au pair and her um, edgy boyfriend were caught buying drugs in an inner-city neighborhood.

Think about it: an au pair is a teenage girl who was that desperate to get out of her parents house. Gives you a hint of the personality type.

For babysitting, give me a quiet, slightly geeky neighborhood girl whose parents I know well. I'd rather have a known personality and no rules, than a stranger and give them a list of 100 rules. It's all about trust.

$10 here in sunshineville. probably a little over market - but we have a few that will gladly change their plans to accommodate ours.

We have used a 17 y/o neice a couple of times. as she got older she became less trustworthy. So its the grandparants once in a blue moon. We went 2 years without a babysitter from 2003-2004. We do not go out much w/o the 2 and 12 years olds.

We paid said neice $10 an hour.