Need a baby sitter? There’s an app for that.
Uber-esque baby-sitting services, including the popular Bambino and UrbanSitter, are gaining traction among harried local parents, who love that they can hail child care as easily as a car.
Of course, when it’s your kid — or pet — the stakes are high: Walkers on the dog-sitting app Wag have been hit with allegations of theft and worse.
Although sitter apps promise careful screening, reportedly asking sitters to submit to in-depth background checks, Stamford, Conn.-based mother of two April Martin tells The Post that she has met some “psycho sitters” during her year and a half on Bambino.
Like most top baby-sitting apps, Bambino, which launched in 2016, lets parents pore over sitters’ photos, user ratings (out of five stars) and referrals.
For the most part, it’s worked well for 36-year-old Martin, who “found the best sitter” the day she signed up. But it didn’t screen out the bad egg who she claims “stole the kids’ iPad.” Though the mortgage financier was disturbed, she still uses Bambino, which charges $1.95 to $2.95 per minute of care, “for the convenience.”
Another Stamford mom was less lucky. The office manager, who prefers to remain anonymous, hired a 15-year-old sitter through Bambino. Her 5-year-old told her afterward that she and the sitter went for a walk and then apparently hitchhiked home.
“They got in a stranger’s car, with no car seat,” says the 44-year-old, who still uses the app, but won’t hire teens. (Bambino representative Sarah Brown says that the company can’t comment on the incident, because it was never reported, but says that the app has a “zero-tolerance policy” for such cases and investigates every rating that’s three stars or lower.)
That’s Stephanie Fagenson’s nightmare. The 43-year-old Upper East Side mom checked out another service, Sittercity, but her hire canceled the morning she was supposed to start. “I don’t know if I would ever try them again,” says Fagenson, who’s back to hiring child care through word of mouth.
Chelsea mom Nicole Solovey does extra due diligence: She meets potential sitters from UrbanSitter ahead of hiring them, and also relies on videos the baby sitters post. “You can tell a lot about somebody watching them speak and their body language,” says the 39-year-old, whose app of choice charges $19.95 per month or $99.95 per year.
Some parents find it hard to trust each other on the apps.
“Moms never want to leave a complaining review in case they need to use a sitter again,” says Martin.
Still, loyalists love the freedom of the apps — and the little perks.
“The math is done for you,” says Madhu Puri, a mother of two in Dumbo. “We’ve had more than one occasion where we had to end a night trying to calculate [a sitter’s] hourly rate after a few too many glasses of wine.”
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