The Babysitting Co-Op That Reshaped My Family Life

My husband and I were at a party in his co-worker’s backyard when I glanced at my watch for the first time that night and shuddered in surprise. It was 11 p.m. Three hours had passed in a flash, and we were due home to our babysitter by the time it would take us to get a Lyft. I looked over at my husband across the patio. He had just grabbed another drink from the open bar and was deep in an animated discussion with friends. This was one of the few annual gatherings my homebody, introvert spouse revels in, and I didn’t want his fun to end. I was also deep in conversation and already feeling the sad pangs of having to leave a party in full swing.

I texted our babysitter: “Hey, we’ll probably be here for at least another hour or so, that ok?”

Under normal circumstances, I would’ve been doing the mental calculations about how much money we’d be out after this night away. Evening babysitters cost $20 an hour or more, we’d be out a hundreds of dollars after a night of revelry. But that didn’t enter my mind because our babysitter, Jason, is a friend of ours. His daughter, Prudence, is my son Finch’s best friend, and we weren’t paying Jason in cash; we were paying him in hours.

“Sure! Take your time and have fun!” Jason responded.

We were part of a babysitting co-op, in which a group of families swap babysitting services for each other and in which the currency is hours instead of dollars. Before that party night, I had banked up 10+ hours from babysitting for some of the other 15 families in our co-op. I knew Jason, who had a second kid on the way, was just grateful to be stocking up on hours. Knowing this fact also relieved me of any guilt for asking Jason to spend even more time on our couch watching Netflix while my then-2-year-old slept.

After roughly three more update texts that pushed our return time later and later, and three “no worries!” replies, we eventually headed home to relieve him at 2 a.m. The next day’s exhausted parenting regret was the only thing we had to worry about, thanks to a connected community of parents and kids that we had built through our neighborhood-centric babysitting co-op. In our group, we used hours as currency and got to go on date nights again and know there was always backup care in an emergency. It seemed we landed on a form of communal child-rearing that feels genuinely unique in the United States. Which is to say not that communal, but just communal enough to get some relief.

Read the rest of the story at Romper.