Meet the parents ordering babysitters as easily as a takeaway
Anyone under 40 probably already is, says Fiona Cowood – they’re just not telling you
Where are your kids tonight then?” asks the woman I’ve been chatting to at a party for the past 10 minutes. “Oh they’re with a stranger I booked off the internet,” I say. She sips her wine and laughs. “So who’s got them, really?”
Such is the response of most people when you say you’ve left your most prized possessions in the care of someone you first met an hour ago, who arrived at your door like a takeaway curry. And yet as party season peaks, on-demand babysitting services such as sitters.co.uk and apps like Bubble and Kowalah are revolutionising parents’ social lives – you might just not know it because they’re reluctant to tell you.
It’s certainly a strange paradox that in these risk averse times – when we won’t let our children play freely on the streets for fear of abduction or worse – many of us will happily welcome in a stranger and give them the Wi-fi password and a tray of snacks. News came this week that Google has even patented a remote babysitting service that can protect unattended children by remotely locking doors and switching off plug sockets.
When we started using Sitters in 2013, my eldest daughter Daphne was eight months old. I didn’t tell my mother because I knew she would think it weird. (She also refuses contactless cards, thinks online banking is dodgy and recently got out her purse to pay for an Uber.) At the time, we were living in north London, more than an hour’s drive away from her in Kent. My husband and I didn’t go out together that often but as we were lucky to have a pretty sound sleeper, we didn’t want to pass up every offer of a night out. With Sitters we could just tap in our requirements and within 30 minutes, we’d get an email saying that Tanya or Ellie or Sheena would come and take charge. If my mum or a relative asked who was babysitting, I’d fudge it: “Oh just a friend…”
We weren’t alone. “I didn’t tell my mum we used Sitters,” says my friend Jenny, who has a son and daughter. “She would have started going on about Madeleine Mccann. We were the first of our friends to have children and we just needed a solution. All the sitters are checked out and we were happy to pay. It was so easy.”
Sitters, which was founded in 1999 and merged with 50-year-old Childminders of London in 2006, is essentially an internet enhanced babysitting agency. Everyone on their books has been thoroughly checked out and has professional childcare experience. Instead of phoning a secretary sitting behind a Rolodex, parents simply consult a website instead. (See, Mum – less scary than it sounds.) But technology is now serving up babysitting apps, which function more like Uber and Deliveroo, enabling parents to order a babysitter in just a few taps of their smartphone. Bubble, which launched last year, describes itself as a marketplace as opposed to an agency, where parents enter their requirements and are given a choice of sitters, complete with their proximity, hourly rate, photograph, profile and reviews to help you choose. Every sitter is passed through an online identity and background check, too. “Our USP is social validation,” explains Ari Last, Bubble co-founder. “We’re working from the belief that parents want to book babysitters who their friends love and trust. So Bubble gives you a selection of babysitters that have been used by other parents from your school or by friends, for example.”
Ah, the babysitters. When talking about this topic it’s easy to get caught up in concern for the kids, but what about the sitters themselves, who often turn up blind at an address? How safe are they? We recently opened our front door to Eva*, whom we’d booked through Sitters. She seemed anxious to check she had our mobile phone numbers right because of past experience of bad behaviour – not from kids but from their parents. “One time I went to babysit for a really wealthy family,” she told us. “They were meant to come home at midnight. When they didn’t show up I texted to remind them I had to get home by public transport. They finally arrived back at 3.30am, drunk and arguing. I asked them to get me an Uber. They told me it had arrived and sent me outside but the car was for a neighbour. They watched me get turned away by the driver then closed the curtains.” Eva’s phone battery had run out and she had to take several night buses, finally reaching home at 5.30am. On another occasion, she arrived at a house to find the “boy” wasn’t 17 months as she was expecting but 17 years old and with autism. “I must have read it wrong when I accepted the job,” says Eva. “When his mum left, he locked the door and told me to take my clothes off. I was terrified. I frantically phoned his mum but I was in tears when she got back.” Stephen Allen, Sitters’s director says that, thankfully, the vast majority of bookings go very well – because the parents want the sitters to come back, and because the sitters want to be booked again. “We allow carers to tell us if they don’t want to go back to a certain family again and we always want to know why,” Allan explains. “Very occasionally, we may have to tell parents that we can’t provide carers for them anymore.”
So will we all be happily making babysitting arrangements online and through apps in five years time? Rachel Botsman, author of Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together And Why It Could Drive Us Apart, thinks so. “These ‘trust leaps’ – when you do something differently to how you’ve always previously done it – take time,” she explains. “Think back to when you first put your credit card details into a website, for example. Most bad decisions about who to trust are actually made due to a lack of information and that’s what technology can deliver really well. We need that vetting process to be really good – when it comes to our kids, we need that kind of rigour.” *Name has been changed.