How To Start A Babysitting Co-op [Spring Break Redux]
Resources for how you can launch your own community care model
This week is Spring Break here in Portland and parents who weren’t able to take time off are in the middle of the childcare-work conflict dance. A preview of a whole summer of that. In honor of this, I’m reposting my quite popular “How to Start a Babysitting Co-op” post all about how you, yes you, can create your own community care model.
I’m especially appreciative of my babysitting co-op. A couple of our friends took our kiddo for a sleepover the other night so that my husband and I could celebrate our 10-year wedding anniversary with a little staycation. It’s the little things keeping me afloat emotionally these days and our co-op is one of them.
This is a practical guide on how to go about it and you can find the more philosophical approach to why we need community care models like this in the Romper story I wrote here.
For those of you who read this story when it was first posted and went on to start your own co-op, I want to hear about it in the comments!
When my kid was but a wee infant and I had just about reached my breaking point with having absolutely no time for myself or my spouse or my thoughts, my friend Ayn presented an opportunity to get all of that back, even if for a few hours every once in a while. She suggested a bunch of us families in a Facebook group create a babysitting co-op.
A babysitting co-op is when a group of families band together to share in babysitting. Each family is given a certain number of hours to start with (we started with 5 each) and you use those hours as currency. You and your spouse want to go to a concert? Put a call out to the babysitting co-op. You have an appointment and your partner is working? Put a call out to the babysitting co-op. You just want to sit alone staring at the wall in a coffee shop? Put a call out fo the babysitting co-op.
That original neighborhood-centric babysitting co-op would grow to include about 15 families at its peak. Logistically speaking, this meant there was always someone who would watch my kid if I needed some child care assistance. Emotionally speaking, this meant a huge community of families that my kid knew, who knew my kid, and a group of us with shared trust that wrapped us in the warm blanket of community care.
At a practical level with the babysitting co-op, there’s a disaster preparedness aspect to this as the co-op meant that I had several other families that lived near me that could serve as emergency contacts and who I could trust to pick up my kid in case the Big One hit (in Portland/PNW-speak that is the big Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake predicted to hit basically anytime in the next few decades). But on a societal level I believe that the babysitting co-op model held some answers around how we might reframe family life to create a better, more connected world; a way to think more as a community versus individually.
It’s something I’ve been ruminating on a lot related to this project and wrote about in a story published in Romper last week that explores the deeper potential of such babysitting co-ops.
Read the story in Romper Here!
One of the observations I made from that earlier co-op (that sadly disbanded because of the pandemic and subsequent moves from the neighborhood) was that it’s so hard for people to ask for help in our individualized American culture. But we get so much both as the one being asked and the one asking that it’s worth the risk. The babysitting co-op model makes asking that much easier. And the outcome is just so worth it.
I spoke with writer Angela Garbes or the story who wrote a book that I go back to time and again, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change. Her family became especially connected to another neighborhood family during the pandemic and it opened up her world for interconnection and interdependence. I loved what she said to me about this:
“I found living in interdependence gave me something that we’re not good at describing in America, but I’ll put in these terms: The return on investment has been 100-fold, but in a way I never could have predicted. It’s a feeling of satisfaction. It’s a feeling of being wanted. It’s a feeling of being needed. It’s a feeling of like I have much to give and much to provide. It’s a feeling of abundance.”
And yes, it can take work, but it’s worth it. When I shared this story with my friend Sarah Wheeler–who writes the Momspreading newsletter and the Rompercolumn called “Good Enough Parent” and is co-host ofThe Mother Culture podcast–she texted “I just love anything that’s like ‘yes this is hard but you can put in effort to make it easier.’”
And that’s exactly what a babysitting co-op is. A form of organizing ourselves where a little extra effort can go a long way.
But where to start? Well, that’s what this post is for. While the Romper story is about why, this post is about how.
Tools to Start Your Very Own Babysitting Co-Op
The babysitting co-op idea is not new at all. Ayn, who started our original co-op, was a kid in a co-op as a wee tot. She told me it probably wasn’t as formal as ours ended up being, but it was definitely an important part of her life growing up. And I imagine it was especially important for her parents. And if you’re intrigued by this idea, I’m here to support you with resources, resources resource. So no need to reinvent the wheel. Here are my “how tos.”
A disclaimer: Take these suggestions with a grain of salt. Every person, every community, every co-op is different. Some will be more casual, some more formal. But this is what has worked for the couple of co-ops I’ve been a part of and they provide you with an idea of how this whole thing works.
Getting Started
All it takes is a few families to get things going. Probably good to have at least five or six families interested at the outset. There are a number of ways you can go about this, but it’s worth looking close-to-home first with families that you already know and your kid knows and there’s some basis of trust built-in. Here are some suggestions:
Localized/Neighborhood-Centric Facebook Groups: For our original co-op it started with a closed Facebook group of neighborhood parents whose kids were born around the same time. My friend, Suzanne and I had started that group when our kids were tiny babies and we were in desperate need of connection. It expanded incredibly quickly and wasn’t just an online forum, but given that many of us were still on maternity leave when we began, it involved a lot of regular in-person meet-ups. You could start with a city-wide or local parents Facebook network to put out a call to parents that might be in your neighborhood and go from there.
School Connections: The current co-op I’m a part of came out of school connections. When Finch started Kindergarten in 2022, we had built up a pretty connected email list of families from word-of-mouth before school even started. We had already done group playground hangs and there were already some deeper connections built by the time this launched about half-way through our kids’ Kindergarten years. A few weeks into the school year, I sent out an email to see if parents were interested and that’s how we got started.
There are many other ways to do it, but these are how it came about. Honestly, however you do it, it just begins with one person willing to take the initiative to get it started.
General Logistics
Now that you’ve formed your co-op, you have to consider both how to find out how and where to get family information, how to request babysits, how to communicate with one another, and how to track hours. These are the elements to consider including what has worked for my co-ops.
Family Information: Where and how will you collect family information? It’s important to have information available to the whole co-op about who is a part of the co-op, emergency contacts, medications, allergies, etc. For both co-ops, when families are onboarded, they complete a Home Environment & Family Details Survey. Here is a template spreadsheet that you can use to input into some kind of form such as Google Form or other survey format to collect the info. Just make sure to store the info where all families have access to it.
Communication Method: What forum does everyone have access to and will get notifications easily? For our earlier co-op we used a private Facebook Group. For my current co-op we have a WhatsApp thread with everyone (FB Group wouldn’t work because a number of us aren’t on FB and/or rarely check it). Other options are Slack or just a good ‘ol text thread.
How To Request Sits: What are the details needed to request a sit? This one isn’t rocket science, but it’s good to have some kind of standard on what information should be shared to request a sit such as day, timeframe, any other requirements needed for that site (e.g., need to put the kid to bed or need to pick the kid up from school).
Hours Tracking: How do you track hours? There are a variety of ways to do this and it’s perhaps the most complex aspect of managing a co-op. I’m going to start a whole new section about hours tracking because there are a lot of options and it’s probably easier to do this point-by-point. Here goes…
UPDATE: After this was first published, I heard from the creator of a fantastic app that has more or less made a one-stop-shop for the above logistics: The Carefully App. Plus, since our kids are getting older, we decided to stop tracking hours as it feels like we’ve gotten into enough of a rhythm to just assume we’re all in good standing.
Admittedly, I had a hard time getting our families to sign up for a separate app outside of our WhatsApp group, but I think it could work well if you start your group with the app from the beginning. It’s an amazing resource!
More on Hours Tracking
There are both simple and more complex ways to track hours. Here are two options on how we’ve tried it out and the pros/cons of each.
Physical “bucks” exchanging. In the earlier days of our current co-op we tried out the physical “bucks” exchange system. One of the members printed out some fake “babysitting bucks” and we distributed 5 to each family to get started. When a sit occurred, the parents would simply exchange the bucks for the hours sat. I had actually seen this way back pre-kids with my ex’s friends who used a deck of cards to exchange babysitting hours with neighbors–I think in that case, it was one card for one sit regardless of the timeframe.
Pros: It’s simple and you can physically see the number of bucks/hours you have remaining because they’re right there in your house (if you can remember where you put them).
Cons: It’s easy to lose the bucks or forget them when someone sits your kid, you can’t necessarily track shorter increments than one-hour slots (although there’s probably a workaround for that if you wanted to have a “buck” worth 15 minutes vs. a full hour). And, there’s no way to go into negative hours. While this might sound like a pro as it keeps ya honest, it can be a barrier to some families. If you only have 2 bucks left, but you need 3-4 hours of sitting, you’re in a bind. We’ve found that there’s a little more flexibility you allow for the occasional dip into “the red” in these circumstances that can be made up in future sits (like a collective IOU).
Online tracking on a spreadsheet. For both co-ops, we use a Google Sheet to which everyone has access to track hours. A template for that spreadsheet is here. Our current co-op started with the physical bucks system, but switched over to this system for all the “cons” listed above.
How it works: Each family begins with 5 hours. When a sit happens, the family who requested the sit posts in the forum something like this: “@Elizabeth please track a 11/15 sit from 5:30-8:30pm (3 hours) for XX family” – that way the sitter knows it’s being tracked, I have the info I need to track it, and everyone receives confirmation when it has been tracked. It has been helpful to designate one person to do the hours tracking just so the spreadsheet doesn’t get messed up (it can get wonky if a lot of people are playing around with it). You can rotate this role if it becomes a burden on the one person.
How the spreadsheet is designed: Each line represents one sit–entering all the sit details (names, plus specific date/time and times it occurred). Then for the sitter, include the number of hours “earned” in their column and for the sittee track hours “owed” in their column. At the bottom it calculates the remaining hours for each family w/ the already-input formula. If you have tech savvy people in your crew, you can surely use this as a basis for something a bit less cumbersome, but it’s pretty easy for anyone who’s familiar with excel to use. My friend Jason designed a very cool, more user-friendly version of this spreadsheet right before the pandemic but we only had a chance to use it a couple times before the world shut down and I haven’t yet had a chance with him to figure out how to modify the template to be used in our current co-op (stay tuned, I suppose).
Pros: It’s quick and easy to use if you’re familiar with Excel, it tracks in shorter increments (we keep ours to 15 minute increments), and you’re able to go into the negative if need-be.
Cons: You need one person designated to track sits, co-op members aren’t likely to be going into the spreadsheet often to check on their remaining hours, it’s a little annoying that you have to scroll way to the bottom to look at hours.
Use the SittingAround tracking tool. SittingAround is a subscription system that wraps the finding a co-op, asking for sits, and tracking sits answers all into one tool. To be clear, I haven’t used this, so I don’t know much about it, but at $15/year it seems like a screaming deal to make all that easier. My only concern is whether people from the co-op would actually look at the forum regularly or how alerts come through. But I’m sure they’ve worked that out to make it useful for co-op members. Writing this, I’m quite tempted to test this out with our co-op. Stay tuned and/or report back if you use, have used, or end up using SittingAround.
Group Organization and Community-Building
Last and, honestly, I think the most important part is that there’s some kind of community-building element involved. At a basic level, you want to make sure that you feel connected to the people who are going to watch your kid. On a deeper level, it’s what makes babysitting co-ops a new way of reframing our family world. Here are some ways to do that:
Organize quarterly gatherings. The way we do it in our current co-op is organizing casual hangouts at a co-op member’s house quarterly-ish or a couple times a year. It’s nice because we already know these families from school, but it’s just a fun way to get together and hangout. In our first co-op, we did the same thing with quarterly-ish hangouts. Because we had so many families involved, we pooled money together (~$10-20/family) that would help get food and drinks for those events so it wouldn’t be on that one family.
Organize quarterly “business” meetings. This isn’t something involved in our current cohort because it’s a tad more informal and we have fewer families and, thus, fewer moving parts. But it turned out to be necessary with our larger group. At these meetings we proposed new families to join the group, chatted about rules around how long a family could go without giving or receiving sits before considering them “inactive,” and discussing when to have the next hangout and who will host. Sometimes tender issues would arise between families or between a family and the group and we’d discuss these meetings in open ways. Of course this can be uncomfortable, but it’s all a part of living in community with one another and it’s great practice for all of us.
What Questions Do You Have
Whew, I know that’s a lot. It isn’t super complex and doesn’t have to be. You also don’t need to have read all of this at once to do what we did. It’s here and will be eternally on the main page under “Resources and Toolkits” for you to go back to if and when you want to start a co-op. Also, feel free to email me at crammingfortheapocalypse@gmail.com if you have questions as you start yours or want to talk through the process with someone.
And by all means, please put your questions below in the comments. Is there something I didn’t address? Is there something you need clarified from the above info? Have at it!
What a cool concept! Sharing with friends who have young children.