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Originally Posted by Daoust
We've used friends and acquaintances of my mother- and sister-in-law when the aforementioned were not available to babysit. We also knew those acquaintances from church. We would never use anyone for a babysitter that we had never met or had no prior knowledge of.
I have a question that might be a bit of a threadjack, but I'll ask nonetheless:
What do you pay your babysitters? How much per hour? What's the average?
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In my experience, that totally depends on 1) the babysitter's level of experience, 2) their negotiating skills, and 3) how old they are.
As I got older I earned more money because 1) I had the experience and 2) I could have easily made minimum wage at another job. It also depended on the client: some were more capable of paying than others, and so I always took that into consideration. Some times, if I was going to be doing a considerable amount of childcare for them over a period of time, we would agree on a single payment to be made versus an hourly wage.
When I first started babysitting my guideline was $3.50/hr +$1 extra per child, per hour. So say there's only 1 child to be cared for, then I only earned $3.50/hr. 2, $4.50, and so on. This, of course, was when I had no experience and wasn't able to work "a real job". As I got older I could easily make $60 babysitting 3 boys for an afternoon (3 brothers, ages 9, 7, 5...little devils but I loved 'em).