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201 9 Quitter Sitters: The Fall of Babysitting In 1989, Parents Magazine published “How We Survived Our First Night Out,” about a yuppie couple who hired Jennifer, a gum-chewing sixteenyear -old babysitter, to watch their five-month-old while they dined at a bistro. But before she arrived, the mother (“remembering her own babysitting days”) had spent hours sweeping the house clean of liquor bottles, prescription pills, and other possible enticements. Meanwhile, the fretful father—representing a new model of the devoted dad—had diligently compiled a lengthy emergency phone list he posted on the refrigerator with six teddy bear magnets. Despite their elaborate preparations and precautions , their dinner out was not worry-free. The anxious couple were certain that the sitter’s negligence had led to catastrophe: either their daughter had fallen down the basement stairs or she had been poisoned with toilet bowl cleaner. They raced home only to find the babysitter watching a video and their daughter, Annie, sound asleep. While tidying up after the sitter left, however, the mother found a tiny white pill next to her daughter’s infant seat. “She’s drugged Annie,” she cried out in horror! “I read about a baby-sitter who did that,” responded her alarmed husband. After examining the “pill,” they realized it was just a Tic-Tac and, moreover , that their overactive imaginations had led them to mistrust Jennifer.1 After nearly a century of sustained efforts aimed at taming the teenage girl, adults’ anxieties about hiring one to babysit would continue. Following the release of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992), the suburban horror story about a demented, murderous, and seductive nanny, one periodical warned, “[t]he hired hand that rocks the cradle may belong to an unstable, even dangerous, baby-sitter.”2 Reifying long-held suspicions about babysitters were new arrivals on the movie screen unsettling parents in many of the same old ways. Wild exaggerations of female adolescent empowerment and entrapment in popular and pornographic movies continued to stir the fears of adults. By the end of the century there was 202 Quitter Sitters: The Fall of Babysitting a marked expansion of well-known modes of containment—training programs and handbooks—as well as new methods of control—babysitter dolls and babysitting horror fiction. Despite endeavors aimed at getting girls to conform, many at the end of the century turned their backs on babysitting. Though a fifteen-year population decline had come to an end during the 1990s, the swelling adolescent population had not alleviated the labor scarcity that had been hobbling babysitting since its halting emergence.3 Young girls continued to pursue academics, athletics, and other sources of employment that left few with either the time or desire to babysit. “Many teens have other priorities than watching the kids,” reported the Atlanta Journal and Constitution in 2000. Suggesting that girls’ preferences for “real” jobs were not only a recent development but an unusual decision and unnatural choice, the newspaper assumed that “[a] few years back, lots of teenagers were happy to spend their weekends baby-sitting to earn a few bucks.”4 Not exactly. Girls had been deserting babysitting for more desirable jobs for a very long time. Rather than enumerating the everyday problems of ordinary babysitters, however, girls grew bolder and their complaints broader as the century came to an end. Among those having their say about the under-remunerated and undervalued job of babysitting were female musicians who used media to challenge oppressive gendered prescriptions. Still vying with grownups over notions of girlhood at the dawn of the new millennium, girls and young women transformed the legendary sitter into a brassy figure who stood for the downfall of babysitting. The Cyber Sitter: Extending Babysitting, Furthering Anxieties In 1995 a headline published in the New York Times read, “Teen-Age Baby Sitter Unaided Fends Off Would-Be Kidnapper.”5 Covering the same story with a different title, “My Babysitter, My Hero,” Redbook magazine also made sitter heroism newsworthy in the age of Girl Power.6 Despite the newly celebrated authority of the female adolescent, the theme of teenage irresponsibility persisted. One mother reflected the sentiments of the more typical anxiety-laden parent: “The teens aren’t what they used to be. They’re more experienced at life now. I’m always afraid they’re either going to be on the phone and my children will be doing whatever, or unexpected company will come over.”7 Girls dying their hair green, donning...

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