How to Find the Right Babysitter

It’s not easy finding someone to care for your children. Follow these tips to choose someone both you and your kids will love.

Lessons Learned

This article originally appeared on LearnVest.com.

I recently had to let our babysitter go. It wasn’t so much a firing as it was a promise to myself to never call her again after my daughter, age five, told me that the babysitter took long naps on the couch between breaks to give my daughter dinner and put her to bed. I was told the TV was on the entire time, which isn’t the worst babysitting sin in the world, and isn’t as bad as napping through most of a four-hour job.

That’s a great thing about young children (that parents are thankful for!), but babysitters should be wary—kids tell the truth. They might try a little lie when angling to a cookie that they shouldn’t have, but ask them what happened while you were out, and they’re likely to tell you the truth. So out went the old babysitter and in stayed the second one we had lined up over a year ago. I was reminded of a way to ensure you always have a babysitter when you need one: Have a backup. My wife and I did that soon after hiring the first one, to cover our bases.

Here are some methods we used in hiring a babysitter, and some lessons learned along the way to ensure that our next backup babysitter doesn’t fall asleep on the job or break any other cardinal rule of the craft.