New Mom Asks Internet Users If She's a Jerk For 'Testing' Family Members Who Want to Babysit

Aug 24, 2021 by apost team

Taking care of kids can be a tricky task, especially when the children are still in the early stages of their life. Sometimes it can be hard for parents to trust babysitters to care for their children in the same capacity that they do, resulting in them potentially spending weeks or even months searching for the right caretaker. While one option is to hire a sitter from your local area or even a trusted service provider, another is to ask family members to help out with watching the kids from time to time.

While the latter option can at times be more convenient, it may not always be the right answer according to a new mother from Reddit. Trusting someone to take care of your child can be scary and uneasy, especially for new parents. The Reddit user explained that she had her own way of deciding who to ask to babysit her baby girl by administering her very own test. The test would determine whether her and her husband’s families were ready to take on the task of caring for their baby. 

Back in September 2019, the mother posted about her experience with her brother-in-law and his wife watching her baby, and how well they did with her test that would determine whether they were fully ready to become a full-time babysitter. However, this process created plenty of problems within the family, and has left the mother butting heads with her husband’s brother and the brother’s wife, leaving her to wonder if she was actually in the wrong for administering her test.

“My husband and I recently had a baby girl, and everyone in both our families keeps asking to babysit,” the original poster (OP) wrote, starting off her Reddit post back in September 2019. She explained that she has a “simple test” to see who’s really ready to watch the baby. The test is typically done by asking a family member to watch the baby girl for a bit of time while the mother goes off to do something in another room of the house. Whether the experience goes well or goes wrong determines if that family member is deemed worthy enough of becoming a babysitter for the family.

“Sometimes it goes bad, like my grandma turned off her hearing aid so she wouldn’t be bothered by the baby crying,” OP explained. Luckily, she and her husband had plenty of other people interested in caring for their daughter. The mother explained that her brother-in-law and his wife came over to visit and wanted to babysit, so the parents tried the test. 

“They didn’t even have the baby for 2 minutes before coming to fetch me for help,” she wrote. “I figured that meant they failed.” However, OP didn’t give up on her extended family; she just thought it would be a good idea to wait until the baby was older and then they could try the test again. However, OP’s brother-in-law ended up going home early without his wife, explaining that he needed to work. About a month later, OP’s sister-in-law asked her husband why they hadn’t been allowed to babysit. “He told her about the test, and she got mad,” OP explained.

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In a shocking turn of events, the husband’s brother and his wife announced that the couple had actually failed their test, which was composed of counting how many questions the parents had asked them during their visit. According to them, the answer was zero. OP was completely taken aback. “I was sure I’d ask them about their flight, their jobs, a wedding they’d attended that we missed because of the baby — all the usual polite small talk,” she wrote. However, she credited her and her husband’s exhaustion on the potential lack of questions and figured that they deserved some slack for being new parents and having to constantly care for their baby.

After getting plenty of comments telling her that she and her husband were wrong for testing their family members and not asking questions like their family had suggested, the mother edited her original post to include an update on the situation, since there had been some problems within the family following the test. “BIL and SIL had never changed a diaper before and didn’t seem interested in learning,” OP wrote. 

She also clarified that their family members had been the ones who wanted to babysit and that she and her husband had never actually asked them. She wrote, “And we’re not asking anyone to babysit for us! It’s family that keeps insisting we go out and give them alone time with the baby.” In a final update of the Reddit post, OP said that she was going to apologize to her brother-in-law and his wife after finding out that many Reddit users claimed she was wrong for testing them in the first place.

What do you think about this mother’s test? Was she right or wrong for testing her family members to see if they were ready to babysit her daughter? Let us know, and be sure to pass this on to your loved ones, too.