About three years ago, my wife and I were desperate for a babysitter. We wanted to go out to an event in town and our regular babysitter was sick. Finally, after being unable to get a sitter, one of our friends, Julie, watched our children and we were able to go see a local play and get some food. It wasn’t a huge deal, but we wanted to pay Julie back for her help and babysit for her kids.
When I mentioned this to my sister-in-law, she told me that her mom used to have Babysitting Cooperatives back in the 70’s where they would arrange playdates and the Moms would keep track of it all using points. Each child would be a point per hour. She said that sometimes her mom would be the “monitor” for the month and she would get paid extra points to keep track of the scheduled babysitting and the transfer of all of the points. My sister-in-law Denise said that this was a lot of work.
All of a sudden something clicked in my head. Being a parent, a teacher, a techie and the advisor to our Pay It Forward club, it seemed that all roads had led me to this point. Why not build a website that would allow people to form villages that would keep track of all of the scheduling and the transfer of points automatically?
That’s when www.babysittingbarter.com was born. In the three years since, I’ve gone into business with a fellow teacher, Lauren Conlon, in an effort to revolutionize the way we do babysitting. Babysitting Barter allows people to set up villages with their family and friends, schedule babysitting and trade points. The site is free and so is the babysitting, as long as you are able to find some friends who are willing to swap babysitting with you.
The site is simple. Each village member starts with 125 points. Each sit is 10 points for the first child per hour and then 2 points for any additional children per hour. So, one child for one hour would be ten points and two children for one hour would be 12 points. Basically, you pay people to babysit you children in points (which are free). To earn the points back, you just have to babysit someone in your village’s children.
The babysitting cooperatives are forever free. We do plan on instituting a Premium Membership within the next month, which will enable you to connect with paid babysitters, if your cooperative village is unavailable. These paid babysitters will not be anonymous strangers, but babysitters who you are connected to you through the site or Facebook.
We look forward to serving you and would love to hear any suggestions or ideas that you may have for Babysitting Barter!
Brian Mannix
Proud Dad and President of Babysitting Barter
**A note from Katie: If you haven’t yet, be sure to sign up for the South Charlotte Playgroup village! We’ll be swapping points for babysitting! Lord knows, we could all probably use a night out. Playgroup members can access the form by visiting this link on our message boards:
http://www.meetup.com/SouthCharlottePlaygroup/messages/boards/thread/20556872
(For security reasons, only SCP members have access to this link.)**
Leave a Reply