Babysitting: A social study (and quick way to $$$)

    Remember babysitting? It was likely your entry into the money making world. Never mind that it paid significantly less than minimum wage, we were wage earners and that was cool. For awhile. Then we learned that minimum wage paid three times as much per hour and couldn’t wait to older and get a real job. Imagine: $2.35 to a walloping $2.65 an hour for non kidstuff kind of work! I started out at 75¢ an hour looking after the rabbi’s kids. My older sister, Anne, raked in 35¢ an hour on her first sitting jobs.


    It is so not the same today. Babysitting rates have surpassed the minimum wage. Greedy teens or is the minimum wage shockingly low? Admittedly, the avenues for teens to earn money seem to dry up as traditional jobs like paper routes are done more and more by adult contractors (‘paper adult’ sounds odd) or automation. A quick poll of friends in North America through a social network site shows that rates generally well exceed the Federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr. One friend with a single child is getting away with $6/hr but most are coughing up $10, even $12 for college kids. A much-older-than-13 former colleague wailed that some of these rates were more than he was currently getting paid.

     Curiosity turned into a social study when I started asking about babysitting rates here in Perth. I expected the situation to be exactly the same but with a higher rate. The government minimum wage here is $16 an hour. And well, teenagers are teenagers the world over, so the rate must be higher, right?

    Sort of. Polling people at church on Sunday came up with a big zero. None hired outside help. Junior was always watched by grandparents or the occasional switched favors with other couples. So I started asking people I did not know in church and they said pretty much the same thing. Well, all these folks are church goers and maybe that makes a difference. I accosted a few pram pushing people on the street and guess what? Pretty much the same story there also, although one suggested that I look up a particular babysitting website. Doing so came up with mature adults asking for $20-$25 /hour depending on the time of day. Not a significant jump from the $15 asked by one parishioner 20 years ago when he babysat as an older teen.

     What does this mean? Do Australians have much closer knit, highly supportive families than back home or are they just too cheap to pay the neighbor kid to watch theirs? One parent posited that maybe babysitting was an American thing, but her husband was not so quick to draw such a conclusion. Western Australia is heavily populated with people from other places and not all would have moved here with extended family in tow. Those folks will have to choose between not going out or shelling out .

     Whatever the situation, I’m brushing up on my diaper changing skills. Just in case…