Mom Berates 18-Year-Old Babysitter For Letting Her 11 and 12-Year-Old Kids Swim in Their Pool, Despite Dad Telling The Babysitter They Were Allowed to Swim

Emmy Pratt • Senior Editor

Jul 15, 2026 12:30 PM EDT

It's not her fault that they can't communicate as a couple.

Some parents aren't very good at communicating household rules to their babysitters. They tell them that all they need from them is to keep their kids alive, when in reality, there are many household rules they expect them to maintain. They don't want their babysitter to tolerate cruel words from their kids, and they might expect her to discipline them verbally, but that's not always easy for a teenager to do. It's understandable for a parent not to want their kid watching movies the whole time the babysitter is over, but if they don't explicitly say they don't want that, some lazy babysitters might just put Frozen on and wait for the parents to come home.

A babysitter cannot read their employer's mind. If they see a trampoline in the backyard and the parents say nothing about it being forbidden when they're not around, they might very well assume the kids can jump on it! And that assumption might be 100% wrong! The babysitter in this Reddit story did everything right. She asked the dad of the kids she was babysitting (and has been babysitting for years) point-blank if they were forbidden from doing any activity, and he said no. She let them swim in the pool while she watched, and they emerged unharmed, partly because there were no incidents to speak of, and partly because she is a certified lifeguard who could've intervened if necessary. When the mom found out that she had let the kids swim in the pool, she was livid at the babysitter. Who else thinks she should've been livid at her husband for not knowing the basic rules of the house?

via Getty Images (Unsplash+)

Two sisters swim together while their babysitter watches them from outside the pool.
_{The girls in the photo are models, not the real subjects of the story.}
Am I the bad guy for allowing the kids I am babysitting to use their pool?

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via Vitaly Gariev

Mom glares at the babysitter for letting her daughters swim while she wasn't home, even though her husband hadn't told the babysitter it was forbidden.
_{Situation depicted by an actor.}
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