Whatever Happened to Teen Babysitters?

In my parents generations it seemed there was a lot more synchronization of ages in the suburban population. These neighborhoods were initially disproportionately represented with families with children, that's who they were pitched to and priced for after all. That works great for a few years but once the kids age out, you are left with a population of retirees plus a much slower rate of replacement with new families compared to when the suburb was first built and most everyone might have been a new family.

Coupled with the fact that many people leave their families to start afresh in a new city to make a career and their own family, and there just aren't many teens around you know of that you can even ask for babysitting.

Then consider the teen side. I would probably rather work a part time job than to try and get a network of clients with young kids together that would bring me enough regular work to beat out that. A network that is smaller and more diffuse today than in our parents generation for the same reasons that the teen network is smaller.

If you're writing a whole piece on it, I would appreciate at least some marginal shred of evidence of the presumption that there are far fewer teen babysitters. The only piece of research they provide is a 'study' (more like a sociological qualitative research paper that interviews 16 non-random babysitters) that says that babysitters take more time to prepare.

My perception is that this has always been a class thing and the answer to a lot of the "whatever happened to X" questions is that the journalist grew up in a lower class bracket than where they currently find themselves.

There is a whole niche of commercial movies about things that happened to them.