When I was young and used to make my living by babysitting, here is how things usually worked:

1. Someone called me on the phone and asked me to babysit.

2. I said yes.

3. At the appointed hour, I went to the house, and the parents left, while the children screamed and carried on as though the world had come to an end.

4. It was then my job to restore their will to live by feeding them snacks, rocking them, singing nonsense songs, playing games, WHATEVER IT TOOK, etc., etc., until at last they were so tired that I could finally put them to bed. After that, my job was mostly to make sure the phone line was kept busy until the parents came home.

But these days babysitting, like so many other things, seems to have changed. 

I know this because Stephanie, my college-age daughter, makes all her spare money by taking care of other people’s kids. And although sometimes her babysitting jobs resemble something like the above scenario, mostly they don’t.

Unlike in the past, when parents seemed clueless about the fact that they were leaving their little darlings rending their own garments and shrieking their lungs out, today’s moms and dads can’t have fun if they know they’ve inflicted the syndrome of Separation Anxiety on their own offspring. Plus, they’d be terrified of ever having a sitter return under such circumstances.

Stephanie has had actual long-term assignments with children who have never once awakened while she’s at their house. Once a mom told her that if the unthinkable happened and a child should happen to wake up and cry, just to please ignore it because the kid would be so shocked to see someone other than the mom appearing at the bedside that all hell would break loose. Mental anguish would ensue. Therapists would have to be summoned.

But wouldn’t it be worse, Stephanie asked, for a child to cry and cry and have NO ONE come?

Won’t happen, said the mom. And thus it didn’t.

I can hear you asking: But what about a parent who wants to, say, go out of the house alone during the hours when the child wouldn’t normally be asleep? Is there any hope for that kind of recreation?

Ah, yes, there is.

Recently Stephanie had just such an assignment. She was asked to babysit one afternoon for a toddler she’d actually never met before–the mom was the friend of a friend–and rather than go through all the painful introductions of a new sitter to the 15-month-old, the mother (we’ll call her Heather) just decided that Stephanie should meet her downtown while Heather was taking the baby for a walk.

Through elaborate choreography designed in advance, Stephanie was to come up to Heather from the side and then gently take the handles of the stroller, while Heather would gracefully drop away…and then, UNSEEN BY HER CHILD, Heather would head out to the movies. Stephanie would then walk the baby around for the next two hours, never once stopping or leaning over the stroller…and then she would meet back up with Heather after the movie was over…when Heather would simply resume control of the stroller, presumably handing over cash with one hand.

If the baby (whose name Stephanie never was actually told) whimpered, she was to hand her a bottle of apple juice, carefully reaching over the baby’s head and placing it in her hands without coming to a halt. Luckily when the baby was finished with the juice, she simply dropped the bottle onto the sidewalk, in true toddler fashion, and Stephanie scooped it up without missing a step.

It was a brilliant plan, and it worked divinely.

The only weird part was that Stephanie kept seeing people she knew, people who kept coming up and saying, “Wow! Who is this cute baby?”

If you pride yourself on your babysitting professionalism, you never want to admit you have no idea.

The truth, she said later, was that in an odd kind of way, the people who were approaching the stroller knew way more about the kid than she did. They at least knew what she looked like…and whether or not she had at last fallen asleep.