Kidsit Babysitting Statistics

Common Childcare Services Offered By Babysitters

Babysitters often offer multiple childcare services to their clients. Babysitting is the most common at 97.97%, parent help at 40.15%, nannying at 33.18%, and au pair work is the least common at 3.62%.

Child Age Preferences Of Babysitters

Babysitters' favorite child age to work with is preschoolers at 89.72%, and the least favorite is teenagers at 35.88%.

Childcare Services Offered By Babysitters

Many babysitters offer extra services for children, sometimes at additional cost per hour.

Household Services Offered By Babysitters

Babysitter can also provide a range of household services that can be a real help to busy families.

Average Babysitting Rate Per Hour By Country

See our babysitting pay rates guide for average rates in the top babysitting locations.

What Payment Methods Do Babysitters Prefer?

Here's what our babysitters said in a recent poll:

Babysitter Availability

Babysitters can be more or less difficut to book depending on the time and day of the week, if it's a special occasion, or if it's a school or public holiday.

Weekly availability

Evenings are the most available time for babysitters with Friday evening being the most popular. Overnight is the least available time with Tuesday night-time having the least sitters available.

Special availability

Many babysitters are also available for special occasions and unique circumstances.

Babysitting Qualifications And Credentials

The average babysitter is 23 years old, and has 5 years and 7 months experience working with children.

Babysitter Skills And Interests

There are Hardly Any Male Babysitters

The disparity between how many men versus women are babysitters was greater than any other job I could find. A whopping 97.1% of all babysitters are female.

There could be several different societal reasons for this. Women are generally seen as the more nurturing and loving of the sexes. And babysitting isn't something that would be classified as a traditionally "masculine" job. So there could be a lot of stigma surrounding being a male babysitter. Men who babysit could face jokes and even insults or judgment from family and friends.

Many people also carry on the incorrect belief that male childcare providers are more likely to physically or sexually assault children in their care. On why this simply isn't true, check out my article Is it Safe to Hire a Male Babysitter? which goes in-depth on the topic.

Are you a male and thinking about becoming a babysitter? Read this article first Can Men Babysit? to learn why there aren’t many male babysitters, you can actually use this to your advantage.

Do People Consider Hiring A Male Babysitter?

To answer this, we polled our website visitors to see what they think:

Leaving Your Kids With A Babysitter Is Actually Pretty Safe

While male babysitters especially face a stigma, there's a general idea some people have that babysitters, in general, are unsafe. In my opinion, this is probably perpetuated by decades of movies and television shows which portray babysitters in a bad light.

If you watch any kind of entertainment with babysitters in it, they're usually portrayed as being incompetent and letting the kids they're watching get completely out of control. It's quite a popular comedy trope, and most shows have at least one episode where the kids are essentially jumping on the couch and eating ice cream while the babysitter is pulling their hair out. In other forms of media like horror movies, babysitters may be portrayed as the villain that treats kids poorly or steals from the family.

While a small minority of babysitters are bad apples, in general, these ideas about babysitters couldn't be further from the truth. Most babysitters are responsible, mature people who enjoy caring for kids or just need a part-time job. If you hire a babysitter that has completed a babysitting course as well as First Aid or CPR, it's very unlikely you'll have any kind of problem.

In fact, one study found that only 4.2% of all criminal offenses against children under age 6 were committed by babysitters. That's less than the percentage that either family members or strangers account for.

What Is The Main Purpose Of Your Resume?

We polled our babysitters to find out:

Childcare Is Most Common When Both Parents Work Outside The Home

71% of households where both partners work will pay for childcare for a preschool child (Source).

As kids get older, that number drops a bit to 49% for school-aged children (kids between ages of 5 and 14.)

Most parents (86%) who use child care arrangements do so on a regular basis. So if you're a babysitter, you should really be aiming to get recurring jobs where you work the same time and place every week, if possible.

Younger Babysitters Might Be More Prepared Than You Think

I think there's a common misconception that younger and less experienced babysitters are probably less safe to leave your kids with.

But a study from Penn State University on the emergency preparedness of 11 to 13-year-old babysitters shows that most of them are actually pretty prepared for dealing with tough situations (Source).

About half of the kids in that age range who are babysitters were trained in CPR and most had First Aid training. About 10% of them had even called 911 at some point!

Based on this study, I feel a bit safer with the idea of leaving my kids with a babysitter of that age. The biggest drawback the study pointed out for 11 to 13-year-old babysitters was a lack of attentiveness. So if you do hire younger babysitters, you probably just want to make sure your own children are old enough that a lack of attention won't cause any serious harm.

How young is too young to start babysitting? Check out my article What Age Can You Start Babysitting? (Laws & Maturity Requirements) for details!

Parents Want More Government Help With Childcare

More than two-thirds of Americans think that either the government or the businesses they work for should be doing more to help fund childcare for parents who work. However Congress in the US still pretty much fails to address this issue. And childcare funding in America tends to lag behind what's available in other developed countries like Canada, the UK, and Australia (Source).

The Word "Babysitter" Became A Thing In The 1930s

The word "babysitter" first showed up in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1937 (Source).

Even though terms like babysitter and babysitting only came into existence in the 1930s, it's actually one of the world's oldest professions. We just previously used other words like nanny, nurse, or childrearing to refer to the services that babysitters provide instead.

Another fun fact. The words house-sitter and pet-sitter are derived from the word babysitter.

How Many Babysitters Have Babysat Overnight?

We polled our babysitters to find out:

What Are The Most Useful Babysitting Documents?

According to the babysitters using our website they preferred the following: