Kids can be trouble. Nobody knows that better than a babysitter. When mom or dad is away, the kids will get into as much trouble as they can. But sometimes, the parents or even the living situation is even worse. That's usually way more upsetting than a rebellious kid. No matter what the problem is, babysitters see some stuff.
These babysitters share the most messed up things they saw and experienced while trying to babysit these little "angels." Content has been edited for clarity.
He Was Looking For More Than Just A “Babysitter”
“A girl I work with needed some extra cash and started posting online to find babysitting jobs. She wound up getting some steady work from this attractive single guy who had adopted his special needs niece and needed some help watching her because his job required a lot of travel. She worked for him for a while and she wound up dating him within weeks. Then, he started making the little girl call my coworker ‘mama.’ Meanwhile, she was still babysitting for him frequently when he was away for work.
Shortly after they start dating, a woman contacted my coworker claiming to be the guy’s girlfriend and saying she was pregnant. He wound up playing the other woman off as a crazy ex and they continued dating. So, every day for about a month, she would come in gushing about how this guy was too good to be true. They didn’t spend a ton of time together because of his job, but when they did he was buying her lavish gifts or taking her on last-minute ‘family’ vacations to Disneyland. She knew they were moving fast, but she kept justifying it and saying ‘Sometimes people just click!’
This went on for about a month until they start fighting about the fact that they are never alone without the little girl to which he replies ‘You’re my babysitter. What am I supposed to do?’ Then it got crazier. One day she noticed his phone going off and saw a partial text from another woman on the notification screen saying ‘I can’t stop thinking about last night.’ She went through his phone. Turns out, he had five ‘babysitters’ that he ‘just clicked with.’ His overnight business trips were overnight stays with other women that he would pull the same scam on. He was having his niece call all of these women ‘mama’ so she wouldn’t slip up and call one of them by the wrong name. The whole thing was so messed up in so many ways.”
The Cat Smell Was Just The Beginning
“I babysat for a family in high school. They typically brought their two little kids over on their way to work on the weekends. I noticed a couple things the first time I watched them. First, they had serious speech impediments. They were five and seven years old, I think, and they were essentially unintelligible for most words. I could typically understand what they wanted by having them point it out, and we worked on speech and pronunciation a lot. Second, they reeked like they had spent most of their lives living in a litter box. They just carried this deep-rooted musky scent of cat urine and feces with them. We also worked on hygiene and bathing. This went on for a few months until one night their parents asked my brother and me to watch the kids at their place. Sure, we’ll do it; the kids are fun and it’s easy money.
When we get to their place, I saw that it was a double-wide trailer, and the door was open. We started to roll up and a stink hit me. I’ve heard people describe particularly putrid smells as a wall of scent and that is what I experienced. It was like somebody had taken a jar of cat pee, let it ferment all summer in Texas, and then surprised me by opening it in my face. It was pervasive, and there was no place in their trailer didn’t make me retch.
The parents went off to work and left us to watch the kids. I was extremely skeptical about sitting down on their furniture because there was cat poop everywhere. There were three litter boxes practically overflowing with it, there was cat poop in the unused shower, there was cat poop behind the couch, and the cushions had obviously seen some action too. When I went to cook dinner for the kids the shelves were practically empty, and there were no pots, so I ended up microwaving some hotdogs for them, which was apparently a common meal.
The room that the kids stayed in was inundated with cat excrement and toys. One of the kids couldn’t even sleep in his bed because there was just so much stuff, so he slept on the couch.
When we got home after that ordeal, we had a talk with our mom about calling child services and ultimately decided to do it. I later learned that they removed the older child from their custody due to anger problems that resulted in him beating his little brother. It made me tear up just thinking about those kids. The older one must be about 18 now and the younger one is probably 16 or so. I’m not sure I have the heart to look them up.”
In The Middle Of A Marriage Meltdown
“I babysat almost every single Friday and Saturday night through high school but here are my top two worst experiences:
The Spankening. One of my earliest babysitting experiences in middle school. This family lived down the street from me, and they were weird. The dad would work from home and stay upstairs while the kids and I were downstairs. One day, we were playing ‘house’ and I was a dog who had to sleep on this daybed in their playroom. I laid down and the kids jumped on me. While I was attempting to wrangle them off of me, their friend handcuffed me to the bed. They then proceeded to pull down my pants and started spanking me over and over again. I was screaming, it was painful and they wouldn’t stop. This was when the dad comes downstairs. I was thinking my salvation was here. But instead, the dad walked in, laughed at me, then turned around and walked back upstairs. I finally got them to uncuff me by kicking the kids as hard as possible. Also, the family calculated the exact cost per minute so I would get checks for like $22.47 and stuff like that. I never went back after the spanking.
The Marriage Meltdown. This happened a year after I graduated college. It was done as a favor for one of my mom’s coworkers as I was in the awkward stage between undergrad and grad school and had time off. The wife had a baby about three years before and was looking to go back to work. She needed someone to watch the baby while she went to a coffee shop to work on resumes and applications. They had just bought a house and were in the process of moving in. I was asked to get there at 8 a.m. and was always prompt. Every morning, the dad would be just getting out of the shower and would chat with me with just a towel around his waist. That was how I met him for the first time. Finally, over an hour later, the dad would go to work and the mom would leave to go to the coffee shop. This went on for a few days and I soon discovered that the son was mentally handicapped. No biggie, cute kid. I also found out from my mom’s coworker that the wife was suffering from postpartum.
The situation hit the fan when the mom left early one morning and I was supposed to meet the dad at the house. I got there at the normal time; no one was there. The dad was supposed to drop the older kid off at daycare then meet me at the house. I didn’t have the parents’ numbers but I emailed the mom after 9 a.m. rolled around and no one showed up. Finally, I was about to leave and I got a call from the dad, he said he was about to pull up. He arrived and ended up complaining to me about his wife for over THREE HOURS! I learned all about how she sucked, they hadn’t been intimate in ages, and her postpartum wasn’t real. He then proceeded to pick up his son and tell him ‘It’s ok that mommy doesn’t love you. I love you enough.’ He kept saying that over and over. He then proceeded to get mad at me for contacting his wife that he was late because she freaks out about everything and will now blame him for not being on time. Finally, he left for work after taking another awkward shower, and I watched ‘Project Runway’ on my phone while the kid slept.
I have no clue why I stayed that long. I felt like this guy was going to begin crying if I said I needed to leave. I also stuck around for an hour before he showed up because I thought the mom had snapped and killed her family since all their cars were out front. I later found out that the dad had borrowed his brother-in-law’s car and the mom had walked to a coffee shop.”
Night Of Living Nightmares
“I only babysat once in my life. Never again.
I was 25 or so and working for a research group at a university. The secretary was a nice lady and had a family emergency so she had to leave town for a night. She was scrambling to try to find someone to cover her at home because her kids couldn’t be left alone even though they were 10 and 14. I felt bad for her. I lived just down the street. I didn’t have plans, so I figured I’d be a standup guy. Big mistake.
She was a single mom with two kids who she admitted were ‘troubled.’ I had no idea how much until I tried to take care of them.
The older kid had a ‘date’ at the movie theatre with some friends. His mother said this was okay, so I dropped him off. I spent the next couple of hours watching ‘Super Troopers’ with the younger kid who told me it was his favorite movie. So, though the movie seemed questionable, I liked it a lot. Things were off to a solid start; easy street.
The movie theatre called and told me I have to come to pick him up or they were going to call the cops. I hear him screaming something I can’t make out on the other side of the phone. I should have let him go to jail.
I called the mom, but I didn’t get an answer. I didn’t get an answer for the rest of the evening.
It turned out the kid got into a fight with his friend during the movie and peed on him.
The manager at the movies was upset because they’d have to clean up the pee. He wanted the damage paid for. I explained to the guy I’m just helping out, gave him the home phone number, and he sided with me since the kid calmed down.
I drove the kid back. I didn’t know what to say to him. The ride was mostly quiet until I got close to the house and smell smoke. The 10-year-old had a freaking lighter and tried to light the back of one of the seats on fire.
I should have called the cops at this point, but it was one of those deeper and deeper things where you figure it’ll just be over soon. It never ended.
They wanted to watch ‘Super Troopers’ again and order pizza. I told them it was late already. They told me their mom never says no and they were watching the movie. I wasn’t sure exactly how to enforce anything on these kids, so I said fine, but no pizza. One of them went upstairs and ordered a pizza when he said he was going up to use the washroom.
I fell asleep. I woke up and one of the kids was trying to rob me by pulling the wallet out of my pants. I caught him and he claimed he heard my cell phone ringing and was trying to answer it for me which was stupid because my cell was in plain sight on the table in front of us.
When the pizza arrived, I had no idea who was knocking on the door. Given the kid failed to get money from me, he ran to the door and grabbed the pizza, pushed the pizza guy and then slammed and locked the door. He told me we had ‘free pizza, we must have won a contest or something. How did they even know we wanted pizza?’
When the movie ended they said they were going to bed/agreed to it. Great.
I slept on the couch downstairs. I actually didn’t hear them until around 2 a.m. when I heard a scream like someone got shot and then what sounded almost like shots from upstairs.
I ran up the stairs and found the 10-year-old crying and smashing a hammer into the door of the bathroom. I looked at the other doors and found one of them is off its hinges and there is something sticky on the ground and it looks like it’s in the kid’s hair/face.
It turns out the 14-year-old waited for his brother to sleep, then poured a cup he collects his pee in on the kid’s head, then ran. The 10-year-old somehow ran right through the door trying to get him and the 14-year-old and locked himself in the bathroom.
I had to wrestle the hammer out of the younger kid’s hand. He was livid, he was going to kill his brother when he got out of the bathroom.
The 14-year-old slept in the locked bathroom.
We cleaned the 10-year-old’s face/hair off in the sink in the kitchen because the other kid wouldn’t come out. When we were cleaning him, we heard the door opening. The 10-year-old tried to grab a knife from the kitchen and go up there to presumably make good on this threat. I managed to stop him.
I locked all the knives and other things I found that looked like weapons in the mom’s car. I told the 14-year-old to stay in the bathroom or he might die. Then I watched ‘Super Troopers’ on an endless loop while the other kid passed out. I was too nervous to sleep.
When the mom came home the next morning, I just gave her the keys to the car and told her to ask her kids what happened because I couldn’t relive it.”
The Most Dangerous Tutoring Session
“I took a job tutoring a kid in German, but the mother of the family thought that meant I would also babysit her younger son as well.
I kind of stumbled into the position, but he was attending a small private high school and was required to take two years of a foreign language to graduate. His mom mentioned that he had ADHD and it would be hard for him to retake another year. She arranged with the school board that if he could take the national exam and pass, it would count as his second year.
He was 16 years old and his family lived in a gorgeous, $2 million house in the most affluent neighborhood in our area. His dad owned some sort of African safari business, so they had all sorts of awesome stuff lying around. Ceremonial masks, spears, drums, animals, etc.
I tutored him twice a week for several weeks. The mom thought that I could be there for less than 2 hours a week and get her kid through high school German. I tried assigning homework, but he refused to do it. I spent almost three weeks working on one thing that he should’ve learned in twenty minutes. That ended when I asked him to turn to a certain page in his textbook, and he responded by ripping the page out and eating it.
Later that week, his mom reprimanded me for it. Apparently, I should’ve set out a snack for him and his 12-year-old brother since they were hungry.
I gave it another couple of weeks, but the final straw came when he got worked up and started jumping around. He ran in and out of the kitchen and grabbed a traditional African spear and threw it at me. I moved slightly, avoiding the spear, but it landed on their nice leather couch. It was a real spear that went straight through the couch. I grabbed my bag and my laptop and walked out.
The mother didn’t understand why I left.”
Putting Words In His Mouth At A Crazy Level
“I was 17 years old and babysitting my best friend’s little sister. It was summer, and I didn’t have a job, so I got drafted for $25 a day, which was almost minimum wage at the time without income tax to worry about. The little girl, Laura, was a precocious little devil. She had a schedule she made up as to what happened and when it happened. I was about three weeks into doing this when the mom and dad wanted to have a talk with me.
They had my parents there and everything was tense. I was questioned as to what I did all day with Laura, so I ran down the schedule and showed them where she tacked it on a corkboard in her room. They kept throwing more questions at me that kept getting more and more personal, like whether or not I ‘touched’ myself. My dad held up a hand and said they better get to the problem or we were all leaving. They said that while they were at a party with friends the night before, Laura blurted out that she wanted to see me beat off. I was flabbergasted, my mom nearly vapor locked, and my dad stared at the wall counting to 1,000. I had no idea what she was talking about. I had never said those words in her presence, let alone performed the deed.
They weren’t interested in hearing anything but a full confession, so my parents and I left. I was certain the cops were going to come knocking. Tensions around my house were high, to say the least, then the phone call came. My best friend had lost his job and was trying to keep it a secret from his parents so he taught his little sister to say she wanted to see me touch myself so I would get booted and he could graciously offer to quit and make the easy money babysitting. It all came out when they told him I wasn’t allowed at the house anymore and they were hiring some girl to babysit. My ‘best friend’ went on a rant about what morons they were and how he set the whole thing up, and they had to go mess it up by being idiots.
Anyway, the upshot was I was no longer under any suspicion, but I couldn’t babysit anymore because they hired the girl to do it. I never saw or talked to that friend again. It wasn’t that I avoided it, I actually went looking for him to beat the stuffing out of him; he just disappeared from town. Years later, I ran into Laura all grown up, I asked her about her brother after she realized she remembered me. She said he had been shipped off to his grandma’s house in Boulder City and he never did actually amount to much. She said her mom and dad still talked about how badly they treated me and she was sorry for her part in it.”
That’s Not What A Babysitter Does
“I put an advertisement on a website sort of like craigslist advertising myself as a babysitter. I was in desperate need of a job. I paid £5 to have the listing stay at the top of the search results and the only answer I got was a man calling from nearby asking if I could babysit his two children on a regular basis. He said I would have to look after the children but also look after his wife. I didn’t understand what he meant so I asked if she was mentally unwell.
He said, ‘No, it’s just that she gets down sometimes and could use another female to talk to. I work for a big company and sometimes she has to deal with a lot of my clients and she could use advice.’ I didn’t get it so I asked him to explain. ‘It’s just little things. We have a lot of younger men from overseas come over and she’ll take them out to dinner or for drinks. She sometimes gets upset about it though.’ I caught on then (he was pretty much selling out his wife and wanted ME to comsole her) and pretty much said thanks but no thanks and hung up. He called me three times again that night and I started to get worried. I took the ad down and slept with a knife beside my bed. Never again.”
A Cheesy Diet
“The parents were bodybuilders and had one daughter. I don’t know what her name was because I heard them call her so many different things. Emma, Emmie, Emory, Every, Avery, and one time Emerson. It was bizarre.
Anyway, this kid would lose her mind unless I played Bubble Guppies on TV and consistently feed her cheese. I would usually try and distract her with any other snack but she would only eat cheese. The parents encouraged me to give her all the cheese she wanted. They said she ‘was going through that stage where she only ate cheese.’
I was concerned about this kid’s health. For two years, I only saw her eat cheese. She was constipated almost every time I babysat.
One time, I ended up feeding her an entire block of cheese for two hours, and refused to babysit for them after that.”
“The Babysitter Is A Witch”
“My sister was the babysitter in this story. There were two little girls that lived down the street from us who we played with all the time. Their mom asked my sister to babysit over the summer since she just turned 13. Each time my sister went over there, she would keep them occupied by playing with their dolls and putting Disney movies on. Then one day my sister found the sequel to ‘Ariel The Little Mermaid’ in their stash of movies. She’d never seen it, she wanted to watch it, the kids didn’t. So my sister said, ‘Ok well you guys can play with your dolls (upstairs) while I’m watching the movie (in the finished basement) and let me know when you’re hungry for lunch.’ They became suspicious because after all, and I quote, ‘What teenager still watches Disney movies?’ They decided that she must be a witch, locked her in the basement, and frantically called their mom at work.
9-year-old: ‘The babysitter is a witch! You have to come home! We have her trapped in the basement! She’s going to hurt us! She’s a witch!’
Mom: ‘WHAT?! Unlock the basement!’
9-year-old, crying now: ‘No she’s a witch! You have to come home!’
Mom: ‘Ok I’m coming home, but you have to let her out of the basement before I get there.’
My sister in the meantime was FUMING that they were not hearing her screaming from the basement. When they finally unlocked the door, they were both armed with some household things and started beating her with them until she pushed on some pressure points and dragged them kicking and screaming to their rooms. When the mom arrived to find my sister a distressed mess she paid her extra and apologetically says ‘You don’t have to come back after today.'”
Trying To Keep Timmy Alive Is A Full-Time Job
“When I worked at a summer camp, I had a kid, Timmy, who had some behavioral issues, and he liked to hide. One time he climbed all the way into a trash can, with garbage in it, for no reason. I tried to work with him on his behavior issues.
One day, we took a field trip. Partway through, I took the kids over for a bathroom break. After they were done, I counted and realized I was one short.
Me: ‘Hmm, I wonder who it is? Oh no, it’s Timmy! Kids, has anyone seen Timmy?’
Other kid: (nonchalantly) ‘Oh, he’s over there, in a locker.’
Me: ‘What do you mean he’s in a locker?’
Museums sometimes have these small lockers you can rent for like 50 cents. They’re big enough for maybe a jacket or two, so you can leave your coat, or lunch in there.
Timmy had gone full-on contortionist and managed to squeeze himself, butt-first, into this locker. Took me a second to realize where his head was even at. I had to pull him out because he got stuck.
That was the day I went from ‘trying to help Timmy manage his problems’ to ‘keep Timmy alive for the summer.'”
Even Mom Knew The Truth
“One time, I babysat two little spoiled rich white girls. They told me I’m too short for my age, I’m bad at playing barbies, they said my hair was ugly, and screamed and cried bloody murder when I told them it was time for bed after I had let them stay up an hour late. They hid the TV remote from me and called me a bully. They locked themselves in one of the rooms saying they were going to tell their mom I was mean and screamed at them for no reason at all. When the mom came home and asked how they were, of course, I said they were fine. She responded with ‘I know they’re terrible. What did they do?'”
A Messy Situation
“When I was in high school, I was against babysitting while my sister loved it. She would babysit for a family we were somewhat close to who had two young boys. They had also just gotten a new Dalmatian puppy. One Saturday, when my sister had agreed to babysit, she realized she would be late and asked me to stand in for a few hours before she could get there. I agreed and got to the house.
Once the parents left, the two young boys started full-out fighting. They were punching each other in the face and going full force attacking each other until the younger one was screaming in pain. While trying to get the older brother off the younger brother, their new puppy was sprinting around the downstairs and vomiting everywhere. The entire kitchen floor was getting covered in his throw up as he smeared it around with his paws. I managed to pry apart the boys and had to spend the next hour or so picking up puppy puke. I left as soon as my sister got there, and have never babysat since.”
The Switch
“When I was a teenager in London, and generally pretty young and naive, I used to babysit for a neighbour who had a toddler. The kid was fine. The first time I turned up there, the only parent I saw was the father. He explained that the mother was in America for work. He stuck around in the house with me for about an hour before he left. He showed me where all the baby food was and everything else. At the same time, he was trying intermittently to phone the mother but never getting through.
The next time I turned up to babysit, the mother answered the door in a leopard print dressing-gown. When I got inside I discovered the original guy had been replaced by a different (American) guy. Nobody said anything to me, so I just rolled with it.”