“A good babysitter is hard come by,” explained a reporter onCBS Newsduring the summer of 2007.¹ A year earlier, a mother blogged that “babysitters seem to care nothing about kids and charge $16 an hour to watch TV and text message their boyfriends.”² And then, of course, reportedLiving Safelymagazine in the 1990s, there were the “horror stories: parents arriving home to find their sitter has thrown a party, or gone to one. . . .”³ Intrinsic to such typical complaints is a longing for the golden age of babysitting when teenage girls were both pleasant and...

Steer clear of “high-school girls” who “take charge” of children, warned the authors ofWholesome Childhoodin the mid-1920s, more than a decade before the concept of the “babysitter” and suspicions about her became widespread.¹ That active and athletic girls attended sports events and flirted with men on street corners, especially in front of the innocent babies they trundled about, led the authors of this new child-rearing manual to disparage adolescent girls and to dismiss them as acceptable child-care providers.² This early critique of babysitters signaled the emergence of a struggle over girlhood between adults and the first generation of...

“The way most of us make our money is by babysitting,” explained a perky girl who spoke for many in the 1945March of Timenewsreel “Teen-Age Girls.”¹ But by 1947, the sober realization that babysitting had become the only way middle-class girls could make money led some to seek out better ways of dealing with the new employment realities.² Drawing upon the rising authority of teenage girls’ culture and the residual wartime support for female workers, teenage girls in high schools and colleges banded together and “fashion[ed] a set of rules,” just as the journalist forThe American Home...

In an article entitled “Know Where You Stand with Your Sitter,”Better Homes and Gardensmagazine described young mothers out for the night, who often found themselves stealing “glances at the clock half-wishing they hadn’t left home.”¹ While many adults today look back longingly to the 1950s as a time when babysitters were both abundant and affable, that golden age of babysitters—and of girlhood—never existed, not even in the mind’s eye of many postwar parent-employers. Rather than the militant, union-organizing babysitter, the figure that proved to be more noxiously persistent and pervasive was the more plentiful “bobby-soxer” babysitter...

In 1957, Jack Fletcher, a father and an engineer, climbed onto the roof of his suburban house in West Covina, California, in order to install a “closed circuit” camera. That device would at least enable his wife to watch on the TV their children playing outdoors while she ironed indoors.¹ What led to Jack’s child-care innovation was a new reality—the scarcity of sitters—unforeseen by those riding the wave of suburban expansion. Many young couples like the Fletchers had not realized that what they had left behind in the move to the suburbs had been invaluable sources of child...

The litany of complaints about irresponsible “bobby-soxers” disappeared from popular periodicals during the early 1960s. However, uncertainties about teenage girls remained. In fact, girls’ growing rejection of such traditional ideals as domesticity, virtue, and submission and their pursuit of new pleasures—sex, drugs, and freedom—heightened adults’ old anxieties. Fears about girls found expression in new stories about bad babysitters who appeared in new cultural forms—from humorous movies, toys, and TV sit-coms to fear-inspiring vocational films and urban legends. In one story that gripped the popular imagination, a teenage girl took LSD with her boyfriend while babysitting for an...

“In an era where morals are undergoing a major upset, when actions which used to be kept under wraps are brought out into the open, ‘The Babysitter’ is daring and current as next week’s news,” read the publicity material for the hot new movieThe Babysitter(1969).¹ The sexually provocative film about a liaison between a babysitter and her middle-aged boss featured Candy, who represented the “sexually active girl”—at least as adult males in the 1960s imagined her. Exaggerated fantasies about female adolescent sexuality in movies like this expressed new erotic possibilities for American men excited by the sexual...

In 1979 theKansas City Timesreported that “[o]ne of the most indispensable persons in the world—and one around whom your social life revolves to some extent—is the sitter.”¹ Just a few years later, the newspaper would cover the case of a babysitter serial killer. During the 1980s, many teenage girls in movies turned into monsters as dangerous as the maniacs who had been stalking babysitters for decades. The transformation of sitters from victim to victimizer—from powerless to powerful—led deranged teens to turn the tables on their attackers and direct their fury against parent-employers. In popular...

So beganThe Bad Baby-Sitters Handbook(1991), a slim and sardonic volume aimed at girls who had had enough of the Baby-sitter’s Club book series—and of babysitting. It was sentiments like these that led one girl to write author Ann M. Martin to suggest “[k] illing off all the [BSC] girls.”¹

Both factual and fictional materials had been disseminating the notion that babysitting promoted girls’ self-esteem, autonomy, and empowerment. “Taking care of other people’s children, planning your own schedule and making money helps you gain responsibility, self-confidence and a sense of accomplishment,”Teenmagazine had explained in 1980.² While...

In 1989,Parents Magazinepublished “How We Survived Our First Night Out,” about a yuppie couple who hired Jennifer, a gum-chewing sixteenyear-old babysitter, to watch their five-month-old while they dined at a bistro. But before she arrived, the mother (“remembering her own babysitting days”) had spent hours sweeping the house clean of liquor bottles, prescription pills, and other possible enticements. Meanwhile, the fretful father—representing a new model of the devoted dad—had diligently compiled a lengthy emergency phone list he posted on the refrigerator with six teddy bear magnets. Despite their elaborate preparations and precautions, their dinner out was...