The Five Minute Talk to Have Before You Leave a Sitter

A new sitter arrives, you are already late, and the handover collapses into where the snacks are and a wave from the doorway. Five minutes of specific information is worth more than an hour of general reassurance, and most of it belongs in writing rather than in speech, because nobody recalls a spoken address at the moment they have to say it into a phone.

Here is the order to run it in. Write the short version on a card, stick it to the fridge, and take a photo of it on your own phone so you both have a copy. Do it properly once and every handover after that takes two minutes instead of five.

Begin with the two things a sitter cannot work out under pressure: exactly where they are, and exactly who to call. Everything else on this list is useful. Those two are the ones that actually fail people, and they fail them at the worst possible moment.

None of this assumes your sitter is careless. It assumes they are in an unfamiliar house, possibly for the first time, and that adrenaline strips detail out of memory long before it touches common sense. If you have not booked them onto anything yet, book your sitter onto a session before the term fills, and use the card either way. book your sitter onto a session before the term fills.

The card on the fridge

The full street address, written out, with the nearest cross street underneath it. This is the single most useful line on the card. A sitter who has been in the house for twenty minutes often cannot produce the address when a dispatcher asks for it, and the call stalls there while somebody hunts for mail on a counter. Write it down, and say it out loud once as well.

Your mobile number, your partner's, and the name and number of one adult who is physically closer to the house than you are. A neighbour, a grandparent, an older sibling, anybody who can be at the front door in ten minutes. That local contact is the piece most families skip and the piece a sitter uses most often, usually for something that is not an emergency at all.

Then the medical block. Allergies, spelled out, with where the auto injector is kept and the instruction to use it and then call 911 rather than waiting to see what happens. Asthma inhalers and where they live. Any medication due while you are out, with the dose and the time. Anything a child must not be given. If a child has a condition a sitter would need to recognise, describe what it looks like, not only what it is called.

The dangers that belong to your house

Every house has three or four specific hazards and they are invisible to you because you live there. The stair gate that only latches if you lift it. The back door that does not lock properly. The hot tub. The dog that is fine until somebody touches its food. The kettle cord hanging over the counter edge. Walk the sitter past yours rather than listing them from the hallway on your way out.

Water gets its own sentence. A small child in a bath is never left alone, not for a moment, not to answer the door, not to fetch a towel. If a child that age is being bathed while you are out, say plainly whether that is happening at all. Plenty of families simply take bath night off the list when there is a new sitter, which is a reasonable decision and easier than a rule that has to be remembered at the time.

Food is the other one. Say which foods are not given to which child, and mean it. Small children choke on the obvious things: whole grapes, hard raw vegetables, nuts, chunks of hot dog, hard sweets. A sitter who has been told the rule will hold it. A sitter who has not been told will hand over whatever is in the fruit bowl. This is a five second conversation that prevents the emergency instead of managing it.

The sentence that matters most

Finish with permission, and use the exact words. If you are not sure, phone me. If it looks serious, phone 911 first and then phone me. You will never be in trouble for calling. Say it, then say the last part again, because the last part is the one that works. Sitters delay calling for help far more often than they overreact, and they delay for a social reason rather than a medical one: they are worried about looking foolish, or about being blamed for whatever has happened.

One more category is worth separating out, which is the older child who is not the sitter. If you have a twelve year old at home who is in charge of nobody but is old enough to be left, that is a different conversation with a different set of instructions. That side of it belongs to the course for a child staying home without an adult, and your card should say plainly which child is responsible for what, because a vague arrangement between siblings is where most of the arguing starts. the course for a child staying home without an adult.

House rules go last, deliberately, because they cause arguments rather than injuries. Bedtime. Screens. Whether the children can go outside. Whether anybody else is allowed in the house. Decide these in advance and say them in front of the children, so that nobody is negotiating alone at eight o'clock. Then go out. If you want a hand working out which course suits which child, ask us which session has room left and we will point you at the right one. ask us which session has room left.