Woman Asks If She Was Wrong To Charge $35/Hour For Babysitting Her Cousin's 3 Kids

Sep 05, 2022 by apost team

Taking care of children comes with plenty of responsibilities and challenges. Watching children can be stressful, and it takes a lot of patience and time management skills to balance everything all at once. It can get pretty expensive to pay for childcare services and babysitting fees, and good babysitters can be hard to come by. It’s common for parents to turn to their friends or family members and ask them to help out at a potentially lower rate to help save some cash. However, the job is still the same, and family and friends still expect to be paid a decent wage.

A 24-year-old woman was staying at her parents’ house during the holiday season in December 2019 when her cousin asked her to babysit her kids. Both her cousin and her cousin’s husband were hoping to spend a few days away from their three children and were willing to pay the 24-year-old woman to watch them. The issue was that the woman was already planning on working during this time and knew she would make way more money through her freelance work, but she still offered to watch the kids. 

The woman really valued her time and knew what she was worth, so she decided to charge her cousin $35 an hour to watch the three kids. Her family was shocked at her rate, and they ended up getting into an argument. The woman went to Reddit in January 2020, reflecting on what happened, and asked users if she was wrong for charging such a high rate.

Starting off her Reddit post, the original poster (OP) talked about her job and how busy she stays in order to make the money she does. “I’m a software engineer with a full time job and a side hustle of doing freelance coding work in my own time,” she said. She explained that she gets paid $40 an hour at her full-time job and makes $60 an hour at her freelance job. “So that’s how I value my time,” OP stated.

During her Christmas break, the 24-year-old woman stayed at her parents' house, and so did her cousin, her cousin’s husband and their three children. They were all set to stay from Christmas until New Year’s. Since the area she was staying in was pretty rural, OP figured that she wouldn’t have much to do and planned on doing some freelance work whenever she didn’t have plans with her family.

“Then my cousin and her husband asked if I could babysit all day for three days, so they could visit some friends in the area and hang out with just adults,” OP said. “I said I had planned on doing freelance work at the library, and she offered to pay me to babysit.” OP agreed only on the condition that they would pay her close to her freelance rates. She felt like $60 was too high but still wanted to be compensated well for her time. OP explained, “Honestly babysitting 3 kids would be harder for me than the routine coding work I had for my freelance project.”

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She landed on $35 an hour even though it was below her typical hourly rate. However, this was still way too high for her cousin and cousin’s husband. OP continued, “She went crazy at me, saying that’s a ridiculous rate for babysitting, that I was entitled and being selfish, that I’m trying to take advantage of how she didn’t have other options, etc.”

Her cousin’s husband was also upset and told OP she was basically a child herself and that she was “a stupid girl” since babysitting usually only costs $15 an hour. However, Urban Sitter reported that the average hourly babysitting rate in 2020 was $17.73 for one child and $20.30 for two children — meaning OP would be way underpaid if she only took $15 an hour for three children.

“I was kind of done with being called stupid so I just told them I hoped they could find someone else,” OP said. “My mom thinks I asked for something offensive, and my cousin and her husband obviously did too.” The woman felt like she could have been a jerk in the situation for refusing to help her family but also felt like she wasn’t getting the money she deserved.

Reddit users were on OP’s side, though, and felt like her rate was perfectly reasonable. One user wrote: “NTA. 3 kids all day, for 3 days straight? Even real babysitters would charge more than 15 for 3 kids.” Another user commented: “Never devalue yourself regardless of your age. These people are the ones being entitled.”

Do you think this woman’s babysitting fee was too much? Or was she right to value her time? Let us know, and be sure to pass this along to your family members and friends, too.