babysitting group

Twominator

I was just wondering does anyone else know of something like this. In light of the economic climate, babysitting costs are too much for my family to continue with- it makes no sense that we are trying to keep costs down by going to peoples houses for dinner instead of restaurants, while still paying a babysitter €9 an hour!

What I was wondering is, is there a group that share babysitting? Say 5 families, who contact each other when they need a babysitter, someone does it for them, then reciprocates when required. This gets rid of the paying issue, but still means that there are a pool of people to call on. It could even be run on the basis of a simple credit system, so you are not just indebted to the person who babysits for you, ie if person A babysits for you, they get a credit, so when Person A needs a babysitter if person B does it, they use their credit so its all even.

This may all be socialists nonsense but it makes sense to me! any thoughts? PS i live in Bray if anyone is interested!!

deisemum

I lived in London when I had my eldest child 14 years ago and got to know other mothers through the National Childbirth Trust. They supported a lot of activities including getting to know other parents that are local to you.

Some mothers (always mothers by choice) usually 3 or 4 in a group formed babysitting circles and started off with a certain number of tokens. They took it in turns to babysit for each other. The more hours you babysat the more tokens you earned. The parent who was going out gave a token per hour to the mother that babysat.

This was a common enough practise back then.