On the Responsibilities of Babysitting

When I was an undergraduate, there were two sanctioned job markets run by the Career Services office: we could be bartenders, which required a training, or we could be babysitters, which required looking through a binder and picking out a family. (There’s much to say about these specific things being the two options, but that is for a different time.) I didn’t want to pay for the bartending training, so ended up devising for myself a weekly schedule babysitting for three different families: my favorite family had two kids under five, and I mostly spent time with the oldest one. Sometimes I’d come over in the evenings so the parents could go out to dinner. The kid was cute and silly and liked to skip through the park. Another family I worked for lived near the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the work required taking the second grader to various tutors and extra-curricular activities and sometimes helping him with homework. This job was more challenging: the kid was much more interested in showing me his guitar skills than doing his worksheets, and on more than one occasion got into a screaming fight with his mother while I was on the clock. Once, he called her a bitch to her face. I quit that job soon afterwards.

I am the oldest of two siblings, and I have always been the one to say that I don’t like kids because they are sticky and loud. I was relieved to have internships in publishing set up for my senior year, which set me up to work in that industry for two years after college. But after I started an MA at the University of Chicago, I went back to babysitting. A neighbor whose daughter I often watched put my information up on a local parent blog, so I got lots of great jobs and, along with a part-time administrative position, was able to support myself. Babysitting, it seemed, would always be there for me.

Things changed about six months after I started working for a family that I had come to really love. The kids were curious and emotionally intelligent. We did science projects and art projects and cooked together. The parents were going through a contentious divorce, and the mother had a restraining order against the father: I was sometimes tasked with walking the two sweet kids from the mother’s apartment down the street to the father’s car. Sometimes the father tried to talk to me; while it was awkward and uncomfortable, I could deal with it. One day, I arrived at the apartment and the oldest child was withdrawn, the youngest was sobbing. The parents had gotten into a physical altercation. I wanted to be there for the kids, but the situation felt too hard and sad, too volatile.

In the first few years of the PhD program, when I still lived in the neighborhood, I would periodically see the mother with her kids, walking to and from school or driving around in their car. I saw from afar as the youngest got taller and the oldest cut his hair. Sometimes, I still feel guilty about leaving that job.

Being a babysitter is odd because you experience and observe the most intimate aspects of strangers’ lives for an hour or two, now and then, or every week. Most of my babysitting jobs in Chicago involved putting the kids to sleep and then reading or watching TV until the parents came home from their evenings out. I wasn’t really caregiving: I was just helping out, stepping in. The families that became too complicated for me to work with were ones whose parents’ lives seeped into the interactions with the kids in a way that caused me to feel that I had become implicated, or had to respond, or had to act. I didn’t realize this at the time, but my babysitting jobs were early indications of what my ethnographic fieldwork boundaries would be.

I found that for me, it was possible to get too close, to care too much, to lose a sense of the limits of my role in fieldwork.

Before I developed the research that would eventually become my dissertation, I toyed with working on a project on medical aging, focusing on the economic difficulties of growing old in a culture—mine—obsessed with the economic futures of youth. While I was in coursework, I took a two-week trip to Phoenix, where I knew my fieldwork would take place, to see what kinds of connections I could make. The most impactful days during the trip were those I spent shadowing social workers at an NGO dedicated to serving indigent older people across the county.

On one of those days, I met a social worker, Melissa, at the home of Sascha, a Russian immigrant in his seventies who had been discharged from the hospital a few days earlier. Melissa had been sent to Sascha’s apartment on behalf of Compassionate Care, a hospital system in the area that contracts social workers to visit and survey recent patients. When I arrived at the apartment, the door was open to the heat and Melissa was sitting in a white folding chair placed in front of a very small children’s Mickey Mouse card table. Sascha was sitting next to her in an old brown easy chair. There was no other furniture.

Melissa was talking with Sascha about a medication he had been prescribed and asked if he knew what it was for. He shrugged. “Inflammation,” she said. “I’m not a nurse, but I know that!” She looked at the bottle’s instructions, which were written out on the orange pill bottle in a large block of black words. “I wish they had given you the punch out pill thing. Much less confusing.”

She asked whether he wanted Meals-on-Wheels for the next thirty days, which he was eligible for due to his income level. He declined. “You can probably cook better, anyway,” she said. “Also, you’d have to be home every day from 11-1.”

Melissa put an X on the sheet of paper she held on her lap and then introduced a survey that Compassionate Care had sent with her. She asked questions like:

            Do you have emotional support?

            How would you rate your health compared to other people your age?

            Are you depressed?

            Do you have heart problems?

            Can you raise your arms over your head?

            Do you have asthma?

            Do you have diabetes?

            Are you interested in diabetes or nutrition classes?

            How is your memory? Has it gotten worse over the past three months?

Sascha answered the questions quickly, barely giving Melissa enough time to finish speaking before responding. She didn’t seem to mind: she had four other clients to get to that afternoon, and this survey was not the main reason for her visit.

In fact, this was just one of many surveys she would give out that week, and Sascha’s answers would not have any effect on the care he received from her. Instead, the surveys were given out by Compassionate Care: they would receive Sascha’s answers to the questions, but the utility of the survey wasn’t clear to me. Were they evidence of due diligence on Compassionate Care’s part? A way to convince other organizations that they deserved more funding? Later, Melissa told me that the surveys were very important to Compassionate Care, but she also had no idea what they were used for.

When Melissa asked if he had emotional support, Sascha said he was on Prozac and it was very helpful. Melissa asked him the question again, reframing it: “Do you need emotional support?” He shook his head no.

When the survey was complete, Sascha asked if he could clarify something about his prescription. He was still confused about how many to take each day. Melissa read the instructions on the bottle out loud. It was confusing: 4 pills/twice a day/2 days, 3 pills/twice a day/3 days, etc. Melissa and Sascha tried to figure out together how many he had taken over the past few days since he had been discharged from the hospital, but he couldn’t remember.

“Would it help if I wrote it out?” she said. Sascha nodded and she wrote out the same instructions from the bottle on a sheet of paper in neat cursive. It didn’t make things less confusing.

Frustrated, Melissa looked at me and asked, “What should we do?” I suggested we draw out a calendar, and she handed me the pen she had been writing with, as well as an informational handout for Compassionate Care which was blank on the back. Sascha got up from his chair. “Here, lady, please sit,” he said, gesturing me to it, and walked into one of the two back rooms.

Leaning over the Mickey Mouse table, I traced out a simple calendar, doing my best to draw it out for maximal explicitness with boxes to be checked off once the pills had been taken. Together, Melissa and I checked off the boxes next to Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday according to what Sascha had remembered.

Melissa called out to Sascha that we were done, and he came back in. She showed him the calendar and asked if it made more sense. “Yes, yes. Thank you, Miss Melissa, thank you lady,” he said to us, and shook our hands. “God bless you.”

Later, while I was eating lunch at a coffee shop a few miles away, I realized that we had messed up Sascha’s calendar: according to what he had remembered, we should have instructed him to take 4 pills that same day and the day after, to make sure he used up all of the medication. Instead, we had written out that he should take 3 pills each day…he would have 2 pills left over. I frantically emailed Melissa to tell her what had happened. She didn’t reply for a week. When she did, she wrote, “If I remember correctly, the client was going to follow up with his doctor.”

I was deeply affected by this experience—enough that it made me completely reframe my dissertation research. As anthropologists, we are visitors in people’s homes, observers for a moment or a season. There is IRB protocol of course, but we must also develop our own ethical framework and sense of care and responsibility toward our sites and interlocutors. I learned that in my experiences with babysitting and I learned it in that two-week pre-fieldwork trip.

Four years after that encounter, I was wrapping up fieldwork in Phoenix and living near to the apartment building Sascha had lived in (and maybe still did). Every time I turned onto the main road from my apartment, I passed by his building and felt a pang, remembering that day. On one of my last evenings there, I drove by as the sun was setting, the sky all pink and clear blue, behind his apartment building. I was heading to my friends Dierdre and Phil’s home, to keep Deirdre’s 103-year-old mother Luisa company while Dierdre and Phil went to a concert in Scottsdale.

That evening, Luisa sat on the sofa and dozed, the TV turned to MSNBC. Once, she got up and slowly walked into the room I sat in, reading a novel. “Dierdre?” she asked. “She’ll be home soon!” I said, a bit too loud. Luisa nodded and shuffled back to her couch.

Rachel Howard received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Her work engages with cultural and linguistic anthropology and studies the American good life, focusing on retirement communities in the Southwest.