Of Babysitting and Stolen Childhoods

At least twice a month, Saturday nights were movie nights. We hired a babysitter to play with our young son for a couple of hours, drove to the nearest movie theater, got tickets to whatever movie still had a few seats open and watched that movie.

The neighborhood where we lived in northern Virginia had three girls in their early teens who were interested in babysitting and earning some money along the way. All three had obtained training in CPR (cardiac pulmonary resuscitation), were Girl Scouts (Girl Guides, as they are known in India) and were very professional in their approach to babysitting. They arrived at the appointed time and never canceled if they had promised they would be there on any given day.

One of them, in particular, took her job very seriously. The first day she was to babysit for us, she whipped out a one page, typed form for us to fill. The form asked for everything from our emergency contact information to our son's bedtime, his medications, if any, allergies, if any, his dinner time and what he liked to eat for dinner.

We were taken aback, to say the least.

She was also very well prepared to handle our son for the two odd hours she expected to play with him. She had brought along with her some crayons and pictures for him to color, and some games.

This Saturday night arrangement worked well for all parties involved. My husband and I got to hang out together and watch a movie or attend work-related events, our son had a fun time with a babysitter who wasn't averse to squealing like a child herself and running around the house after him, and the babysitter got to earn money for whatever she was saving for (one of them financed a trip to Mexico through her earnings).

When we moved to Bangalore about a year ago, I was delighted to find a lot of teens in our neighborhood. I, of course, saw potential babysitters in all of them. Fully expecting to have at least five potential babysitters in my rolodex by the end of the week, I approached two of them who were hanging out in the childrens' park in our apartment complex.

"Hi, I was looking for a babysitter for my son. Do you guys babysit?"

"Whaaa...?" read their expressions. They didn't have a clue as to what I was saying.

They looked at each other and got up and walked away, leaving me with my mouth hanging open.

I thought I had approached the whole thing wrong. May be I should've asked the parents.

So I talked to the mother of one of the girls. Her reaction was not much better than the one I got from the girls. Finally I got something along the lines of "I don't think she'll be interested," from the mother.

I couldn't figure it out. It's not that no one had ever heard of babysitting here. Moreover, what did the other parents do? Most families have both parents working and most families are nuclear units, so the need for a babysitter (as distinct from a full-time nanny) must arise at some point.

A couple of months down the road the picture became somewhat clearer. Most of the families with young children had someone staying with them. In some cases it was a grand-parent, but more often than not, a young girl, practically a child herself, transplanted from some village to live at the house and take care of children not much younger than herself.

I saw them everywhere. I saw them at the park with the kids (I saw more such young girls than the childrens' mothers in the park), I saw them at the grocery store handling the cart and the children while the mother piled the cart with groceries, I saw them at the school gates waiting patiently to pick up their wards.

You don't have to look very hard to find the irony in this picture. We hesitate to have our own children "work" while apparently having no objection to young children working long hours to care for our children.

And children don't just work in homes. They work in extremely hazardous conditions in factories and construction sites, in the cities as rag pickers and in the fields. Here is a heart-breaking story from a Human Rights Watch report from a few years ago about a girl forced to work in a beedi-rolling factory:

My sister is ten years old. Every morning at seven she goes to the bonded labor man, and every night at nine she comes home. He treats her badly, he hits her if he thinks she is working slowly or if she talks to the other children, he yells at her, he comes looking for her if she is sick and cannot go to work. I feel this is very difficult for her.

I don't care about school or playing. I don't care about any of that. All I want is to bring my sister home from the bonded labor man. For 600 rupees I can bring her home - that is our only chance to get her back.

We don't have 600 rupees. We will never have 600 rupees.

The entire report is here.

More recently, Outlook (January 23, 2006 issue) carried some horrifying stats on the state of child labor in India.

Nearly 17 million children have to work for a living, many of them in hazardous environments. Close to 30% of the 2 million sex workers are underage. Less than half of India's 430 million children go to schools.

And in any given month, there are at least two stories such as these about the discovery of child labor and the rescue of the children.

And there is something we can all do about it.

Next time you see a child working somewhere he or she should not be working, please report it to the authorities. Organizations such as Akshara Foundation will work with the families of such children and will give them lessons at least for a few hours everyday so that the endless cycle of lack of education and financial indebtedness is not repeated.

This post began on a somewhat facetious note about babysitters, but the point, really, is about children and their right to their childhood, to an education, and to at least the opportunity to get out of whatever financial morass their families have gotten into.

Crossposted on Desicritics.org.