Thanks for posting this, Amy. I just had a baby in October and am fully expecting my 11 year old son to babysit (by age 13, anyway) his little brother if I need to run a short errand to the grocery, post office, library, what have you. Guess I will be doing some research on the laws in my state regarding child welfare. This floors me, though. I, too, started babysitting when I was 13 and was fully capable of changing a diaper, making a bottle, using a stove (and a fire extinguisher :)) and soothing an upset child. How are we supposed to teach our kids to act like adults if the government keeps treating us parents like children????

I was the baby of the family, so I never had to watch my brothers or sisters. But I remember taking a babysitting course at around age 13 or 14. Yep me a guy and I did end up doing some baby sitting. I could do it, true some minor hassles but not impossible.

This totally shocks me! True I might not have been the best but for many kids it is not beyond capability.

I think we should Ban the "Babysitters Club" book series as it maybe harmful thoughts to youth.

I have seen that too...a sibling having a significant disability and the others see it as there duty to rally behind them. One girl I had a date with said her goal was to get herself setup so she could take care of her disabled brother who was currently living with their Aunt.

My ex-sister law likes to leave my niece and nephew to be babysat by her new fiancée's teenager. He usually just ignores them (they are getting to the point they really don't need a babysitter - a referee might be more appropriate) but one occasion shoot my nephew with an airsoft gun because he was making too much noise.

I loved babysitting. Once I hit 12 I was babysitting every Friday and Saturday night. I made TONS of cash b/c I babysat for rich people...cash which I hoarded and put some in the bank then I would blow a reasonable sum at Bath & BodyWorks.

My life is pretty much the same, 13 years later, except now it's Sephora and the beauty section at Nordstrom.

Kids love(d) me b/c I do stuff with them like bake brownies from scratch (not from a box!) and listen to their little kid problems like I would my sister's or friend's problems and level with them like a grown-up. If you show a kid you value their opinion and what they have to say, they're much more willing to listen to you when you ask them to please help with the dishes or to keep their voice down (we're talking like 6-11 year olds. Teenagers are a lost cause, I believe. I certainly was.). No one likes being steamrolled by authority.

My daughter took a babysitting CPR course at 12. She is now 13 and has yet to be hired. Mostly, the people around here all have nannies. She's been offered a job as a mother's helper during the summer which means she goes to the local beach club with a family and takes the kid to the craft table and makes bracelets. I don't think that its that the mothers don't trust the kids. I think its that they have the money to afford a steady person in the house who also helps with errands because they drive.
I've left my older son in charge at times of the younger. Sometimes it works out. Sometimes they fight. It reminds me of when my older brother was left in charge. He used to torture us as his younger siblings. That used to be part of growing up.

My how things have changed in 100 years...

My great grandparents emigrated from Scotland to the west coast of Vancouver Island 100 years ago and had 9 kids.

Each child was responsible for the next younger child.

After a few years all Grandma had to do was sit and knit. Go Grandma!

It keeps getting worse and worse for today's kids. The powers that be have even taken away paper routes from kids. My older brother and I had over 200 customers back in the day. We split the route and were done by 4:30. This was back in the day when there was an evening and a morning paper (yes, I'm OLD, thanks.). We made good coin. Nowadays, the paper is delivered at 6 a.m. by people driving the routes, and some have as many as 5K customers to a route. I can't imagine getting up that early to deliver papers. So much has changed. I used to babysit, too, from the time I was 12 years old to when I was 15 and started waiting tables. I earned enough money between my paper route and babysitting to have my own phone installed, with my very own phone number! Not that I was home enough to use it, but that was back when phone service was $15/month. I had a cute litte blue "princess" phone. Rotary dial, they didn't even have push buttons on 'em yet!

Both of my daughters took the babysitting course at the local Red Cross, and have their babysitting and CPR certificates. Eldest has a job babysitting my neighbor's car when she goes skiing. Younger has a mother's helper job with a family down the street a couple of hours a week on Saturday, but she's taking over the cat-sitting job when eldest is away at school. But neither of them has had the experiences I had when I was their ages. I remember one New Year's Eve, four couples on the street went out together and left me at one couple's house with all their kids! I made $50 that night - a tidy sum for a 13-year-old back in 1971!

Well I guess my parents were downright abusive then. (well dad was but not because of this.. funny how he wasn't "cautioned" for that...) I remember having to walk my little sister home from school, help her with her homework, and even help get dinner started. And wouldn't ya know, no one died. It sucked sometimes because, well I was 11 and wanted to go hang out with my friends, but it also taught me how to be resonsible for another person. When I turned 12, I actually made a shit load of money babysitting other peoples kids on the weekends. I guess those people were guilty of child labor.

I am #5 of 6 kids. In 1972 my mother made me go to only morning kindergarten the whole year and I came home and took care of my baby brother,Tony, he was about 6 months old when I began.
My parents owned a restaurant that we lived above, so she was just downstairs if I needed something. I was a very capable child and Tony was always my under my care our entire childhood. My parents worked 80 plus hours a week. My father supervised railroad shops and my mother owned restaurants and later she managed country clubs. We also would work in the restaurants.
Those were real life skills to manage my adult life that I learned. It wasn't "The wheels on the bus go round and round" and to expect someone to attend to my every need. To me the over involvement of parents is going to be more detrimental than a supposed neglect by this type of mother.
I can assure I was not a teenage pregnancy statistic becuase I understood the work a child is.

Wanda says: "I can assure I was not a teenage pregnancy statistic becuase I understood the work a child is."

I actually think this is a really good point. The over coddilization (is that a word?) of today's children probably have a lot to do with the overwhelming number of teen pregancies.
A lot of them probably become pregnant because they have parents who never bothered to teach them about hard work and responsibilty and safe sex. They spent so much time "protecting" their child that they forgot to actually teach them.

I also blame the govt a little bit to be honest...Instead of being allowed to teach our children how to take care of themselves, and in turn, take care of others, we are sorta being forced to "protect" them into ignorance. Because of all the "protect the children" legislation that gets passed, and the "but what about the chiiiiiilreeen?" mentality that runs rampant in society, kids are taught that the world will take care of them so they become lazy, uninspired, and entitled.

Kids today are all brought up to be special little snowflakes who have no concept of the real world or how to handle real responsibility. Then they breed more special little snowflakes. And those snowflakes breed more snowflakes. It's a world full of special little snowflakes who all think that they are all special and unique.

I think Wanda hit the nail right on the head. I too took the Red Cross babysitting class around age thirteen and I babysat for years. It cemented my opinion that having kids full time was not for me.

We aren't doing today's kids any favors by bubble wrapping the world for them.

I was a "latch-key" kid from 4th grade onward, and was required to watch my little brother starting at 12. Most of the babysitters I had as a little kid were young teenagers. We all survived.

I might have a 14-year-old start babysitting my daughter occasionally. She has a baby sister the same age as my kid, and wants to earn some extra money, so why not? When we go out for dinner, we're usually within a 5-or-10 minute drive from the house, anyway.

Per the article on the Daily Express, "The NSPCC advises that no child under 14 should be left home alone and no child under 16 should care for someone younger than themselves." Government Paternalism at its best!

Also, one of the sweetest things I see is the big brother of the 6-year-old next door helping her do things -- draw something, tie something, etc.

Exactly! One of my older daughter's friends, male, walks his little 5-year-old sister to school almost every day, and it's just the cutest thing, he holds her hand even when he's not crossing the street with her! It's adorable the way she looks up at him, too.

"And, by the way, prehistoric pubescent parents didn't babysit for half an hour, they raised their children to adulthood"
Actually I'm pretty sure a much higher percentage of their offspring did not in fact make it to adulthood. We've made progress there in part by refusing to accept bad outcomes.

One of the problems with trying to come up with an outrage every week is that some of Lenore's examples aren't actually that outrageous. I think this one is right at the line of being reasonable.

Here's the thing, there are two levels of babysitter, the kid down the street and an adult. That's not to say all adults are more responsible than teenagers, but they can bear legal risk. One of the issues here is that we have to have someone we can put away for life if they shake the baby.

Under a certain age you don't leave your baby to a teenager, you higher a pro or use grandma. As a parent, I'd say somewhere around 2 to 4 years of age, hence I don't find the government action outrageous. But as a government worker, not sure where I would put the line.

If you had to craft a bright line rule, at what age would you allow children to be supervised by a teenager? Keep in mind you can only pick one age and there is high developmental standard deviation. Also, when a child slightly older than that dies while under the supervision of a minor, you have to lead the press conference and take the heat for the lax regulatory oversight that led to this poor, poor child's death.

It's the way the incentives are aligned for the government workers that create these absurd rules, shame we can't go back to trusting parents. But then we would have to accept the occasional bad outcome.

I put some blame on people who for generations said "I want things to be better for my kids then they were for me."

Oh yeah, and the concept of childhood as being a happy-go-lucky stage, which has gotten extended into the twenties (not counting the folks who have written off adulthood as something that happens to other people).

Making your kid's life "easier" than your own may have been a good idea way back when, but it's gone too far, as good intentions so often do.

Anyway, this story has been pretty well covered now, so I will respond to the one about Valentine's Day.

"Brown said she and her staff didn’t want to take the chance of causing problems for students with food allergies."

Bullshit. They don't want to take the chance of causing problems for the school.

I've left mine with teenagers from the neighborhood and professional nannies. One of the teenagers took my then 6 year old to her boyfriend's house down the block. Another invited girlfriends over to eat my food. Maybe it's part of a more problematic package, but I just haven't found them as trustworthy as we were in the 1970s. I think all kids need to learn about responsibility; I'm not that comfortable having them learn it on my children.

And there's this. . .I used to sit 3, 4, or 5 kids at a time from age 12 onward. But my mother, or a mother I knew well, was always within screaming at the top of my lungs distance, in case something went wrong, like when the 5 year old pushed the 3 year old down the stairs and he broke his leg. That's not the case anymore, and when you leave your children with a pre-teen or young teen that's all you're getting on a Saturday night -- not mom and dad as a backup, not neighbors who'd run over at the first sound of trouble, but children watching children.

In Maryland, a grammar school has canceled Valentine's Day.
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Well, I can think of ONE excuse for that - even if it isn't what they were thinking of. Namely, the need for teachers to have more time to do the things they used to do - like teaching reading and writing.

Every year, it seems, there's less time for that.

When I was 11 or twelve I logged quite a few hours babysitting (always boys. Even 30 years ago parents were skittish about who was watching their daughters). I had the satisfaction of earning my own money and it was a great learning experience. One mother actually interviewed me for the job first and asked for references, which my parents thought was great. Not that I was left entirely on my own. All the kids I watched lived in the neighborhood, so if a real problem arose I knew I could call one of my folks over for help. One neighbor in particular was a widow who really appreciated the assist while she was supporting her family. It also afforded her time to meet someone and eventually remarry.

One of the problems with trying to come up with an outrage every week is that some of Lenore's examples aren't actually that outrageous. I think this one is right at the line of being reasonable. - smurfy

So, just so I got this strait - you think it is reasonable for a woman have a cruelty to children charge on her record for letting her son watch his sibling for less than 30 minutes?

you think it is reasonable for a woman have been fired from her job over two yrs ago and legally bared from pursuing a carreer in the field she trained for until 2019?

You think its reasonable?

You know its stories like these and reactions like smurfys that make me sad I gave up my dreams of killing off all of humanity

When my sister and I were little, my mom went to our school principal (it was a K-8 Catholic school) to ask for recommendations of 8th graders to babysit. We had a 13 year old sitter who would bring her 11 year old sister along to help, and my mom's rule was that the sister could start watching us alone when she turned 12 (might have been state law).

I also started babysitting when I turned 12. I babysat for $7 an hour at age 12 and $15-20 an hour at age 18. I wasn't a better babysitter at age 18--certainly not worth the 250% premium except for the fact I could drive myself. If anything I took the jobs more seriously when I was 12-13 because it was my only possible employment opportunity and I thought that babysitting was the coolest and most grownup thing in the world, whereas by 18 I was like, eh, I could be sitting in an office or waiting tables. For that reason alone I would totally hire middle schoolers as opposed to grad students to watch my kids--you're getting the same quality of service for SO much cheaper. Except of course for these ridiculous laws.

I grew up and live in a small town so maybe that makes a difference but we still have 12 year olds starting to babysit and being the primary babysitters. Usually the parents know the kid from church or he/she is one of their co-workers children. When I was 12 (which wasn't that long ago) it wasn't uncommon for me to be babysitting 4 or more kids of an evening. It's one of the reasons I like living in a small town, we all know each other so we aren't going to try and rat one another out if we break one of the "nanny" laws.

"Under a certain age you don't leave your baby to a teenager, you higher a pro or use grandma. As a parent, I'd say somewhere around 2 to 4 years of age, hence I don't find the government action outrageous."
You contradict yourself with that statement. The child being watched was 3, within your guidelines for children who would be old enough to be watched by a teenager.
"If you had to craft a bright line rule, at what age would you allow children to be supervised by a teenager? Keep in mind you can only pick one age and there is high developmental standard deviation."
Which is why it should be left up to the parents to determine if the person they are leaving their child with is responsible or mentally or emotionally mature enough to handle the responsibility they are entrusting them with. You can't just craft a "bright line" rule. There are always other mitigating factors to consider. Part of being a responsible parent is considering those factors. If someone then needs to be held responsible legally if something does go wrong, the parents should then be held responsible.

"no child under 16 should care for someone younger than themselves."
Yeah... About that. I was a certified lifeguard at 15. That's the age you had to be to take the training, though whether that's a Red Cross regulation or state, I'm not sure. I started working essentially as soon as I was certified. It was at a day resort, mostly catering to company picnics. I never saw the same families twice in one summer, and yet, without knowing me, they felt comfortable leaving their (often times small) children alone by the water, assuming I or the other guard on duty would watch out for them. Not just regarding safety, but often times low level babysitting. Obviously, that's a parental judgement issue. I would be interested to know, however, if it would no longer be allowable for "children" under the age requirement by the NSPCC to have jobs in fields that might leave them "caring" for someone younger than themselves.