Reply to Advice on finding a sitter for just a couple mornings a week

Forum Index » Childcare other than Daycare and Preschool

Reply to "Advice on finding a sitter for just a couple mornings a week"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Ok, I've been trying to do this without childcare but I think I've hit my limit. My 3-year-old was supposed to start public preschool this fall but obviously that's not happening.

I work freelance so my work is variable, and has been somewhat hit or miss since the pandemic started. Some of my clients have disappeared completely, some have paused work, and a couple are actually a little busier. It's inconsistent enough that FT care doesn't seem feasible -- I don't want to commit to something that might become financially hard to deal with if my work slows down completely.

So I'm trying to figure out if we can find someone to just come just 2-3 mornings a week (probably 6-10 hours). Ideally, the sitter would take my daughter our of the house most days, to the park or just for a walk. Our apartment is not large and we don't have a yard, so this would give us the best "break". Though obviously if the weather was too bad to go outside, they could stay at our house and hang out in our daughter's room and it would be fine.

Has anyone done this? Is it hard to find someone for this kind of schedule? I've poked around on Urban Sitter a bit, as that's how we've hired sitters on an ad-hoc basis in the past, but I haven't gotten any bites on my listing yet, after about a week. I've asked friends, but haven't gotten any leads -- our friends with nannies only seem to know people who are looking for something full time. We used to have a great sitter we used with some frequency, the college-age daughter of one of my colleagues, but her campus is closed for the foreseeable future so she is staying home with her parents and doesn't have any friends in town who are interested.

Any advice welcome. Am I just being unrealistic about these expectations, especially with pandemic-concerns? I'm getting increasing desperate.[/quote]

When I needed 1-2 hours of regular help, I asked the teachers/caregivers (since they are not actually licensed teachers) at my kid's preschool. I paid $20/hour for the teacher to come over, get the daycare kid ready, and take the kid to preschool. I learned that she was getting paid less than $14/hour by the daycare and that some other teachers had second jobs in retail or regular babysitting. [/quote]

Basically, you could hire a daycare caregiver to work 6:30am-9:30am or similar. For a daycare center to provide 7-6 type of long hours, they have to stagger the teachers schedules, so there are teachers that start work only at 9:30 or 10am. They could stop by your house, work a few hours, and then start their work. Or some center floaters (those who help with whichever center classroom that needs help because a teacher is sick or on vacation) would also have more flexible schedules. There could be all these people who used to do substitute teaching that might be available. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics