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Would you 'Deliveroo' your babysitter? (Anyone under 40 probably already is...)

As party season peaks, on-demand babysitting services are quietly revolutionising parents’ social lives - E
As party season peaks, on-demand babysitting services are quietly revolutionising parents’ social lives - E

“Where are your kids tonight then?” asks the woman I’ve been chatting to at a party for the past ten minutes.

“Oh they’re with a stranger I booked off the internet,” I say.

She sips her wine and laughs. “So who’s got them, really?”

Such is the response of most people when you tell them you’ve left your precious, most prized possessions in the care of someone you first met an hour ago, who arrived at your door like a punctual takeaway curry. And yet as party season peaks, on-demand babysitting services such as sitters.co.uk and apps like Bubble and Kowalah are quietly revolutionising parents’ social lives – you might just not know it because they’re reluctant to tell you.

You’ve left your precious, most prized possessions in the care of someone you first met an hour ago, who arrived at your door like a punctual takeaway curry

It’s certainly a strange paradox that in these risk averse times – when we won’t let our children play freely on the streets for fear of abuse or abduction or worse – many of us will happily welcome a stranger over the threshold, give them the WiFi password and a tray of snacks.  News came this week that Google has even patented a remote babysitting service capable of protecting unattended children by remotely locking doors and switching off plug sockets.

When we started using Sitters in 2013 when my eldest daughter Daphne was eight months old, I didn’t tell my own mother because I knew she would think it was weird. (She also refuses contactless cards, thinks online banking is dodgy and recently got out her purse to pay for an Uber...)

Fiona with her daughters Olive (left) and Daphne (right) - Credit: Andrew Crowley
Fiona with daughters Olive (left) and Daphne (right) Credit: Andrew Crowley

At the time, we were living in north London, more than an hour’s drive away from her in Kent. My husband and I didn’t go out together that often but as we were lucky to have a pretty sound sleeper, we didn’t want to pass up every offer of a night out. With Sitters we could just tap in our requirements and within 30 minutes, we’d get an email saying that Tanya or Ellie or Sheena had confirmed and would come and take charge on Saturday night. If my mum or a relative asked who was babysitting, I’d fudge it – “Oh just a friend…”

We weren’t alone. “I didn’t tell my mum we used Sitters,” says my friend Jenny, who has a son and daughter. “She would have started going on about Madeleine McCann. My mum used to be in a babysitting circle but that was a different time. We were the first of our friends to have children and we just needed a solution. All the sitters are checked out and we were happy to pay. It was so easy.”

I didn’t tell my mum we used Sitters. She would have started going on about Madeleine McCann. Mum used to be in a babysitting circle but that was a different time.

Sitters, which was founded in 1999 and merged with 50-year-old Childminders of London in 2006, is essentially an internet enhanced babysitting agency. Everyone on their books has been vetted in person, thoroughly checked out and has professional childcare experience. Instead of phoning a secretary sitting behind a Rolodex, parents simply consult a website instead. (See, Mum – less scary than it sounds.)  

But technology is now serving up babysitting apps, which function more like Uber and Deliveroo, enabling parents to order a babysitter in just a few taps of their smartphone. Bubble, which launched last year, describes itself as a marketplace as opposed to an agency, where parents enter their requirements and are given a choice of sitters, complete with their proximity, hourly rate, photograph, profile and reviews to help you choose. Every sitter is passed through an online identity and background check, too.

A little guide to bubble. #babysittersyourfriendstrust #bubble #babysittingapp #babysitting #parents #nannies

A post shared by bubble babysitting (@bubblebabysittingapp) on Dec 12, 2017 at 12:25pm PST

“Our USP is social validation,” explains Bubble co-founder Ari Last. “We’re working from the belief that parents want to book babysitters who their friends love and trust. So Bubble shows you babysitters around you and how you know them. It gives you a selection of babysitters that have been used by other parents from your school or by your friends, for example. If you don’t have any direct connections, you’ll be able to read reviews from other parents – that digital reference is hugely powerful and it works well for the babysitters too.”

Ah, the babysitters. When talking about this topic it’s easy to get caught up in concern for the kids but what about the sitters themselves, who often turn up blind at an address - how safe are they?

It’s easy to get caught up in concern for the kids but what about the sitters themselves, who often turn up blind at an address - how safe are they?

We recently opened our front door to Eva*, whom we’d booked through Sitters and seemed anxious to check she had both mine and my husband’s mobile phone numbers right. “You just never know what might happen,” she said. Not feeling particularly reassured by that statement I asked what she meant. Eva proceeded to regale us with tales of bad behaviour – not from kids but from their parents.

“One time I went to babysit for a really wealthy family in Knightsbridge on a Sunday evening,” she told us. “I was living in Harrow and they were meant to come home at midnight. When they didn’t show up I texted and reminded them that I had to get home by public transport. They finally arrived back at 3.30am. They were drunk and arguing. In the middle of it all, I asked them to get me an Uber. They told me it had arrived and sent me outside but the car wasn’t for me, it was for a neighbour. They watched me get turned away by the driver and then just closed the curtains.”

Sitting sites | The lowdown
Sitting sites | The lowdown

Eva’s phone battery had run out and she was forced to take several night buses, finally reaching home at 5.30am. She had to be at her regular job at a property company by 9am.

On another occasion, Eva arrived at a house to find the ‘boy’ wasn’t 17 months as she was expecting but 17 years old. “I must have read it wrong when I accepted the job,” says Eva. “I was taken aback when I arrived but thought I’d better see it through. Then when his mum left, he locked the door and told me to take my clothes off. I was terrified!”

It turned out the young man had autism.

“I just didn’t feel comfortable,” says Eva. “I frantically phoned his mum but I was in tears when she finally got back.”

The boy’s mother didn’t apologise or pay Eva for her time.

Sitters’ Director Stephen Allen says that thankfully, the vast, vast majority of bookings go very well – because the parents want the sitters to come back, and because the sitters want to be booked again.

“We allow carers to tell us if they don’t want to go back to a certain family again and we always want to know why,” Allan explains. “Very occasionally, we may have to tell parents that we can’t provide carers for them anymore but the vast majority treat their sitters very well.”

Bubble, meanwhile, gives sitters the chance to rate the parents, a cunning way to stop parents from rolling home much later than agreed.

So will we all – grandparents and parents alike – be happily making babysitting arrangements online and through apps in five years time? Rachel Botsman, author of Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together And Why It Could Drive Us Apart, thinks so.

“These ‘trust leaps’ – when you do something differently to how you’ve always previously done it – take time,” she explains. “Think back to when you first put your credit card details into a website, for example. But this will become completely normalised. Your initial reaction might be ‘Urgh, no, finding people online is really dangerous,’ but think about how these ‘trust judgements’ used to work in the old world. 

"They were largely based on blind faith or personal judgement. In the past, agencies might have done just one reference check by phone. Most bad decisions about who to trust are actually made due to a lack of information and that’s what technology can actually deliver really well. What we need is for that vetting process to be really good – when it comes to our kids, we need that kind of rigour.”

*Name has been changed