Helping Your Baby Sitter Help You

It’s date night and your favorite aunt has her own plans so you need some hired help. Maybe your kids are difficult with strangers, or maybe just have some important allergies or need a special routine to help ensure they handle all of their homework and get to bed in time. It can be difficult leaving your kids with someone from outside of the family, or even with a teen from one of your siblings who isn’t quite up to snuff on childcare. You want to avoid seeming overbearing when introducing these people to your children’s needs, so we’re going to help you put together a list of important information that the baby sitter can consult as needed, a babysitter field guide.

First off, it’s obviously important to have everyone’s allergies in a simple and easy to consult format, maybe you don’t keep any nut products in the house and think it’s okay to omit this up until the hired help brought a snickers and you get a call interrupting your date and ruining the whole night. This is essential information and should never be skimped out on. To follow up on that, of course you want emergency contacts, and the information for everyone’s insurance, just to make sure that everybody is safe and happy.

Now to get off of the topic of safety and back to something a little more cozy, it’s a good idea to have a soft and hard limit on everybody's bed time. A cue on when the baby sitter should start having things wind down so your kids can sleep when they actually go to bed (rather than kick and jump and make unwanted trouble.)

Of course the final major important thing to include for your babysitter is what and how they are going to make sure the kids are fed. It’s a good assumption that most people you hired don’t have the skill to handle anything more than a TV dinner, so have leftovers or extra money for the bunch to order pizza, or something simple enough that you can trust your hired help to cook without burning down the whole house. I’m personally a fan of the home cooked meals, so I’d go with clearly labeled leftovers that can be heated up in the microwave.