“I Won’t Take Care Of Or Raise The Baby For Them”: Teen Refuses To Be Newborn’s Free Babysitter After Parents Announce Unexpected Pregnancy

Experienced parents know that taking care of a child, a newborn in particular is a lot of constant, involved work. So one would expect that, when having a second child, the adults would at least have a plan for how to raise a newborn. But, as always in life, some parents get very misguided ideas about the entire situation.

A teenage internet user wanted to know if she was in the wrong for refusing to be a live-in babysitter for her parents. She detailed the entitled and pretty misguided idea her parents had that they would just continue with their lifestyle and have their daughter do most of the work. When OP pushed back, they were (somehow) deeply surprised, so she turned to the internet to get a more unbiased view of the situation. Spoiler alert, most people thought her parents were being deeply unreasonable.

When people say “it takes a village” to raise a child, they normally mean a plethora of experiences, influences, and community help, not that parents can just pass off the responsibility to someone else. Yes, babysitters exist and even live-in nannies, but in these cases, a person volunteered to do the job, generally for money. Telling a child that it’s their new job is a pretty extreme case of “my house, my rules,” and one that if enforced, would have a lot of negative consequences in the future. They might gain a babysitter and lose a daughter. Now, some parents might think it’s pretty normal for a child, particularly an older child to help around the house. As the eldest in my own family, I was raised with a similar expectation. However, OP notes that her parents were basically uninvolved in her own life and seem to want to keep it that way. A kid helping around the house is not the same as them becoming a primary caregiver at a pivotal age.

OP is right to seek a way out of the situation and the fact that she already has a plan is commendable. Her parents really need a reality check, where their behavior is causing their daughter to uproot her entire life just to not become a full-time babysitter for her sibling. In the long run, this kind of behavior leads to long-term parental resentment, which can trigger a slew of other long-term issues, including anger, depression, and sometimes developmental issues down the line. Even if we set aside the worst-case scenario, the parents will have to come to grips with the fact that they chose their own comfort at the cost of a relationship with their eldest child. Even if they substitute OP with a “real” babysitter or nanny, they will have two children that will likely feel distance and abandonment. A child might not have the psychological tools to understand it, but they can still feel the negative emotions from being effectively unwanted and ignored.

Regardless, from OP’s story and her willingness to leave the house in a year, it’s clear that she is not particularly attached to her parents, which gives us some insight into their hands-off parenting style. They have already made her independent, not a bad thing in itself, but at the cost of a real relationship. OP is, in a sense, doing the same thing they are doing to her. She is ditching a relationship to maintain her own lifestyle. However, at the end of the day, it’s not her child and her responsibility. She expresses being mostly just left alone, until, as in this story, her parents needed something from her. Their shock at being treated exactly how they treated OP would be comical if it wasn’t ultimately sad. But what cements their status as bad parents, instead of just clueless adults, is the manipulation they then attempt, telling their own daughter to “think about what she is throwing away.” One doesn’t have to be a genius to see the textbook attempt to pressure her into something through an emotional appeal. But based on OP’s description of their parenting style, they haven’t really earned any emotional points to leverage.