Considering how difficult parenting is, it doesn’t take long for most parents to appreciate how invaluable babysitters can be to helping them maintain at least some kind of social life.
And while the need to ensure their children are well-cared for often leads parents to put potential babysitters under a lot of scrutiny, that doesn’t mean the babysitters wouldn’t do well to look for some red flags of their own.
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In a way, some get lucky in this respect as it’s not unheard of for parents to leave a laundry list of demands that make it abundantly clear how nightmarish they’ll be to work for. But while others will outright lie about something they know will be a deal-breaker, some causes for friction between babysitters and parents simply won’t come up until the job is well underway.
And for two sisters, what was otherwise a good partnership recently ended due to an argument over an unexpected topic: baby talk.
The woman we’re about to hear from mentions that her sister watches her three-year-old daughter once a month or so.
As she explained in a Reddit post , this makes the sister a “backup backup” babysitter who she described as “not really a kid person.”
Regardless, it’s apparent to the mom that her sister loves and cares for her daughter, but she’s nonetheless bothered by the fact that the sister doesn’t use baby talk when speaking to the child. Instead, she talks to her like she would any other adult.
As the mom said after she brought it up with the sister, “She brushed me off saying she’s treating her like a person.”
Why this matters so much to the mom is that the sister often uses baby talk when speaking to her cats.
This apparently led the mom to think her sister cares more about her cats than her niece.
The sister replied that it doesn’t make any difference how she talks to her cats because there’s no reason to expect that they’ll ever learn to talk, whereas that isn’t true for the child.
Still, the mom continued to press the issue because she felt the sister dismissed her feelings as a mother.
In response, the sister told her that her position on this matter is irrational.
Furthermore, she said that if the mom felt that strongly about it, then she should go ahead and find a different babysitter.
In the mom’s words, “My husband thinks that I should have dropped the subject because now we don’t have an emergency babysitter if we need one.”
With this in mind, she reached out to Reddit to ask whether she overreacted.
And not only did she receive a resounding “yes” in response, but she was told that three years old was too late to still be using baby talk.
As one user said , “Your child’s speech will develop faster if she is spoken to like a whole person. Baby talk should be very limited with developing brains. They learn language from the adults and older kids in their lives.”
And while another person agreed, they had a whole different issue with the mom’s behavior.
In their words , “Making someone play with your child in a super specific way FOR FREE is entitled and wrong. You want your child to hear and play with caregivers differently. It’s better for them in the long run to have lots of loving experiences that are a little different. You overreacted and definitely owe your sister an apology.”
h/t: Reddit | throwawaybabysister
