Besides, feeding, clothing, and educating kids, it’s obviously pretty important to not leave them alone for extended periods of time. Many a young person has made a decent chunk of cash by babysitting children when the adults need to do something. Young parents quickly learn that figuring out what to do with their kids is now an indispensable part of planning nearly anything.

So one netizen shared her surprise when her ex-husband started to make demands about her babysitting his newborn. Even more confusingly, his new girlfriend absolutely flipped out when OP, naturally, refused. She was then subjected to a stunning array of varied attacks over her very reasonable decision.

Just because someone is a mother doesn’t mean they can or even want to babysit random kids

Image credits: Liza Summer (not the actual photo)

A mother shared her bewildering experience after she refused to babysit her ex-husband’s new child

Image credits: Jonathan Borba (not the actual photo)

Image credits: Liza Summer (not the actual photo)

Image credits: Tranmautritam (not the actual photo)

Image credits: specialagentgarbage

Babysitting is a job, not a little side gig someone does

Image credits: Andrea Piacquadio (not the actual photo)

Just looking after one’s own children is hard enough. Many parents see it as basically a full-time job, and some nations even grant pretty generous allowances for people to be with their kids and not work. Denmark, for example, grants 52 weeks of parental leave. This can be spread between the parents and even “started and stopped” so the adults can return to work gradually but still have extra free time to be with their kids. But even if both parents have free time, one can’t exactly take a child or newborn everywhere. To the good fortune of suburban young adults all over the world, most parents are happy enough to pay a babysitter to look after kids while they are out or away.

Now, normally this is a paid gig for a reason. Hanging out with children might be rewarding to some, but most people do need to be paid to give up their free time. In the US, the average pay for babysitting a single child for an hour was about $22.68. Should a person find over thirty hours a week babysitting, they can make more than a lot of roles that are already demanding enough. A lot of, say, customer service jobs and the food industry pay worse. This price indicates two things, high demand and an unwillingness for people to spend lots of time with kids for nothing. Indeed, the cost of babysitters has actually risen quite a bit since 2019, reflecting inflation and the general, lessening desire of people to do this work.

OP’s ex-husband really should have known better than to ask

Image credit: Andrew Neel (not the actual photo)

Which, setting aside all the other issues, is already enough to paint OP’s ex-husband as the bad guy. He and his partner seem to expect that a person that really doesn’t owe them anything should drop everything and perform free labor. This alone is deeply entitled and seems to show a lack of any understanding about parenting or even looking after a child. Pretty surprising, given that this fellow and OP already had two kids together, so it seems logical that an involved parent would know the ins and outs. Indeed, he didn’t seem to think that adding a random extra kid to the mix might make it harder to look after his two biological children she was already looking after.

While he was still entitled to ask because why not try a long shot, he and his partner’s reaction to a no was beyond childish. Review bombing because they don’t get free daycare is more childish than the kid they are trying to pawn off to his ex-wife. The emotional aspect is also important to factor in, this is a marriage that split up after a whole decade, not an insignificant amount of time. Emotions may remain raw for the rest of their natural lives, so one could infer that this argument is just the surface of a deeper, older grudge. Regardless, the commenters were on the money, she is not at fault here at all.

Commenters sided with OP and did their best to give some advice

Others discussed why her ex really needed to think about his position

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