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?
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.)**
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