As a babysitter, what should I do when the child I babysit tells lies but his parents trust him and do not believe me?
Most of the kids that I babysit are super sweet and fun to be around. I recently got a new family reaching out to hire me. At first, the kid seemed nice when their parents were there. I thought we had a pretty good time when they left. He seemed as happy as a kid can be when they have been left with a stranger for a few hours. When the parents get back home, the kid straight up lies to their faces, in front of me, saying that it was horrible and that I didn’t do certain things that they had told me to do. And the parents believed him. They paid me but did not tip me and kind of rushed me out of the house.
2 answers
As I read this, I remembered when a similar incident happened to me. I immediately left that job after I thought things through. My thinking was that if such incident continued to occur, the child might go on to lie about very important and sensitive things that could put me in trouble with the parents and the law or just plain ruin my reputation.From what I gathered about what is going on, it look as if the parents have an inkling as to what is going on but are not ready to deal with it. It might also be that they are ignorant about such behaviors and need someone to talk to them about it. However, if you feel confident enough that you can talk to his parents and prove with strong evidence that their child is lying, then I would advise you go ahead and have a sit down with his parents.
That is an incredibly tough situation to be in. It’s not something that anyone wants to go through but it has happened more than you think. Kids lie to their parents all the time, but if it could hurt you in any way, you need to get out of there. You don’t want to get into trouble with the parents or have it escalate to anything else just because a kid lied to his parents. If you have a way of proving that the child is lying, with videos or pictures of your time watching the child, then talk to the parents. Or if they had nanny cams you can ask that they take a look at them. If not, there is not much you can do other than choosing to not work with that family again. You want to keep yourself safe and try to get good reviews so that you can get more work, and it will be hard to do that if the parents are being lied to about anything.
