A classic children's book series has me questioning my parenting

My daughter and I have been reading an old book series together at night before bed. I didn’t read these books when I was a kid, so I always assumed they were about entrepreneurial teen girls finding their way in the late twentieth century. I was wrong. It turns out the books are, at their core, escapist literature for parents.

The book series is The Baby-sitters Club.

Reading the books for the first time as a parent is an interesting experience because the thing that jumps off almost every page is that the parents in The Baby-sitters Club do practically ZERO CHILDCARE! It’s truly an astounding feat. These folks go off to work, to parties and social events, to concerts two towns over with no means of communication, and on and on it goes. They are non-stop.

Is it magical realism? Fantasy? Non-fiction? I can’t say for sure.

I posted about the non-parenting parents phenomenon on social media a few weeks ago and sparked quite the firestorm. I made sure to say that in the fictional universe of The Baby-sitters Club, all the parents seem to be completely absent from the childcare sphere so as not to paint real-life parents from the 80s as do-nothings. It turns out I was much too cautious. The internet wanted me to throw their parents under the bus, back that thing up, and drive over them three or four times, at least.

The majority of the commenters shared their memories of the book series or joked about how there was no fiction involved; they did all the childcare as teen babysitters or were on their own while their parents did who knows what. Most were pleasant about it, but one person was exasperated, replying something to the effect of “When are y’all going to start listening to us when we tell you what our lives were like?? Our parents basically didn’t exist!”

I feel like there was probably something deeper going on with that one, but the overall vibe of the replies made things pretty clear. The Baby-sitters Club books contain a lot of truth, or at the very least, from the vantage point of three or four decades in the future, they feel real to people who were children or adolescents during the time period.

As a geriatric millennial born in the early 80s, I’m roughly in the right age group for the books, but they don’t feel particularly real to me. So, learning that some of my peers find the books historically accurate was important because it makes the truly unhinged parts even more entertaining. It also makes me question why I’m not attending more galas and why I’ve spent so many hours with these children who live under my roof.

We’re currently on the tenth book, and the 12- and 13-year-old babysitters have already set up and run their own summer camp. I’m in my forties, and I’ve never even tried that. I mean, I’ve kind of operated a de facto camp at times with some of the neighborhood children, but it was never anything official, and I didn’t make money off of it. I never even printed up any flyers. Missed opportunity, perhaps?

Then, in another book, two of the parents get married to each other (most of the parents are separated or divorced, and at least one is dead), and they have tons of friends come into town for an entire week before the wedding to prepare. I can’t imagine having friends as an adult. I really can’t imagine what these friends were doing together for so long. Probably nothing you could write about in a book for tweens. Anyway, during the pre-wedding week, the guests pooled their sixteen or so kids, and the babysitters kept them from nine to five for FIVE STRAIGHT DAYS! Remarkable. The babysitters did put their foot down and told the parents they had to send the kids with boxed lunches, but otherwise they were free to dump the kids and head off to decorate and cook and do all the things five couples have to do together for forty hours the week before a wedding.

But… but, my absolute favorite part (so far) is when one family with eight kids (not a typo… 8 kids… it’s the Pikes, obviously) goes on vacation to a beach town called Sea City in New Jersey for two weeks and they take two adolescent babysitters with them to do literally all the childcare and associated work. Completely unhinged. The babysitters supervised the eight kids on the beach alone pretty much the entire trip. And Stacey was distracted by the hot lifeguard, so it was mostly just Mary Anne (and I just found out last night that Mary Anne is 12 years old!!)! Mind you, these are very young kids they are watching, and the parents are just… never around? Mary Anne got a bad sunburn early in the vacation, and you would think the parents might’ve be concerned, but nope. They were like, “Not our problem, get a hat on and get back on that beach with our eight kids! There are lifeguards. It will be fine.”

One morning, around the middle of the vacation, the dad says, “Hey, why don’t we go to Smithtown today!” Smithtown is apparently a colonial village, and the kids are immediately like, “Nah. Boring. Pass.” So, the dad says, “Honey, should you and I go to Smithtown then?” And the mom is like, “Why not?” And so they head off with a jaunty wave, shouting over their shoulders, “Babysitters! Kids! Here is twenty bucks. Enjoy exploring Sea City. We’ll see y’all at 8 p.m.”

So now the sitters are stuck with eight kids for the whole day, and it’s raining a little, of course, so they decide to go to mini-golf, because that’s what you do in the rain. It’s really crowded at the course, everybody had the same idea, I guess, but they push through and start to play. Ten children. Alone in one golf group. No fouromes here, just a… decagon? decade? half-score? of miniature mini-golfers.

I’m a huge mini-golf guy. It was one of my favorite activities as a kid (and adult), so I was all in on this scene. It didn’t disappoint. They start playing, and Mary Anne and Stacey are locked in from the start. They are counting every stroke, and the kids, some of whom are like 3 or 4 years old, are racking up scores of 27 on a single hole. I’m picturing the 4-year-old just whacking the ball around, and Mary Anne is counting every shot. The kid finally gets it in and is like, “Yes! I got 26!” and Mary Anne is like, “Hold your horses… I have you for 27, Margo.”

Apparently, everything is going great, but the babysitters are concerned because the people playing behind them are getting impatient. I don’t know why. 27 shots per person seems fine to me. But the babysitters are worried the adults in the next group are going to get mad. All adults, of course. No kids. These folks aren’t letting kids ruin their fun either. They’re playing mini-golf kid-free and have the bad luck of getting stuck behind ten children? Horrible. Picture the couple standing there on the opening hole, watching the first of ten kids in the group in front of them whack the ball into the spinning windmill arm 15 to 20 times. And it has to be even worse because they have probably never been in the presence of a child before. It’s like a whole new experience. They might have kids themselves, but still, that doesn’t mean they’ve ever spent any time with children. It had to be a shock.

Anyway, the babysitters huddle up to try to fix the slow-play situation, and what they decide is that they should split into three groups and put a limit on the number of strokes each player can take on a hole. And the stroke limit they land on is, get this… 20 strokes! They say later Margo’s score is over 200 after around 14 holes, which has to be some kind of world record. So Mary Anne and Stacey are out here meticulously counting well over 1000 mini-golf strokes and recording them with those tiny pencils on the little score cards, and meanwhile, the parents of the eight kids are off living it up in Smithtown. Making candles by hand. Churning butter. Probably getting the blacksmith to make them a cookie cutter out of metal that’s like The Pike Family seal or something, so they can go home and pretend they contribute anything to the family. It’s all a farce. A complete charade.

What a ride this book was. It’s called Boy Crazy Stacey. Highly recommend it. All the books so far are pretty captivating. And truly eye-opening. It’s too late for me now since my children are aging out of the needing a babysitter stage, but maybe it’s not too late for you. Pick up these books. Take notes. Maybe fantasize a little. And then find some spunky teens in your neighborhood who are excited to make two dollars an hour for taking over all your domestic labor.

If nothing else, once you’re done reading, you’ll feel great about your parenting (or really stupid). And you’ll feel relaxed after a magical journey through a fantasy world called the 80s, where the living was easy (for parents, NOT babysitters).

Words by me, Andrew Knott. Best known for duck.

Books:

Love’s a Disaster - contemporary fiction about a marriage proposal gone wrong, complicated families, mini-golf, second-chance love, Florida, sword fighting, and punk rock music.

Fatherhood: Dispatches From the Early Years - essays and humor about the very early years of my parenting journey

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