Since the schools have closed again, the demand for babysitters has risen enormously. Children are having online classes at home, which makes the work-from-home situation even more challenging for parents. Employers are therefore offering a babysitter through the company. In this way, the parent can focus on work and there is a babysitter who takes care of the children and helps them with home schooling. AD visited the babysitting family of our Babysitting Angel Madelon.

Article by Kim Visbeen

Working from home and helping, entertaining, feeding, and changing the children: not an ideal combination. And babysitting agencies see that too. “The number of requests has exploded.”

With a pan of cocktail sausages simmering on the stove, Madelon de Groot (19) is busy making lunch for the child she babysits. She has just taken the oldest, who is nine, to a friend’s house; his six-year-old brother is waiting for an afternoon full of games. She has been babysitting for years here in the Rotterdam neighborhood of Hillegersberg, where she lives with her parents. Nowadays, alongside her Health Sciences studies, she babysits one fixed family once a week through babysitting service Charly Cares. “And the rest depends on how busy I am and when people need me.”

And that has been a lot more since the schools and childcare centers closed their doors. Take this week, for example, in which she is helping out at families on three days in total. “Because the schools will stay closed longer, parents ask: it won’t work out with the babysitter we had arranged, can you still come? I hear that often: that parents look each week at what works with grandparents and their own work.”

Babysitting through the employer “The number of requests has exploded, especially in the last two weeks,” says Xander Koenen, co-owner and founder of Charly Cares. In Rotterdam, the number of bookings with the babysitting service since the current lockdown is three times as high as in the months of October, November and December. 93 percent of the bookings are for daytime.

Babysitting through the employer is especially popular. An employer then pays for a babysitting service, partly or entirely, for the employee. According to him, both small and large companies are interested in that. “The kids need to be kept busy. Companies provide the babysitter at their own expense so the employee can keep working productively. They are really at their wit’s end. They have nowhere to leave their kids, but work just goes on.”