Adventures in baby-sitting

Is there a parent who hasn't fretted about getting a baby sitter for the night? Is there a baby sitter who hasn't felt put upon, underpaid, distrusted?

For more than eight decades, baby-sitting has been part of our social and cultural history. Now, Miriam Forman-Brunell, history professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, has analyzed its origins, evolution and inner workings.

In her new book, "Babysitter: An American History," Forman-Brunell describes how baby-sitting got all tied up in 20th-century struggles over gender, age and family. Somehow, even baby-sitting became a situation for workplace conflict. And whence the lore of the "bad baby sitter"?

Forman-Brunell teaches the history of childhood and youth at UMKC and is the author of "Made to Play House" and editor of the book "Girlhood in America: An Encyclopedia."

Here are excerpts from a recent interview.

Q. What spurred your interest in baby-sitting and its history?

A. I was revising my dissertation about the history of dolls and girlhood for publication and ran across a memoir of a girl, from about 100 years ago, who would wheel babies in perambulators, as they called them, to make money to buy dolls. Later while teaching at Princeton, I overheard a group of preadolescent girls at a pizza place talking about their baby-sitting activities. I was surprised to hear them talk about it in business terms, about how they were charging parents by the number of children.

I started to think about the connection between that girl at the beginning of the century and these girls at the end of the century.

Q. How are you defining baby-sitting and baby sitter?

A. For the purposes of this book, I defined baby-sitting as part-time work, for pay, by youth, typically away from the home. I didn't look at children taking care of siblings, or nannies or other adults.

In the 1920s, there was no term "baby sitter," but there was the phrase "minding the children" and then "child-minder." It was not until the late 1930s that the term "baby sitter" emerged.

Q. What changed starting in the 1920s?