Stop Baby-Sitter Poaching!

The most precious commodities today? Oil, corn, and mature teens who can watch our kids on a Saturday night.

(Illustration by Katherine Streeter)

Amanda is a working mom from the Boston area who loves the baby sitter she's had for years now. She knows how essential a reliable sitter is to her own sanity, so she pays her well. When two moms in her circle asked Amanda for her sitter's phone number, she demurred, saying with a laugh, "Oh, you know I can't reveal that!" She figured the matter was settled.

But when her sitter suddenly became less available, Amanda learned that her two friends had been hiring the woman behind her back. When she confronted one of them, the friend said, "You don't mind, do you?"

Amanda jokes that she was tempted to tell both women that she had slept with their husbands, "that I knew they didn't want to share them, but they didn't mind, did they?"

"Well, that's extreme," Amanda admits, "but I mean, hands off my husband, job, and sitter, in that order."

In their sometimes desperate search for dependable childcare, many parents who wouldn't think of swiping so much as a newspaper from their neighbors' doorstep somehow find it OK to go behind their backs to poach their baby sitter.

As all parents know, a reliable sitter with a flexible schedule is a precious commodity. When I was growing up, my neighborhood was awash with high school girls willing to sit any time. All you had to do was stock the freezer with their favorite flavor of ice cream and pay them a buck an hour. But in today's over-programmed era, where many high schoolers' schedules are stacked with SAT prep sessions and enrichment tutoring, not to mention theater and sports practices, good luck trying to get the girl down the street to sit consistently. So that intensifies the competition to find - and keep - a great sitter.

And that has too many parents who would scold their child for stealing a candy bar somehow seeing no problem in cornering their neighbor's baby sitter at the playground and furtively trying to steal her services.

Baby-sitter poaching has complicated lives and even ended friendships. You can find evidence of this in whispered complaints made at play groups and in strident postings made to parenting message boards. One mom who posted a comment on the blog Sippy Cups Are for Chardonnay recounted how she got burned by a friend who stole her sitter. "It was ugly," the mom wrote. "Needless to say, we are no longer friends."

Let's get this out of the way: The trouble does not lie with the actual baby sitter. She (it is still almost always a she) is an independent contractor and perfectly free to entertain any offer and choose the family that she feels is the best fit. More power to her.

The trouble lies solely with the poacher.

What constitutes poaching? I'd suggest it's any time someone tries to hire the regular sitter of a friend or neighbor without first checking with that person. After all, if you're too reluctant to discuss it with your friend first, that's a good indication you're engaging in at least mildly underhanded behavior.

Several years back, my wife got a baby sitter referral from a friend who had a deep bench to choose from. The sitter turned out to be wonderful. Soon she was sitting for us more than for my wife's friend. Still, years into the arrangement, my wife continued to check with her friend any time she needed to change the sitter's hours and especially in the rare cases when we wanted to book her for the most coveted sitter slot of all: Saturday night.

But contrast that with the approach adopted by a former neighbor with whom we were not at all close. Once when she spotted our sitter with our daughters at the mall, this neighbor approached her and asked for her number. When our sitter declined, saying she was already working for several families and offering the name of one of her friends, the neighbor persisted, refusing to relent until she had the number. Our sitter said later she thought this neighbor was a friend of ours, so she didn't want to reflect poorly on us by repeatedly telling her no.

So here's a modest proposal for parents: Don't say anything to your neighbor's sitter that you wouldn't say if your neighbor were standing right there. If you're going to swipe from them, make it something of less value, like their newspaper. Or their car.

Neil Swidey is a Globe Magazine staff writer. E-mail him at swidey@globe.com. Correspondent Michael Skocay contributed to this report.