Have parents stopped trusting babysitters?

This "signal" is basically "Bad Therapy" meets "The Anxious Generation"

Once upon a time, parents in old-school neighborhoods — with sidewalks, front porches and neighbors with faces — had an old-school strategy that allowed them to leave their homes in order to go to movies, enjoy dinner dates, attend stimulating lectures, etc.

They hired a babysitter.

The key elements of the babysitter resume included the following: This was a girl, usually a teen-ager, from a family the parents knew and trusted. The assumption was that she frequently took care of the younger children in her own family and, thus, all of the adults involved in this process believed that she could handle a few hours — with an old-fashioned telephone nearby — of childcare duties.

People of a certain age will remember scenes in movies or television shows in which parents paused and handed the babysitter a note while saying, “If you need us, we can be reached at this number. Just give us a call.” Think “Sleepless in Seattle,” kind of.

Today, of course, most babysitters would have smartphones with the ability to text, call or even Zoom parents in an emergency. That’s a major improvement. Maybe.

Ah, but can teens be trusted? What if they haven’t been taking their meds or their therapists don’t think they can handle any potential traumas? In other words, what if the contents of this new Abigail Shrier bestseller come into play: “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up.”

Then again, maybe another new book — “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” — is just as relevant? After all, it was a tweet by its author, Jonathan Haidt, that pointed me to this signal. He wrote:

This essay on the decline of teen babysitters hits so many themes of The Anxious Generation: We don't trust teens to be competent; we don't know our neighbors. If you want to help young people, hire a nearby 13 year old to babysit, or just help out.

Ah, parents no longer know and trust their neighbors. That’s another part of this equation.

Anyway, Haidt was urging readers to read this Faith Hill feature at The Atlantic Monthly: “Don’t Tell America the Babysitter’s Dead — For decades, sitting was both a job and a rite of passage. Now it feels more like a symbol of a bygone American era.” Here’s the essential info in the overture:

Babysitting used to be both a job and a rite of passage. For countless American teens, and especially teen girls, it was a tentative step toward adulthood—responsibility, but with guardrails. Perhaps you didn’t cook dinner, but you did heat some leftovers for the kids. Maybe you arrived to find them already tucked in, and you read them a story, turned out the lights, and watched TV until the car turned into the drive. You knew whom to call if anything serious came up. Paula Fass, a historian of childhood at UC Berkeley, told me that she started sitting around 1960, when she was 12 or 13. By the time she’d arrive, she remembers, the parents had put their kids to bed and stocked the fridge for her to raid. They recognized that she was grown-up enough to be an extra eye in the home — but childlike enough to go looking for snacks.

Sitting was a “quintessentially American experience,” Yasemin Besen-Cassino, a Montclair State University sociologist and the author of The Cost of Being a Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap, told me. For decades, working a part-time job was common for teens in the U.S. — perhaps a reflection of the cultural emphasis on hard work, discipline, and financial independence. Even tweens would babysit. And something about that position, teetering between dependence and independence, got lodged in our cultural imagination. Starting in the mid-20th century, the young sitter became an emblem of American girlhood. …

Let’s tick off a few questions: Are kids today mature enough to handle this job? Are they mentally HEALTHY enough? How many are growing up in families with multiple children, offering them a chance to care for their own siblings (consider North American birthrates these days)? Do parents know their neighbors? What if they only trust families from, let’s say, their own religious congregations and those folks live some distance away, relatively speaking?

Oh, and are today’s parents secure enough to trust a babysitter? Maybe it’s easier, in many cases, to simply pack up their one child and take him/her/they along? Thus, Hill writes:

Today, the teen babysitter as we knew her, in pop culture and in reality, has all but disappeared. People seem to worry less about adolescents and more for them, and for their future prospects.

Let’s jump ahead and read some more:

Even if parents do know potential young sitters nearby, they may still hesitate to rely on them. In the past few decades, as “intensive parenting” has become a child-rearing ideal across classes, grown-ups have broadly begun to see kids as fragile and in need of constant oversight. Tweens or younger teens might not seem like comforting sources of protection — they might seem like children in need of watching themselves. … It didn’t used to be unusual for 12-year-olds to babysit. Now more than two-thirds of American parents think kids should be 12 or older before they’re even left home alone. Several states have guidelines issuing a similar age limit; in Illinois, kids legally can’t be left unattended until age 14.

One final point: How many parents today grew up watching Hollywood products in which the babysitter was portrayed as a temptress, as a silly hook for jokes or even a helpless child trapped in a house invaded by a killer?

In other words, has the babysitter become a “condensed symbol” of a wide variety of problems facing parents in the screen-culture age?

I am not sure that religious groups can heal entire neighborhoods. But what could churches and schools do to address this issue (that is, if readers think this is an issue that needs to be addressed)?

Discuss, please.