Woman praised after refusing to babysit grandchild for free
Joe Harker
Featured Image Credit: Rick Lowe / dszc / Getty Images
People are praising a grandma after she refused to babysit her grandchild for free, instead telling her daughter it'd cost $20 (£16) an hour and there would be late fees if they didn't pick up the baby on time.
For plenty of new parents who need someone to look after their little bundles of joy for a bit, the first port of call is going to be mum and dad.
They've been through the whole 'looking after a baby' thing before with you and because they're family there's no way they'd do something like charge you money, right?
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Wrong.
One new mum wanted to know if she was being unreasonable after having a new baby and asking her own mother to babysit so she could go back to work.
Taking to Reddit to lay out the issue, she explained that she was the higher earner in her relationship and neither of them had jobs which made working from home realistic.
Laden down with medical debt and student loans, the new mum didn't want more expenses to pay for, especially as they were trying to save up to move into a bigger home so the baby would have more space.
However, when she asked her mum to watch the baby, she was told she'd have to pay up at a rate of $20 an hour since grandma said she was 'too old' and had already gone through the whole raising kids thing before.
The grandma told her daughter that if she really wanted a baby, then maybe she 'should have thought about staying home like she did'.
The new mum wanted to know if she was in the wrong and got the surprising response of people siding with the grandma.
One person wrote: "Sorry to be blunt and rude but maybe don't have a child if you can't afford to take care of them. And if your plan was always go back to work you should have discussed that during the pregnancy with your mom."
A second said that her mum was 'under no obligation to babysit for you' and suggested she should have 'worked all this out by now'.
Someone else said it was 'generous of her to be willing to do it for pay' and wondered how the new mum had 'the gall to be mad she won’t do it for free'.
However, not everyone thought grandma knew best, as others pointed out that she 'doesn’t understand that now is completely different from when she became a homemaker'.
They argued that while a family used to be able to 'survive on one income back then', things had changed and both parents working tended to be an economic necessity.