WFMW: Babysitting Co-op

(Thanks to Shannon for hosting the Works for Me "carnival." Check out Rocks in My Dryer today for links to tons of other WFMW ideas!)

A couple of you have asked about this, and I decided it would be great for a WFMW: The Babysitting Co-op.

This is one of the most helpful things in my life. Teenagers these days seem to have a much busier agenda than I ever did, and the ones who are willing to babysit could easily break the bank. (I was lucky to get $15 for a whole evening of sitting, let alone for each hour!) Plus, I love the peace of mind that comes with having other moms tend my kids.

Here’s how it works:

There are about ten families who participate. Most have two children, but some have three or four, and all of the children are under age 12. It would work with four or five families, but the larger the number of participants, the greater the chance of getting a sitter when you need one. And we have a limit of 25 families, but it has never gotten that big.

Each family (mom) takes a turn being the bookkeeper. We have used both a hard copy in a spiral notebook and an Excel file that we posted electronically. Either works fine. On the bookkeeping sheet, there is a line for each family in the co-op and a column for each day of the given month.

Whenever I need a babysitter, I e-mail or call around the co-op list to see who is available. In general, for daytime sits I take my kids to someone’s house and for nighttime sits someone comes to my house.

After the sit, the sitter contacts the bookkeeper and reports the hours of the sit. We round to the half hour. (Hours are not multiplied by the number of children – it’s just straight up, however long you watch anyone’s kids.) The babysitter gets the hours entered as a positive number and the family whose children were tended gets negative hours entered on the same date.

At the end of the month, the bookkeeper tallies the hours, lets everyone know how many positive or negative hours they have, writes in the balance forward for each family, and passes the books on to the next family in alphabetical order. (The bookkeeper balances the hours by calculating the rows across and the columns down and making sure it all equals zero. i.e., the same number of negative hours and positive hours across the board.)

We periodically call the bookkeeper to find who is most in babysitting debt, so that they can be the first person we call for a sitter. That way, no one is over-babysitting or not babysitting enough. No one is allowed to accumulate more than 20 hours (positive or negative).

The co-op I participate in is made up of young moms I go to church with, and they started it almost three years ago. There are written by-laws for it from the early days, but since we have all become great friends, it’s a little more casual than that now. (If you are trying to establish one with your community or in an area where there is a frequent turnover of neighbors/friends in the co-op, I would recommend doing something in writing for each family that participates. I have a copy of the bylaws for ours – if you want it, e-mail me.)

Some important things to keep in mind are:

• Keep the geographic area of your co-op within a reasonable distance so that it’s convenient for everyone involved.
• Although the bookkeeper changes from month to month, it’s important to have a member of the co-op that acts as a leader/mediator, just in case circumstances arise that need to be worked through or cleared up.
• You might want to have penalties/bonus hours in place for times when a sit is cancelled at the last minute by either the sitter or the person who needs the sitter.
• You will want to make clear expectations of the members on issues such as guns in the home (locked up tight or not permitted), pets (allergies, Rottweilers...), medical release information, and the people in the family who qualify as sitters (i.e., only the mom, only the parents, or is the teenage daughter or au pair OK?).

This is an awesome money, time and stress saver in my life, akin to supper swapping (which DYM blogged about and I dream of doing but no-one will go for - can you believe?!).

Babysitting Co-op works for me!

P.S. If you are in the throes of potty training, head straight over to Katherine’s WFMW at Raising Five – she is a preschool mom extraordinaire, sharing her wisdom in that department today! (Antique Mommy also has a hilarious previous post about potty training here, and I posted what worked for me here, so read up. Sharing our collective wisdom definitely works for me!)