'90s Babysitting: What Was Everyone Thinking?

When I was 10 years old, my family moved to a new neighborhood. It was one of those housing developments that seemed to be popping up everywhere in the ’90s, and of the 25 houses I’d say 20 of them were occupied by families with very young children. Those parents saw me coming, the oldest child in the neighborhood by far, and started drooling.

It was the ’90s, you see, so the fact that I was a girl, a double digit age and — bonus! — the oldest of four children? What further qualifications could they possibly require? After all, what was I doing except keeping their infants, toddlers, and children who were only a few years younger than I was alive for up to eight hours? By the time I was 11, my weekends were booked watching everyone’s kids for $2 to $3 an hour.

Looking back, this was weird right? TikTok user @ontheshoreside (we’ll call her Shore) perfectly encapsulates so much of what was unusual about this all-too-common set up in a hilarious video.

“Did anybody else start babysitting when they were 13 with, like, zero credentials?” she begins. “Your mom would get a call from a neighbor and she’d be like ‘You’re babysitting tonight,’ and you’re like ‘I don’t even know how to do that.’”

She remembers going to some house (whose house? who knows?) where there would be three or so children.

“A couple of them would be talking age and the other would definitely be a baby,” she says. “You knew enough that you would feed the talking ones Capri Suns and popsicles. Baby would usually get a bottle that you would feed way too fast and then the baby would start screaming and you’d have to call your mom and be like ‘There’s something wrong with this baby; this baby will not stop screaming’ and then your mom would be like ‘Well, did you burp the baby?’ and you’re like ‘That seems very aggressive’ but you would inevitably learn how to do that and you’d have to burp the baby, the baby would then be OK.”

So how long would an ordeal like this last?

“You had no idea what time this very old looking couple, who were probably only 30, were coming home because there were no cell phones,” Shore recalls.

Of course, at some point you were going to fall asleep on the couch — I know I definitely was at people’s houses until 2 a.m. sometimes, so of course I was sleepy, especially after watching their kids for eight hours so — and the sound of that garage door would have us at attention super quick

“[The parents] would come home, definitely probably tipsy and be like ‘Oh my God, you’re the best; they’re all asleep!’” Shore says, noting that the evening concluded with an awkward, maybe dangerous ride home with a very likely buzzed dad.

Contrast that to today, where Shore observes “most babysitters need, like, a PhD to watch kids.”

I was unaware this scenario was as universal as it is, and the commenters agreed.

“I mean, we all read Babysitters Club so I think that counted as our credentials,” one joked.

“Just found out a girl I babysat as an infant just turned 40,” said another. “I’m 50.”

“I wasn't quite tall enough to get the baby in the crib,” recalls a third. “So I'd pretty much have to hoist and fling her into the crib.”

Yikes.

But this comment stood out to me the most.

“I handled those three random kids better than I handle my own three children now,” they observed.

I think there’s some lesson to take here. As tweens and teens we often had an unearned confidence that our young charges picked up on. Were we doing everything perfectly? Of course not. But we didn’t know that because we weren’t holding ourselves to a ridiculous standard of perfection that no one can achieve but every mom seems to expect of themselves these days. So, it might be helpful from time to time to hold ourselves to ’90s teen babysitter standards... and go ahead and have a popsicle while we’re at it.