When Kids Can Watch Themselves

Last weekend my husband and I planned a movie date. Like many couples, we spend most of our weekend time with our children, shuttling them to sports activities, overseeing weekend homework and sharing that rare family occurrence when everyone sits at the dinner table at the same time.

So “Date Night” seemed like a good idea. We chose the movie, checked the theater times, fed the kids dinner, bid them goodbye and were off.

Do you recognize what’s missing in this series of events? The noticeable absence of a babysitter. Until recently, any outing that involved both my husband and me required a babysitter to watch our two children. Unlike many of my friends, my husband and I have no family in the area to help with the kids, so we’ve relied heavily on sitters over the years. Most of my babysitters began sitting for me when they were twelve. Now my own “baby” is twelve, and over the past year I’ve been allowing him to take responsibility for watching himself and his younger brother without a sitter.


I tried to calculate just how much money I’ve spent on babysitters these past twelve years. $ 5 -$8 per hour multiplied by all the hours spent at book club, Newcomers, my Pampered Chef business, dates with my husband, weddings and funerals equals enough to purchase a luxury vacation for my husband and myself (a vacation we couldn’t take because that would require…a babysitter).

This led me to reflect on my own experience as a babysitter. As an early teen, my Saturday nights were spent sitting on a scratchy couch keeping an eagle eye on Adam Gilbert, age 4. Surrounded by metallic wallpaper (this was, after all, the 70’s), I’d watch “Love Boat” and “Fantasy Island”, sneaking chips or cookies from the pantry in unnoticeable increments, despite the Gilbert’s admonishment to “Help yourself to whatever you’d like.” Sometime after midnight I’d be roused from sleep by the sound of the garage door opener, at which point Mr. Gilbert would drive me home as quickly as possible, always in silence, clearly uncomfortable with the idea of making conversation. For this I earned the princely sum of $1 per hour, an amount that seems like slave wages compared to today, but one that paid for a steady supply of candy necklaces, Tiger Beat magazines and worthless trinkets from Spencer Gifts.

Now that my son is the same age that I was when I began sitting, I’ve eased him into the idea of being home alone. At the start of fifth grade he was given a key to the front door and strict instructions to call my cell phone if I’m not home when he gets off the bus. In sixth grade, he graduated to getting himself in the door and getting his brother off the bus shortly afterwards. I would always arrive home soon after, since leaving these two boys together was like leaving a lit match in the company of a powder keg. On the rare evening when I needed to go to book club or a school event before my husband arrived home, I would entrust my boys to watch each other for the overlapping hour. Even this resulted in no panicked phone calls to my cell phone or bloodshed.

Then last month, the true test: We left our kids home on a Saturday night in order to attend a friend’s party. The party was five minutes from home, and our children had already been fed dinner, minimizing the risk of cooking or choking incidents. From 7-11pm, we mingled with other grown-ups without worrying about how much the evening was costing us in babysitter fees. A friend at the party whose kids are older than ours, said, “It’s great when the kids are old enough to watch themselves. See, it was totally worth having them!”

We arrived home that night to find the house and children still intact, and that’s when it dawned on me that my husband and I could now get some of that all-important alone time that was sacrificed when our kids were little. We no longer have to wait for a “special occasion” to get out for a few hours on our own. We don’t have to go to the bank or make change to pay the babysitter, or take turns driving her home. We don’t have to take out a second mortgage in order to pay for dinner, a movie and a babysitter.

We do, however, have to figure out a way to get the kids to put themselves to bed before we arrive home past their bedtime.

Baby steps.