Anyone participate in a babysitting co-op? how does it work?

[steph2003]

I'd like to try to set one up in my neighborhood since there are something like 20 little ones all under 4 on the closest 3 streets to my house! We all pretty much know each other within the 3 streets & I'd feel comfortable leaving my child with any of them. Most of us are transplants to the area & don't have family to help relieve us parents.

Does anyone participate in a co-op? I guess I'm wondering how to get it going & how does it work? someone would have to be in charge, I guess that I'm kinda volunteering for it! Do you set up rules/guidelines? better yet any websites you could refer to help me get started?

thanks for any input!

[jubilee]

Yes, I do. I have the info/rules around here somewhere, I'll post it later this afternoon. It is wonderful because I never pay for babysitting and I know and trust the moms. They are experienced, unlike some teens. It really has been very positive for our family!!

[sadie427]

I started one last year with around 5 moms that had babies around the same time. Unfortunately it's pretty much dead now. I think you need more families, or at least more families that actually use it--there were only two of us who used it on a regular basis, so now the two of us just switch off favors and don't go thru the coop formally. The website below recommended 20 families, which seemed like too much to me when I read that, but I think that's probably right. I wanted to expand ours but the other mom wasn't comfortable with that. Plus we found we really just don't want to go out all that much without him now that he's in daycare. We live near a university so have found great babysitters with no problem, and since we don't go out much paying for the babysitter is not all that bad.

Also, I think it works best during the day, especially in the older baby-toddler age group. The times I actually used it were for things like dentist appointments during the day, or a matinee on a Sunday. Since you would generally be dropping the child off at the sitting families house, we ended up not really using it at night once he was really developing a pattern of nighttime sleep, since it was hard to put him to bed in someone's house and pick him up when he's asleep, he would always wake up on the way home. To me, if you're trying to encourage your baby/toddler to sleep through the night, waking them up in the middle of the night to bring them home doesn't seem right. Plus putting both babies to bed once they are a little bit social tends to be hard. Unless you could somehow make an arrangement in advance that the sitter comes to the child's house, but that would probably require one parent staying home and the other babysitting, don't know if other people would agree to that. I think the website below recommends that though.

http://parents.berkeley.edu/recommend/groups/coop.html

As far as keeping track of the hours, there's a website, I think it's called babysittersexchange.com, or something like that. That worked pretty well.

hth