Starting a babysitting co-op

[mamalanza]

Hi everyone,

I'm a SAHM of toddler twins, thinking of forming a babysitting co-op. Does anyone have any advice about starting a group like this? How to structure the group, pitfalls to avoid, etc?

[JL83]

I organized one briefly. It ended up with me and another mom being the main ones. So we stopped the co-op and just swap babysitting when we want some now.

We had 4 moms. Our idea was to have 2 moms stay with the kids while the other moms had a couple hours out. It worked well except the one mom who always came WAY late on her day to help watch the kids, and the other mom who was always like an hour late coming back. We tried to rotate houses, but it ended up being at either my or the mom who continued's house all the time.

[wake_up]

I'm involved in one that has a yahoo group and everything, but has pretty much fallen dormant. We use poker chips to signify hours, so that the trades don't have to be one-for-one - white chips for one hour, blue chips for 2 hours, and we all got something like 10 hours worth to start. That way when our chips bag started getting light, we knew we were "out of balance" and could try to offer childcare more often than asking for it. I think our group fell quiet mostly because a lot of us don't see each other often - I've actually been thinking of having a potluck picnic or something to rev it back up again. So nice to have a money- and guilt-free childcare option!

[K-Mom3]

I had a group of three families in a babysitting coop. We met every Friday and even had a standard 3 hr time block. We did sometimes change to another day or time, but only if all three couples agreed. If someone dropped their kids off late, they just forfeited some time, unless they had made arrangements ahead of time. One couple babysat while the other 2 went on a date. The babysitting always happened at the babysitters' home. For a while we were doing 5-8 and so the agreement was that the babysitting couple would feed all the kids.

We chose to do it that early so that it wasn't cutting into bedtimes. It was sometimes a disadvantage, though, because we couldn't go to an evening concert--lots of events start at 7:30 or 8:00.

We got solid commitments from Dads that they would be fully involved in the babysitting. We actually had one dad who would bail on his wife when it was their turn for a date! But she really badly needed a break anyway so she got a break without her dh.

I had 2 kids, one family had 2 kids and the 3rd family had 4 kids but the 2 oldest were actually quite helpful with taking care of the younger ones.

I suggest discussing ahead what you'll do about cancellations, find out how flexible everyone's schedules are. Discuss discipline--if you don't like timeouts, for example, make sure the other couples are on board with that.

My kids were sometimes overwhelmed with so many kids coming over and wanting to play with their toys--we would go through the toys beforehand and put away anything they didn't want to share.

It was fun and worthwhile. The easiest to organize, though, is just 2 couples trading every week, or each getting 1 date a month or something.