“I Was Exhausted And Upset”: Babysitter Calls Child’s Dad After All-Night Ordeal, Fury Follows

Helping your family members with some babysitting is probably one of the most classic “family jobs” out there. Indeed, depending on where you live, it might be entirely normal to fully outsource your child-raising to whatever blood relative you happen to have in the area. But everything has its limits at the end of the day.

A young woman agreed to babysit her cousin’s kid, but ended up calling her ex to help her when the mom just didn’t come home at night. We reached out to the teen babysitter via private message and will update the article when she gets back to us.

No matter how you spin it, leaving a fifteen year old with a baby overnight is just a downright terrible idea. Remember, a fifteen year old is a child, just like the baby, although in many ways significantly more capable. So there is almost no way her cousin, herself legally a minor, could berate her for her actions.

Unfortunately, this is probably a close reflection of their family dynamics, where certain folks are just told what they are supposed to do and are obliged to “follow orders.” After all, it’s not unusual for folks to get their family involved to help with a lot of things, including childcare. “It takes a village to raise a child,” or so the saying goes. Although, pointedly, researchers have struggled to actually pinpoint where this saying comes from. The internet is littered with similar stories of folks being “pushed” into childcare.

While we don’t really have the necessary information, it does look like the cousin is already used to doing some babysitting work. The real issue isn’t her being “exploited,” she wasn’t forced to do it, she agreed. The crux of the matter is the cousin blowing up at her over calling for help when she herself just didn’t show up.

She didn’t even leave her any reasonable alternatives to contact. She didn’t even leave her location on, so the fifteen year old was basically forced to find some other help. After all, a crying baby is stressful enough when you are its parent, let alone a teenage babysitter. It’s still a lot of responsibility.

Texting her at 3AM is not a good “alternative,” as most folks would already be asleep by then. Imagine yourself in the babysitter’s shoes. You are now responsible for a child, it’s mom is nowhere to be found, you are getting more tired by the moment and it’s started to cry. The mother was lucky she didn’t call the police. In general, the cousin’s behavior was just entitled and downright exploitative. It’s also pretty short sighted, since she now lost access to a free and willing source of childcare.

In fact, she probably didn’t tell the babysitter because knew that she would absolutely not agree to stay the night. It’s not to say that the mom doesn’t deserve a night out, but this is not the way to go about it. Even worse, the mom didn’t even follow up in the morning, she just assumed that a teenage girl could spend over twelve hours looking after a kid. Unfortunately, her friends and the cousin’s mom also seem to think she did the wrong thing, although we have to assume they only heard the cousin’s side of the story.